BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The fourth annual MUSE Undergraduate Literature Conference, to take place on Saturday, Sept. 27, will feature keynote speaker Lisa Ruddick, professor of English at the University of Chicago. Ruddick will give her address, titled “Literature and the Feeling of Aliveness,” at 12:30 p.m. in the Center of Natural Science Learning and Research (201 E. Beecher St., Bloomington), room C101.
MUSE is presented by Illinois Wesleyan University’s Alpha Eta Pi chapter of Sigma Tau Delta (STD), the international English honor society, in conjunction with Illinois State University’s Lambda Delta chapter.
The conference, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Center of Natural Science Learning and Research. Registration begins at 8 a.m. in the commons area and conference activities begin at 9 a.m. with student research presentations. The conference will also feature informational panels on post-graduate options for literature majors, Feminist literature, and British literature.
Ruddick’s current scholarship focuses on the ways in which “training in the humanities, conducted with the best of intentions, can thwart the feeling of aliveness by partially dissociating practitioners from their intuitions and their deep affective resources.” She is the author of Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Cornell University Press, 1990), “The Near Enemy of the Humanities is Professionalism” (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2000) and “Stein and Cultural Criticism in the Nineties” (Modern Fiction Studies 42, 1996).