SMLC Seminar
Reading the Campus Novel (from a Distance)

Wesley Beal
Fulbright Visiting Associate Professor, American Studies HKU

Date: 14 Nov 2018 (Wed)
Time: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Venue: Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Abstract: What is the campus novel as a genre? Who is it for? How might reading novels set on American university campuses help us better understand the manifold crises of higher learning in the U.S? Or for that matter, how might the campus novel also produce pressures on the U.S. university? This talk, part of a cultural studies project on the intersections of the campus novel and the material crises facing higher learning in the U.S., explores a range of digital humanities tools to uncover the core content of the genre.

Bio: Wesley Beal serves this fall as Fulbright Visiting Associate Professor in the American Studies Programme at HKU. He teaches two courses on American literature and continues his research project on the campus novel genre. At Lyon College, a small liberal arts college in Arkansas’s Ozark mountains, he teaches a range of American literature courses, as well as the introduction to theory, world literature, and composition. His book Networks of Modernism (Iowa UP, 2015) studies network models in modernist experiments to argue for a cultural logic of modernism that emphasized not just fragments, but a networked view of the U.S.