The Society for Critical Exchange Non-Profit Organization Guilford House U.S. Postage Case Western Reserve University PA1D Cleveland OH 44 106 CLEVELAND, OHIO Permit No. 4066 The Society for Critical Exchange, Inc. Winter 19980999 Founded 1975; Incorporated 1976 Salutations! GuiKord House, Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH 44 106-71 17 As you read through this edition of the SCEfsNews and Voice: 216/368-2176 Fax: 216/368-2216 Notices, you'll see a large range of current activities. Projects of long E-Mail: maw4@po. cwru.edu standing are expanding their directions and initiatives. The News & Notices: 3 19/335-2793 Fax: 3 19/335-2535 Intellechtal Property and Construction of Authorship project is E-Mail: [email protected] continuing its work on the international implications of intellectual property law (p. 7). A volume of essays from the first New Economic Board of Directors Criticism conference will appear this spring from Routledge; the Term Ending 3 1 December 2000 project also sponsored a second conference on "Culture and Peter Jaszi, Law, American University Economics" (the program is printed on pp. 36), and has spun off Lany Needham, English, Lakeland Comm~QCollege panels and a second edited collection on "The Question of the Gift" Regenia Gagnier, English, Exeter University (UK) (see pp. 2 and 10-11). Woman Nation Narrative has returned with an important initiative "Rethinking Anderson" (pp. 8-9). Term Ending 3 1 December 2002 And newer projects are continuing to grow: Mark Osteen, English, Loyola College Cultures of Andrea Lunsford, English, Ohio State University Writing is gearing up for another conference (p. 9), and the SCE is Diana Strassman, Economics, Rice University co-sponsoring a series of panels on Cognitive Linguistics (p. 12). You'll find reports on all these activities, and on our doings at Co-Presidents the regional and national MLAs, within this newsletter. Term ending December 3 1,2000 There is, of course, much room for more work, and for new Stanley Fish, Dean of Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois, Chicago projects by SCE members. With this in mind, we are working to Jane Tompkins, Education, University of Illinois, Chicago elevate the SCE's Website to the status of a project, and are seeking SCE members who would like to make this resource into a truly President Elect innovative electronic space for the pursuit of theory. On the last Nancy Armstrong, English and Comparative Literature, Brown University page of the newsletter you'll find a fuller description of what we have in mind. Past Presidents And on the very last page of the newsletter, you'll find your Ralph Cohen, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Richard Ohrnann, Edward Said handy annual dues notice. This is the only dues notice you'll receive. Please clip the page and send it to us with the appropriate Executive Director amount, so that the SCE can continue to put on conferences, publish Martha Woodmansee, English, Case Western Reserve University collections of essays, and press ahead with new and innovative [email protected] projects. Associate Director Yours most sincerely, Max Thomas, English, University of Iowa [email protected] Assistant to the Directors Martha Woodmansee Max Thomas Kristine Kelly , English, Case Western Reserve University Director Associate Director Regenia Gagnier and John Dupre collaborated with Mark Osteen NT PIPOJECTS OF THE SCE and Martha Woodrnansee to mount a conference on "Culture and Economics" at the University of Exeter, July 23-26, 1998. This meeting The SCE runs several standing projects which operate through brought together an international array of literary scholars and economists meetings at the national and regional MLA conventions, through special to Wher consider the interrelations of their disciplines. Buildmg on the conferences, and through publication initiatives. The SCE is an aff-iliated conference held in 1994, this meeting aimed to sharpen study in several organization of the national MLA and of the five regional MLA areas: new theories of production; theories of consumption and alternative organizations. In many cases, ths means the SCE has standing panels at economies; feminist economics; the hstory, and pre-history, of economic conventions, through which it is possible for members to organize and discourse; formations of value, both monetary and non-monetary; and the carry out sessions on a wide variety of topics. The SCE will assist in various forms of the market. coordinating such sessions, and in expanding them into continuing If the 1994 conference suggested that certain paradigms and projects when appropriate. There is no limit to the number of concurrent assumptions about economics and about literary theory needed rethinking, projects; please do contact the directors with ideas and initiatives. this conference suggested a number of the forms that such rethinking The following pages include reports on each of the continuing might take. Notably, a mini-conference on the Nineteenth Century, SCE projects, on SCE-related panels at conferences, and on other SCE prompted by an extraordinary cluster of papers focused on that time activities both present and future. The SCE's website will continue to period, presented a broad view of the period not so much as one of accumulate information about these projects; for more information, consolidation of grand economic/authorial narratives, but as one of contact either the SCE Directors or the Coordinators of the inhvidual extraordinary contestation regarding the relation of the human subject to projects. the forces of social structures. And, in his plenary address to the cordierence, Terry Eagleton suggested that this rdhlnking might well necessitate a revitalization of the Marxist theory of base and superstructure itself. NEW ECONOMIC CRITICISM PROJECT REPORT Thus, the papers from the conference represented a putting-into- Coordmators: Mark Osteen, Martha Woodmansee practice of the ideas preliminarily discussed in 1994, and suggested that the issues raised about cultural production are only becoming more The New Economic Criticism project is devoted to the steadlly pressing. increasing intersection between economic considerations in literary studies The conference program is included on the following pages. and the importance of theory in economic studies. 1998 was a busy year Plenary Session: Overviews for NEC, includmg sponsoring two panels on "The Question of the aft" Welcome by Martha Woodmansee, Case Western Reserve University, at the MLA convention, and co-sponsoring, with the University of Exeter, Society for Critical Exchange; Opening comments: Regenia Gagnier, an international conference on "Culture and Econonlics" in Exeter, Exeter University and Mark Osteen, Loyola College, "Economics and England. A volume of essays from the first NEC conference, entitled New Culture"; Diana Strassman, Rice University, "Feminist Economics"; Jack Economic Criticism: Interrelations between Literature and Economics Amariglio, Merrimack College, "Postmodern Economics" and edited by Martha Woodrnansee and Mark Osteen, will be published by Routledge in the Spring of 1999. A collection of essays from ths Feminist Economics 1 summer's conference is being assembled for journal publication. Details Drucilla Barker, Hollins University, "Real Bodies and Rational Agents"; about the conference, including the full program, can be found below. Prue Hyman, Victoria University of Wellington, "The Uses and Limits of Details about the MLA sessions can be found under the MLA activities Orthodox Economics: Concepts of Value Towards a Feminist Valuation"; Marjolein van der Veen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, "Beyond report, on page 10. Commodification: Rethinking Prostitution" 2 SCE News and Notices New Series #I2 3 Consumption 1 Postmodern Economics Amy Koritz, Tulane University and Douglas Koritz, Buffalo State Joseph Childers and Stephen Cullenberg, University of California, College, "Checkmating the Consumer: Passive Consumption and the Riverside, "Speculating with ValueIGambling with Difference"; Robert Economic Devaluation of Culture"; Margueritte Murphy, Bentley College Garnett, Texas Christian University, and Stephen Cullenberg, "Samuel and Brian Cooper, New School for Social Research, "The Return of the Bailey's Contribution to a Postmodern Economics" Regressed: Culture, Race and Economics in the Debate on the Determinants of Wages" Nineteenth-Century Political Economy Mary Jean Corbett, Miami University of Ohio, "From Nature to Culture: Early Modern Economics English Economics and Irish Disaffection in John Stuart Mill's England Kathleen McLuskie, University of Southampton, "Nothing for the and Ireland'; Lucy Hartley, University of Southampton, "Natural Values"; Minstrel: The Economics of Early Modern Theater''; Karen Edwards, Josephine McDonagh, Birkbeck College, University of London, "Infant Exeter University, "The Economics of Paradise"; Jonathan Barry, Exeter Suffering, Human Value, and Political Economyn University and Maarten Prak, Utrecht University, "Citizenship: Between Culture and Economics" Money Richard Gray, University of Washington, "Hypersigns, Hypertexts, Gifts and Symbolic Objects Hypermarkets: Adam Mueller's Theory of Money and Romantic Jacqui Sadashige, University of Pennsylvania, "Fetishizing Antiquity: Semiotics"; Christina Crosby, Wesleyan University, "Faith and Flesh in Souvenirs and Sentiment in Republican Rome"; Antonio Callari, Franklin Ruskin's Political Economy"; Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia, and Marshall