8:45–9:15 Breakfast
9:15–9:30 Opening Remarks
9:30–11 Panel 1
Narrative Desire
Chair: Rudiger Campe (Yale University)
Janet Beizer (Harvard University), “Storied by Seduction”
David Shields (University of Washington), “Reading for and against the Plot”
Sarah Raff (Pomona College), “Narrative Exchange in the English Novel: Transference and Tutelage”
Susanna Lee (Georgetown University), “Reading for the Plot, or revisiting Stendhal in 2023”
11:15–12:30 Panel 2
Legal Fictions
Chair: Michael Shae (New York Review of Books)
Chiara Benetollo (The Petey Greene Program), “Beyond Our Campus: Carceral Pedagogies and the Rhetoric of the Law”
Tal Kastner (Touro Law Center), “The Stakes of the Plot”
Rachel Bowlby (University College London), “Touch ID: Footnotes on Fingerprints”
12:30–2 Lunch
2–3:30 Panel 3
Melodrama and Realism
Chair: Rhonda Garelick (Southern Methodist University)
Margaret Cohen (Stanford University), “The Narratology of Excess”
Aaron Matz (Scripps College), “Melodrama or Irony?”
Martine Reid (Université de Lille), “Reading with Balzac”
Eric Bulson (Claremont Graduate School), “Wordless, Soundless, Speechless”
3:30–4 Coffee
4–5:30 Panel 4
Professing Literature
Chair: Jane Tylus (Yale University)
David Marshall (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Majoring in Literature”
Sarah Winter (University of Connecticut), “Peter Brooks and the Interdisciplinary Humanities”
Alessia Ricciardi (Northwestern University), “What Does a Worldly Criticism Mean?”
Alex Woloch (Stanford University), “The Critical Imagination”