Posts
Co-Editors: Dan Bivona, Arizona State University, and Helena
Gurfinkel, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
500-word abstracts and 1-paragraph bios to dbivona@asu.edu and hgurfin@siue.edu by August 1st, 2012.
This collection explores a possible relationship between the
fin in the fin de siècle (the turn of the nineteenth century) and pedagogy. We
welcome essays about fin de siècle
literature and culture that theorize
*teaching the end/decline,
or teaching at the end
*the pedagogical/didactic,
implications of catastrophic thinking
*teaching as
inaugurating, offering (or not) a new beginning after the end.
Geographically and theoretically, this volume it is not
limited to Britain, the US, and Continental Europe. We encourage submissions
that leave the precincts of the “West.”
We invite contributions focusing on
- the reinventions of Foucault’s systems of power and knowledge as pedagogical strategies
- fin-de-siècle anxieties surrounding physical, moral, and intellectual decline
- didactic representations of a pending catastrophe and attempts to teach how to avoid it.
Examples include but are not limited to
- Max Nordau’s Degeneration
- Thomas Hardy, the Education Reform Act of 1870, and the dangers of literacy
- George Gissing and concerns about declining literary standards
- The didactics of social Darwinism
- Scientia sexualis as a teaching/didactic tool against perversion and degeneration Eugenics, colonialist education, and protecting the “healthy” national/racial body from decline
- The end of traditional womanhood and the fear of the New Woman.
- Fin-de-siècle approaches to paideia
- Religion, pedagogy, and eschatology at the fin-de-siècle.
