August 3-6, 2006
University of California, Santa Cruz
sponsored by the Dickens Project

Featured Speaker: Sharon Marcus, Columbia University

Two-page proposals due by Feb. 1, 2006. Mail proposals (hard copies only) to:

Professor Hilary Schor
Dept. of English
University of Southern California
Los Angeles CA 90089

Suggested topics:
URBAN PLACES
Shops, Shop-windows, sewers and skyscrapers, tenements and tenants
URBANITES
Street-sellers and street-walkers, Planners, builders and schemers, loiterers, detectives, criminals and victims, spectators and spectacles, classes and classifications
URBANITIES
Cosmopolitanism, city of manners/ novels of manners, strangers and estrangement, languages of the city
URBAN GENRES
Melodrama, the urban gothic, mysteries, realism, romance and reality
URBAN THINGS
Devices and machinery, street noise, street smells, tasting the city, commodities and the marketing of fiction, mobility, transport and passengers, semiotics and the city/ semiotics of the novel
URBANITY AND THE NOVEL
Future Cities: Utopian Urbanism, cities and the limits of fictional representation, urban crowds and mass literature, mapping the city/city guides/mapping the novel