CALL FOR PAPERS

HERMES Seminar 2012: The Relevance of Literature in a Changing World

Amsterdam, June 10-16, 2012

Annual International Seminar in collaboration with the universities united in the HERMES-network (University of Wisconsin at Madison, Stanford, Aarhus, Giessen, Leuven, Lisbon, UC London)

Over the last decades, the study of literature has branched off into many directions. Much to its benefit, literary studies has entered into a many-voiced, intense discussion with philosophy, aesthetic theory, cultural sociology, political theory, popular culture studies – to name just a few of the many conversation partners. As a result, literary (theory) scholars of today study a wide variety of cultural phenomena: film, theatre, performance art, visual culture, et cetera. Yet paradoxically, this diversification of literary studies has pushed a number of intriguing, critical questions concerning the role and analysis of literature itself into the background. What is the place of literature in the present? How is it defined, produced, interpreted, and received? Which notions and practices of literature interact and compete in present-day academic and public arenas? What are the modi operandi of contemporary literary culture(s), on national as well as global scales? And why is it that literary art and issues of authorship and commitment continue to play such an important role in the present? These questions are central to the Hermes 2012 Seminar in Amsterdam.

In recent years literary theorists and historians have extensively researched a number of cultural developments that appear to be quite frightening to writers, readers and literary professionals. To sum up just a few:

• The diversification of culture (high/low, new media, ethnicity…)
• The increase of cultural production (within literature, in general)
• The loss of liberal humanist certainties (about quality, canonicity etc) and dissatisfaction with the postmodern alternatives for it
• The growing dominance of information technologies in Western culture and the transformative impact of those technologies
• The rethinking the basis of subjectivity as radically heterogeneous (the ‘posthuman’ condition)
• The (assumed) vanishing of print culture
• The commercialization of culture…

These (and other) cultural transformations seem to undermine the ways we used to think of literature and literary culture. Therefore, they contribute to the renewed topicality of very basic, but also important questions: What is literature? What is literary experience? How is literature perceived, discussed, viewed, structured? Where, how and why do people have an interest in literature? How is literature transformed by the changing society of today, and how can literature transform society? What can literary education contribute to moral education?

The Hermes 2012 seminar in Amsterdam addresses these questions in the light of the dizzy cultural and political transformations op our time. We will focus on literary history (contemporary developments) and literary theory (ethical turn, material turn). Keynote speakers are still to be invited. A few possible sessions are:

• Globalization
• Remediation
• Translation
• Cultural diversity
• Politics…

If you are interested in participating, please send a proposal for a paper of max. 300 words and a biographical note of max 150 words, to the OSL office at OSL-fgw@uva.nl before January 15^th 2012.

The Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies

is a collaboration of doctoral schools in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain with associated partners in Italy and USA that seeks to further an understanding of the European presence in the fields of literature, art and culture in an era of globalization, to promote interdisciplinary thoughts in the fields of literary and cultural studies, to explore changes in European self-understanding and self-criticism across the cultures and disciplines in and beyond Europe, and to develop co-operation between European as well as between non-European research environments.

The Hermes web site is hosted by Aarhus University