NAVSA 2012: Victorian Networks
Tenth Annual Conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association
Madison, WI
Report by Rebecca Soares
For those who have never been to Madison, WI the mere mention of the Midwestern city may call to mind wide expanses of cornfields, isolated farm houses in serene pastures punctuated by milk cows, and, of course, cheese. While this pastoral vision could accurately describe many of the towns that make up America’s Heartland, a name that in itself suggests a national connectedness through networks of agriculture and industry, it couldn’t be farther from the vibrant, eclectic, and cosmopolitan atmosphere of Wisconsin’s capital. Madison has long been a nexus of artistic, cultural, and political activity. From the infamous Vietnam War protests on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in 1970 to the 2011 Madison Protests that gained national news coverage and international support (donors from 10 countries, including South Korea, Egypt, and Denmark, as well as 43 states donated pizza from a local restaurant to send hungry protesters meals), Madison has been a focal point in a network of liberal and democratic thinking that stretches across the nation and across the globe. It is for this very reason that Madison was a particularly appropriate location for “Victorian Networks,” the tenth annual conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association.
For three days in late September, over 500 Victorianists from eight nations gathered at Madison’s Monona Terrace Convention Center to participate in the largest NAVSA conference to date. Inspired by the fluidity of the conference’s theme and the capaciousness of the very term “network,” 363 presenters demonstrated the vast interpretative possibilities of network theory, networked thinking, networked forms, and material and immaterial networks in ten sessions, each of which featured twelve to thirteen panels. In a single session the panel topics were as diverse as networks of religious heterodoxy, naval expeditions and oceanic exploration, networks of literary criticism, evolutionary theory, the Victorian social network of giftbooks and friendship albums, travelogues and picturesque prospects, homosocial networks, street art and urban visual culture, transatlantic poetic networks, and late-Victorian psychical research. Answering the discipline’s recent call for the marriage of digital humanities with the more traditional and text-centered methods of literary analysis, several speakers examined the intersection of Victorian culture with twenty-first century reading practices and formats such as Facebook, Twitterature, and Wikipedia. The conference organizers echoed this turn to digital networks by creating a Twitter account for the conference and encouraging participants to live-tweet about their experiences.
The opening plenary roundtable on nineteenth-century visual networks titled “Victorian Eyes,” set the tone for the interdisciplinary emphasis that would be carried throughout the weekend. Featuring four art historians, Caroline Arscott (Courtauld Institute of Art, London), Tim Barringer (Yale University), Julie F. Codell (Arizona State University), and Mary Roberts (University of Sydney), the panel examined the manifold meanings of networks in the art world. Arscott’s paper, “Colour as Lure and Provocation,” examined the renegotiation of the distinction between color and line in the context of evolutionary theory by close reading William Morris’s 1885 tapestry The Woodpecker. In a visually dazzling presentation, Arscott argued that Morris’s promotion of color can be read as a legible political move and endorsement of Darwin’s theories. Moving from the medium of textiles to early photography, Tim Barringer’s “‘A New System of Portraiture’: The Daguerreotype in Victorian London” focused on the socially destabilizing impact of the daguerreotype. Comparing the photographic portrait with painted miniatures, Barringer demonstrated the power of early photography to subvert the social hierarchy that was once captured by the commissioned portrait. Julie Codell shifted our focus from individual portraits to the complex network that is created by the production of replicas. In “Networks and Replica Chains: Artists, Patrons, and Victorian Eyes,” Codell challenged our understanding of artistic reproductions by asking whether replicas can be viewed as revisions, thus becoming independent from their antecedents. Codell ultimately suggested that these replicas form a second artistic canon that is not governed by linear logic. Mary Roberts continued this emphasis on replication and transmission by examining the ways in which aesthetic languages are translated as artworks cross national and cultural borders. In “Networked Objects and Transitional Geographies: Victorians on the Bosphorus,” Roberts explored moments of cross-cultural contact by considering paintings of the Ottoman Empire produced by English artists and their Ottoman counterparts.
Immediately following the opening plenary, conference-goers continued their exploration of visual networks at a reception held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Chazen Museum of Art. There participants previewed the special exhibition “The Golden Age of British Watercolors, 1790-1910” that was curated by a class of graduate and undergraduate students in the Art History Department under the guidance of one of the conference organizers, Nancy Rose Marshall. The collection not only displayed a wide range of technical styles but also the network of influence and artistic choice that went into the creation of each painting.
The second plenary session on Friday evening took us from artistic to psychoanalytic networks as Adam Phillips presented the introduction to his forthcoming biography of Sigmund Freud: Freud’s Impossible Life. A widely read psychoanalyst, literary critic, and essayist who is currently a visiting professor at the University of York, Phillips captivated the audience with his ability to untangle the complicated history of a man preoccupied with how his patients told their stories and who simultaneously thwarted the ability of his biographers to tell his own life story. Drawing from this paradox, Phillips reflected upon the art of biography and the partialness of memory and the archive.
Amanda Anderson (Brown University) gave the third and final plenary on Saturday evening, presenting a provocative new piece “Formation, Genealogy, Networks: The Case of Liberalism.” After tracing the theoretical and intellectual history of liberalism and its incarnations in literary criticism, Anderson argued that a new characterological approach, one that pays close attention to the formal and dramatic features of dialogue, must be implemented in order to rescue liberalism from its current bleak pessimism. The final plenary was followed by a sunset rooftop reception at Monona Terrace, an event that provided conference-goers with gorgeous views of Lake Monona and the Capitol Square skyline.
Throughout the weekend, the conference organizers—Susan Bernstein, Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz-Robles, and Nancy Rose Marshall—provided participants with many opportunities to form professional and social networks of their own. Nine “networking lunches” encouraged participants to take part in casual conversation on one of several themes, including Dickens at 200, Digital Humanities, Material Culture, and Sensation among others. These conversations, co-hosted by two scholars in the field, revolved around topics that were not only well-represented at the conference but also in contemporary scholarship. NAVSA 2012 also featured eight seminars moderated by leading scholars in the field. Seminar participants pre-circulated short position papers and then engaged in a two-hour discussion of their writing with colleagues working on similar projects. The topics of the seminars ranged from global networks, the circulation of print, and new approaches to the serial novel to poetic networks, scientific and evolutionary networks, and Victorian psychical messaging. Building upon this theme of professional networks, graduate students were invited to attend a publishing forum featuring panelists Melissa Purdue, one of the founding editors of the online journal Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies; Ivan Kreilkamp, co-editor of Victorian Studies; and James Emmott, a PhD candidate and editorial intern with the online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. This forum addressed topics from the future of academic publishing and the role of publications in job materials to how to start revising the dissertation for a first book project.
Although the limitations and possibilities of networked thinking for Victorian studies are still open to debate, one thing is certain: NAVSA is a dynamic hub of activity that fosters connections among scholars, disciplines, and institutions. Perhaps the most entertaining and moving demonstration of this fact was when Dino Felluga, with the help of glow sticks and a darkened ballroom, created a visualization of the NAVSA network, calling on conference goers to raise their hands (and glow sticks) in answer to questions about demographics, attendance at past NAVSA conferences, and professional connections and friendships that have grown out of the organization.