Assembling the Past: Digital Studies and Literary History

The QMUL Centre for the Study of the Nineteenth Century and its Legacies is delighted to welcome Prof. Dino Felluga (Purdue University), who will be presenting: 'Assembling the Past: Digital Studies and Literary History'.

Daniel Deronda puts it well when he considers the unalterable course of events in time: ‘“It can never be altered—it remains unaltered, to alter other things.”’ The novel as genre in fact helped to popularize this way of thinking about time, a way of thinking about past events that now seems so familiar to us as to seem to be the very nature of reality, what my co-author Emily Allen and I term the ‘novel-verse’ in our forthcoming Oxford University Press book, Novel-Poetry: The Shape of the Real and the Problem of Form. Now, what happens if we rethink this approach by changing the medium itself? Does the accompanying message about temporality change? I will discuss two digital ventures that make use of digital tools to rethink our approach to temporality and, thus, our understanding of the past: BRANCH at branchcollective.org and COVE at covecollective.org.

The discussion will be followed by an opportunity to continue conversations over refreshments.

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