Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada, May 18-19, 2018
At a Q&A that followed a Toronto screening of Little Men (2016), a film about two families‘ battle over a lease and its impact on the lives of its central protagonists, director Ira Sachs reflected on the modern-day struggle of many families to remain in the middle class. Sachs’s film speaks to the primacy of economics in discourse. Recent scholarship has shown the value of reading film and literature economically. The enormously influential work of David Graeber, Mary Poovey, Margot C. Finn, Julian Hoppit, Sandford Borins, Audrey Jaffe, Margaret Atwood, and others have opened up new avenues for thinking about money and the humanities. This conference aims both to consolidate and to advance criticism in literature, film, philosophy, and cultural studies by attending to some incarnations of debt and analyzing their wider implications.
Further information: https://www.facebook.com/DebtinHistory/
Deadline for submissions: Aug. 1, 2017