Conference: Literature, Philosophy, and Commerce in Europe and the Americas, 1750-1900

Thursday, April 8 and Friday, April 9. The aim of the conference is to explore the impact of the eighteenth century financial and consumerist revolutions upon the moral and artistic systems of representation in Europe and the Americas. By bringing together scholars of European, Latin American and U. S. cultures, we intend to compare recent redefinitions of property, credit (and other forms of fictitious wealth), the stock market, luxuries, fashion, and the rhetorical and visual techniques employed to represent them. Ultimately we hope to question received categories in looking at the intersections of literature, philosophy and the material world, the development of capitalism and its cultural justifications, and the consolidation of “national literatures” as the paradigmatic mode of our discipline.

Speakers include Beatriz Gonzales-Stephan (Rice University); John Noyes (University of Toronto); Richard Rosa (Stanford University); and Lucia Sa (Stanford University).