"Style" is back in style. Late or grand, high or low, free and indirect or ostentatiously costly: style is a term that negotiates disparate phenomena and seemingly incompatible ideas. It is the mark of individual character or of generic identity, the site of ethics or of radical irresponsibility, the product of individual agency or an effect of social abjection, ornament or expression, excess or essence. Subtly related to a host of different terms (like manner, mode, voice, tone, character, rhetoric, convention, fashion, and form), style is surface, or substance, or both. Literary studies has lately shown a renewed interest in the idea of style—not least because its suppleness hints at new ways of conceiving often vexed conceptual relationships: between politics and aesthetics, history and form, meaning and materiality.

What is style, and what does it do? And what is its place in literary studies today?

"The Elements of Style" is the second annual graduate-student conference at the University of Chicago's Department of English, sponsored by the Department of English, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Division of the Humanities, and the Center for Gender Studies.