I'm at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston, and I presented my paper (A Grammar of Marriage: Love in Spite of Syntax in Silas Lapham) yesterday. Surprisingly(!), there's not a lot of youth in the William Dean Howells Society, except perhaps his great-granddaughter Polly whom I met.
Highlights so far:
- Meeting Elizabeth Renker. I attended a Melville Society panel she chaired, and about 10 of us went to dinner afterward. I found out about her new book, an institutional history of American literature (1870-1950), and we talked about our different ways of coming at the same problem--er, discipline (American literature for her and rhet/comp for me).
- Seeing Paul Lauter again. Unfortunately, I missed his panel about working-class literature, since it occurred at the same time as mine on Howells and marriage. But he was generous enough to tell me what happened, to ask about my project, and to encourage me to email him about joining the Society for the Study of Working Class Literature's listserv.
- A paper by Robin Blyn reading "Those Extraordinary Twins" in the context of the 1886 Santa Clara decision and the consequences for thinking individuals as corporations. Too much reliance on Michaels and Trachtenberg for me not to be fascinated.
- [And an update:] Wai Chee Dimock. I introduced myself and, because I found her short 1990 article on Silas Lapham to be so compelling and so present in subsequent criticism on the novel, I told her so--and about my paper, which she was kind enough to ask to see more of.
