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Victorian Apocalypse: The siècle at its fin, Conference 3: Exhaustion/Entropy/Extraction

Apr 22, 2022 @ 8:30 am - Apr 23, 2022 @ 10:30 am
Presented online via Zoom Meeting

Organized by Joseph Bristow (University of California, Los Angeles), Neil Hultgren (California State University, Long Beach) and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (University of California, Davis)

During  the 2021–22 academic year, the  UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library  will host the Core  Program entitled “Victorian Apocalypse: The  siècle  at its  fin.” This  program of lectures and presentations aims to reassess the ways in which  the 1890s in particular as an era has strong associations with theories of decadence, degeneration, and disease. “Victorian Apocalypse”  will  draw attention  to  the significance of UCLA’s unrivaled collections relating to the 1890s, especially the life and work of Oscar Wilde, which are held at the  Clark Library.

Conference 3:
Critics of fin-de-siècle literature and culture have long associated this period with devolution and decline, and with a newly pessimistic vision of the future that starkly opposed the Victorian doctrine of progress. While the origins of this philosophical turn are various and have economic, religious, and geopolitical dimensions, recent critics of the fin de siècle have begun to connect the era’s melancholy atmosphere with the environmental changes wrought by the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution–changes that emerged by the end of the period as both irreversible and profound.

The British Empire in the nineteenth century, newly powered by steam, engaged in a global terraforming project on an unprecedented scale. Mines, railways, factory pollution, and the extractive industries of global empire left marks on the earth that told a story of extreme social and environmental change over the course of mere decades. Many thinkers at the time understood how these social and environmental changes were intertwined, and how the decline of nature also portended the decline of the human. John Ruskin’s The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), for example, diagnosed the gloomy skies of industrial England as a consequence of “poisonous smoke” rising from “furnace chimneys,” but also an ominous sign of human finitude: “dead men’s souls.” In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Britain was the first nation to transition to a coal-fired economy, which accelerated production and fast-tracked the imperial project, but by the end of the century, economic and political woes intermingled with new fears about the finitude of Earth’s resources, voiced by political economics such as William Stanley Jevons in The Coal Question (1865). The fin de siècle thus foretold not only the decline of British Empire, but ultimately the decline of human civilization.

Full program schedule is available on our website:
http://www.1718.ucla.edu/events/exhaustion-entropy-extraction/

Speakers
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, University of Chicago
Sukanya Banerjee, University of California, Berkeley
Deanna K. Kreisel, University of Mississippi
Allen MacDuffie, University of Texas at Austin
Benjamin Morgan, University of Chicago
Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington, SeattleThis conference is free of charge, but you must register in advance to attend. All audience members will receive instructions via email after registration. Click below to register directly with Zoom:

Details

Start:
Apr 22, 2022 @ 8:30 am
End:
Apr 23, 2022 @ 10:30 am
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Website:
http://www.1718.ucla.edu/events/exhaustion-entropy-extraction/

Organizers

UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies
Clark Library