`Effects' and `Process': Literary Evaluation and the Scholarly Conference

The scholarly conference constitutes one structural vehicle from which both professional and research pursuits generally proceed. Although perhaps a truism, this premise masks the complexity underlying the relationship between scholarly work in language and literary studies and institutional mechanisms that determine what and how literary works and language topics may be discussed. In this essay, I consider certain material practices to which we adhere in scholarly conferences, and how these influence more abstract procedures of assigning "value" and undertaking "evaluation." By presenting a case study developed from the professional conference site of the annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, I hope to suggest broader interdisciplinary issues of the institutionalization of literary values. (CJS)