is a collaboration of doctoral schools in Belgium, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, France, 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.
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Passages are central objects of study across humanities disciplines. From textual excerpts to the shopping arcades theorized by Walter Benjamin, from the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade to present-day forms of migration and resettlement, and from transitions depicted in the Bildungsroman to ritual praxis, ‘passages’ are understood and interpreted in many ways. Whether structural, semiotic, spatial/geographic, temporal, existential, societal, or institutional, passages refer to paths toward and processes of (status) change. They connect and thereby engender difference. They enable entrances and exits, arrivals and departures, while they also foster moments of liminality and suspension in between. Unlike thresholds that are simply crossed, passages imply journeys of duration, prompting anticipation of the new and foreign as well as a sense of existential finitude. Never smooth, passages come with challenges and risks as they bear the potential for breaks and ruptures.
In addition to exploring ‘passages’ in such myriad senses, the 2019 Hermes Summer School aims to foster a concept-based, interdisciplinary dialogue on how to approach and theorize such a term. Based on the notion that concepts function as crystallized mini-theories (Mieke Bal) and travel through times, contexts, and discursive settings, a conceptual approach to ‘passages’ will provide us with analytical tools to (re-)focus our research questions and create a meaningful exchange across disciplinary, national and linguistic boundaries. We invite participants to employ concepts in the study of culture such as Cultural Memory, Performativity, Space, Infrastructure, Knowledge, Media, Body, (Cultural) Translation among others, as they approach the topic of ‘passages’ and to explicitly reflect on their value and limits for their research. How can various definitions of and approaches to ‘passages’ travel and transfer between disciplines and thereby stimulate cross-disciplinary research? How do concepts in the Study of Culture enable meaningful passages between disciplinary contexts?
Each paper will be allotted 20 minutes. In addition to presenting their own work and areas of expertise, speakers are strongly encouraged to reflect on the concepts they employ in their analyses. A reader with selected literature on the topic of ‘passages’ will be provided. Please send your proposals including an abstract (200 words) and a short bio note (150 words, including your name, email address, institutional affiliation, dissertation topic, and disciplinary anchoring) to jens.kugele@gcsc.uni-giessen.de by January 31, 2019. We welcome abstracts related but not limited to the areas listed below:
· social passages including rites of passage; migration and (re-)settlement; politics, regimes, and violence; class im/mobilities; passages between “identities” (racial, gendered, sexual)
· historical passages (periodizations, transitions)
· linguistic and symbolic passages via translation or adaptation
· textual passages (genres, forms, structures)
· narrating/representing passages (e.g. as a trope or formal feature in cultural products)
· theories of passage in ritual studies/cultural anthropology and their heuristic potential for the study of literature and culture
The Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) is a founding member of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies, a long-standing collaboration of eleven doctoral schools in Belgium, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the USA. The Consortium’s annual summer school, hosted in turn by each partner institution, brings together specialists, delegates from the partner universities, and 22 PhD students (two per university). An intensive training workshop and work-in-progress presentations focus on shared methodologies and interdisciplinary themes and lead to the publication of an annual edited volume, published by UCL Press in the Comparative Literature and Culture series.
Accommodation for delegates, speakers and student participants will be provided for five nights (May 19–23 at Rauischholzhausen Castle and May 23–24 at a hotel centrally located in Frankfurt am Main). A shuttle to Rauischholzhausen will leave from the Main Station in Giessen on May 19 in the late afternoon; those travelling by plane can easily reach Giessen via train after landing in Frankfurt am Main. The program will end in Frankfurt on May 24 in the early afternoon. Participants are requested to make their own travel arrangements.
Elizabeth Kovach, Jens Kugele, and Ansgar Nünning on behalf of the Hermes Consortium
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Giandomenico Iannetti (University College London)
Katherine Ibbett (University of Oxford)
Peter Leary (University College London)
Timothy Mathews (University College London)
Simona Micali (University of Siena)
Baldassare Pastore (University of Ferrara)
Ellen Sapega (University of Wisconsin-Madison) - tbc
Florian Mussgnug (UCL)
Jennifer Rushworth (UCL)
Roberta Ascarelli (IIGS)
Lucia Corso (Enna)
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, UCL
PRIN “Legal Entity and Vulnerability”
University of Enna Kore
Italian Institute of Germanic Studies
University College London (UCL) is proud to be a founding member of the Hermes
Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies, a long-standing collaboration of eleven
doctoral schools in Belgium, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great
Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, France, and the USA, with a proven record of
international excellence in the field of Comparative Literary Studies. The Consortium’s
annual summer school, hosted in turn by each partner institution, brings together
specialists, delegates from the partner universities and 22 PhD students (two per university).
Intensive training workshops and work-in-progress presentations focus on shared
methodologies and themes and lead to the publication of an annual edited volume,
published by UCL Press in the Comparative Literature and Culture series, co-edited by Prof.
Timothy Mathews and Dr Florian Mussgnug.
The 2018 edition of Hermes, jointly hosted by UCL and the Italian Institute of Germanic
Studies in Rome [Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici], will take its timely topic from the
UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) ongoing research initiative for 2017-18:
“Vulnerability”. We will explore the intrinsic ambivalence of this concept, which suggests both
fragility and openness, and will pay attention to narratives of vulnerability but also to the
ways in which texts and traditions may become vulnerable: to loss, censorship, editorial
intervention, or interpretation. We will engage with shifting historical contexts and approach
comparative studies as an opening to other fields of disciplinary inquiry, including
neuroscience, which provides new perspectives on human perception and defence
behaviour. Our philosophical and juridical understanding of vulnerability will be further
advanced by the contribution of PRIN 2015 “Legal Entity and Vulnerability”, a large
collaborative research initiative funded by the National Research Council of Italy.
Hermes aims to expand internationally collaborative research and research-based learning,
and promotes international mobility and collaboration across Europe. Our summer school
thus embraces the aims of the newly established UCL Rome Regional Partnership Fund,
which facilitates and supports academic collaboration between UCL and institutional
partners in Central Italy. We are delighted that this year’s summer school will be hosted in
Rome and welcome this opportunity to open the Hermes network to the Italian doctoral
schools associated with the Italian Institute of Germanic Studies.
Vulnerability, from the Latin vulnus (‘wound’), signifies a susceptibility to being wounded. It
suggests both fragility and openness, and it is this ambivalence that we wish to explore.
Thinking about vulnerability often raises questions which are political and ethical in nature:
who or what is vulnerable? What reactions does vulnerability provoke? What forms of
responsibility does vulnerability entail? Vulnerability has been argued to be a defining
characteristic of the human condition. The American philosopher Daniel Callahan writes that
“we are as human beings intrinsically vulnerable. We are vulnerable to time and nature […]
and we are vulnerable to each other”. Yet these vulnerabilities are shared not only by
humans but also, for instance, by non-human animals. Indeed, the recognition that animals,
too, are vulnerable is a key argument in animal rights. To recall a much-quoted phrase from
Jeremy Bentham: “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they
suffer?”
In literary studies, vulnerability can be approached from a number of different angles. It may
concern characters and situations, and encourage us to reconsider literary expressions of
suffering and woundedness on the level of plot, theme, and characterization. Then again,
texts themselves may also be vulnerable: to loss, censorship, editorial intervention, or
interpretation. How is a text made vulnerable by its readers and how are readers made
vulnerable by certain texts?
In the context of this conference we want to explore the specific contributions that
comparative literature can make to vulnerability studies. A comparative approach
encourages us to consider whether vulnerability has a distinct form in literature from different
times and different places. It also benefits from a recognition of the importance of other
disciplines — philosophy, psychoanalysis, neuroscience inter alia — in understanding
discourses of vulnerability. Finally, we propose that comparative literature might itself be
understood to be defined by its own vulnerability, in the two senses of the term introduced
earlier: fragility and openness. Like comparative literature, vulnerability is at heart a mode
and form of relationality.
We welcome abstracts (150 words) related — but not limited — to the areas listed below.
Each speaker will be allocated 20 minutes to give their paper. In addition to presenting on
their own work and areas of expertise, speakers may wish in their papers to reflect on
methodological questions raised by the general topic of vulnerability.
• Figurations of vulnerability, in literature, art, humanitarian discourse, politics and
poetics
• The constitution/construction and representation of vulnerable subjects and groups,
regions, languages, populations or communities
• The vulnerability of text(s) and writing
• The instrumentalizations of vulnerability in human rights discourse, humanitarian
studies, refugee studies, public policy and politics
• Vulnerability and victimhood: ethics, values, agency and moral judgement
• Vulnerability and violence: epistemic, actual and strategic
• The relationship of ‘vulnerability’ to ‘precarity’, ‘fragility’ or ‘risk’
• Vulnerable forms: genres, mediums, practices, objects, structures, materials, modes
of being, life-worlds
• The gendering/ageing/sexing of vulnerability: vulnerability and intersectionality
• Vulnerability and visibility, vulnerability and difference, vulnerability as image
• Vulnerability and the law, discourses of protection, care and control, compassion and
support
• Vulnerability, performance and performativity
• Vulnerability and power, vulnerability and strength/resilience
• Comparative literature as a vulnerable discipline
Abstracts of no more than 150 words, accompanied by a short biographical
presentation of similar length should be submitted by email to j.rushworth@ucl.ac.uk
by Monday, 5th March 2018.
Accommodation for delegates, speakers and student participants will be provided for four
nights (18th June to 22nd June 2018) at Villa Maria Guest House, in the immediate
proximity of Villa Sciarra-Wurts and within easy walking distance from the vibrant
neighbourhood of Trastevere and the historical centre of Rome. Students will be hosted in
shared double rooms with en suite bathrooms.
A conference fee of EUR 270.00 per participant, to be paid to the organisers on arrival, will
include participation, accommodation, lunch on four days, conference dinner, and a guided
walking tour of Rome.
Participants are requested to make their own travel arrangements. Please see here
information on how to reach Villa Maria Guest House. In case of dietary or other special
needs, please contact the organisers at your earliest convenience, at f.mussgnug@ucl.ac.uk
Participants are encouraged to consult the IAS homepage for reading suggestions and
information about ongoing research initiatives and events around the theme of vulnerability.
Recommended preparatory reading will be sent by the organisers in pdf, in preparation for
the summer school. We also recommend the following monographs and edited collections:
Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. by J. H. Burns and
H. L. A. Hart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Butler, Judith and Zeynep Gambetti (eds), Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2016).
Callahan, Daniel, ‘The Vulnerability of the Human Condition’, in Bioethics and Biolaw, ed. by P. Kemp,
J. Rendtorff, and N. Mattsson Johansen, 2 vols (Copenhagen: Rhodos International Science
and Art Publishers, 2000), II, 115–22.
Ganteau, Jean-Michel, and Susana Onega (eds), Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st-Century Fiction
(New York: Routledge, 2017).
Ganteau, Jean-Michel, The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction
(London: Routledge, 2015).
Gilson, Erinn, The Ethics of Vulnerability (London: Routledge, 2016).
Greene, Thomas M., The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986).
Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2016).
Latour, Bruno, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
McCoy, Marina, Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and
Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Maillard, Nathalie, La Vulnérabilité : une nouvelle catégorie morale? (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2011).
Mathews, Timothy, Alberto Giacometti: The Art of Relation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).
Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Pick, Anat, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011).
ten Have, Henk, Vulnerability: Challenging Bioethics (London: Routledge, 2016).
Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985).
Tylus, Jane, Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1993).
Literature and art are always situated in a context, both literally, metaphorically and by reference. But what does this ‘situatedness’ mean? How do literature and art imagine or critically reflect a community, a state or a world and what does the social and cultural context of the reader or the spectator mean for the interpretation of a work of literature or art? What is the political potential of literature and art? Do globalization and new media change our understanding of what context is? And do new methods of comparatism or Big Data entail new ways of perceiving the concept of context?
In this graduate seminar we wish to focus on the way ‘context’ is understood in literary and cultural studies. In a certain sense, contexts have become wider. It has been argued that aesthetics is always already cosmopolitan or globalized (Papastergiadis 2012), and that Big Data-methods in literature departments will open up literary studies to the great unread (Manovich 2015). New comparatists have argued in favor of a new universalism or a planetary consciousness (Apter, Spivak) and for a relational, transcultural understanding of context (Baucom, Dobie). Yet there is also a new focus on the importance of ‘nearness’, of micro-historical circulation, personal life-stories (Schaffer, Smith), concrete political contexts, personal precariousness (Butler) and affective, phenomenological and performative effects of literature and art on individuals (Ngai, Ahmed). In between the global and the local, we find the nation state that used to be the geographical cornerstone of comparatism as well as the ethnic or political communities often discussed in cultural studies. Talking about context also often means addressing the relation between aesthetics and politics. New approaches have pointed out the inherent political importance of aesthetic form and of giving voice to the unheard (Rancière) and of creating new forms of collective subjectivity and agency (Mouffe, Douzinas).
Literature and art matter in the world and so do storytelling, street art, performative media actions, commercials, documentary movies, political self fashioning etc. that all draw on different forms of aesthetics. We invite participants to critically discuss the role of context in the interpretation, canonization and circulation of literary and artistic works as well as the methodological implications of contextual interpretations.
• Aesthetics and politics
• The politics of literary form
• Big Data and new approaches to context
• The contextualized reader or spectator
• Aesthetics in a globalized context
• Microhistories
• Circulation of literature and art in different contexts
• Context’s function within comparative method
• Mediated contexts and their relation to literary works or artworks
• Historical forms and discussions about context
• The role of the reader/spectator
• Ethnicity, race-, gender- based contexts
Bruce Robbins, Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York
Susana Araujo, Senior researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies of the Faculty of Arts University of Lisbon
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Professor with Special Responsibilities, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University
Frederik Tygstrup, Professor, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University
Paper proposals (abstracts) of approx. 300 words should be sent to Karen-Margrethe Simonsen (litkms@cc.au.dk) or Jakob Ladegaard (litjl@cc.au.dk) no later than February 15, 2017.
270 Euro (includes participation, excursion, lunch all days, one dinner and lodging at hostel)
School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University Langelandsgade 139 8000 Aarhus C Denmark http://cc.au.dk/en/
Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univesity Press, 2014.
Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Princeton University Press, 2006.
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London/New York: Verso, 2004.
Dobie, Madeleine, Trading Places. Colonialism and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century, Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Douzinas, Costas. Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis. Cambridge, UK/Malden: Polity Press, 2013.
Manovich, Lev. "The Science of Culture? Social Computing, Digital Humanities, and Cultural Analytics." manovich.net/index.php/projects/cultural-analytics-social-computing.
Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking The World Politically. London – New York: Verso, 2013.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings, Cambridge, Mass/London: 2005.
Papastergiadis, Nikos. Cosmopolitanism and Culture, Cambridge UK/Malden: Polity Press, 2012.
Rancière, Jacques. Politique de la littérature. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2007. (Politics of Literature, Polity Press, 2011).
Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith: Human Rights and Narrated Lives. The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2004.
Spivak, Gayatri, Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia Press, 2003.
