Annual Stephen Crane Lecture Scheduled, Graduate Students Encouraged to Attend
”The Body Count: Stephen Crane and the Cost of War.”

I am writing on behalf of my colleagues to invite you to the upcoming Stephen Crane Memorial Lecture, hosted annually by the English Department and the Dikaia Foundation. We are honored this year to have Cindy A. Weinstein, Professor of English at California Institute of Technology, give this year’s lecture. She will speak at 4 p.m. on October 19th in Room 208 of the Goldstein Alumni and Faculty Center. The title of her talk is ”The Body Count: Stephen Crane and the Cost of War.”

A member of the faculty in Cal Tech’s Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Weinstein is widely recognized for her work in nineteenth-century American literature. The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature traces the intersections of aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America. Her most recent book, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, argues that the cultural achievement of the enormously popular sentimental fictions of the mid-nineteenth century was to challenge the very constitution of the bourgeois family, substituting love for consanguinity, contract for biology. Professor Weinstein is currently at work on Narratives, Numbers, and Pictures: From Poe to Dos Passos, the project from which her lecture will be drawn. In this moment when counting the bodies, whether of the Iraqi dead or those lost in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is a matter of serious political and ethical debate, Professor Weinstein’s inquiry into the question of numbers—of who is counting and who counts—in the work of late nineteenth century writers is an unusually timely one. Like last year’s Crane Lecture by Cecelia Tichi, Weinstein’s talk promises to focus on the ways in which writers use narrative to confront issues of urgent civic importance and to confirm the vital public import of scholarship in the humanities.

The Stephen Crane Memorial Lecture series is made possible by the generosity of the Dikaia Foundation. It commemorates the achievements of Stephen Crane, who attended Syracuse University in 1891 and was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity from which the Dikaia Foundation derives. We are very pleased that a scholar of Crane and his generation of U.S. writers of Professor Weinstein’s prominence will address us on this special occasion.

We hope you will join us for Professor Weinstein’s lecture and at the reception following it.

Sincerely,
Amy Schrager Lang
Professor of English and Humanities