Cultural Narratives are symbolic matrixes in the making that orientate behavior, world-views, affects, social engineering, and practices (Kuipers 2019; Valdivia 2017, 2019). Literature and cultural symbolic products (fiction, poetry, music, transmedia, theater, amongst others) are privileged sources of transformative knowledge – by enacting simulative and experiential information processing, they play a key role in configuring our societies, identities, systems of representations, technologies, policies, and communicative mediations (Comer & Taggart 2020; Landau 2017; Levine 2015; Stockwell 2020). In this interdisciplinary Hermes Summer School, we will explore, analyze, and problematize cultural narratives of degrowth and sustainability, with particular attention to how they might unfold new imaginaries that can contribute to developing novel ways of rethinking the social fabric.
This summer school aims to provide participants with a critical understanding of narratives of degrowth and sustainability, their complex relations and their implications for sustainable development. For instance, what sustainability narratives configure the sustainable development goals as formulated by the UN construct? (UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals 2015; UNESCO Knowledge Driven Actions 2022) Do they tell a story that frames economic growth as compatible, if not essential, for social and ecological wellbeing? How do they hide or highlight the contradictions between economic, social and ecological agendas? Moreover, what narratives are needed to rethink sustainability in such a way that it moves beyond “green” growth and towards a degrowth path? How might these narratives intersect with posthuman and/or decolonial theories and demands and foster a better understanding of the tension between the Global South and the Global North? In short, this summer school will investigate the potential of such narratives to promote alternative forms of economic and social organization that prioritize ecological sustainability, social justice, and human well-being over economic growth.
As stated by Johns-Putra, Parham, and Squire in their introduction to the volume Literature and Sustainability: “In discussing sustainability from a literary perspective, we draw forward two approaches … One, is that of a critical sustainability. Certainly, other literary scholars have suggested that the very discourse and praxis of sustainability bears scrutiny of a literary kind. Karen Pinkus has argued that sustainability functions in the same way as narrative; it ‘implies or writes a narrative coherence’ [...], and rethinking sustainability requires that we rethink narrative itself. Indeed, a narrative of jouissance rather than of futurity might release us from the trap of ‘business-as-usual’ thinking that accompanies so much sustainability discourse. The other approach may be considered a literary response (broadly speaking) to such discourses of sustainability, including an emphasis on the possibilities that arise in a fluid engagement with literature per se” (2017: 5-6).
In this vein of critical inquiry, amongst other timely research questions, this Hermes Summer School will investigate which cultural narratives can foster and prime social transformations enhancing degrowth and sustainability. What conceptual architectures (e.g., conceptual metaphors and analogical modeling) could promote and contribute to developing fairer and more respectful human, economic, and technological practices concerning the climate and ecological crisis? How do literary knowledge and its practices convey innovative paths for re-imagining change, including social and environmental responsibility within the symbolic frameworks of legal, political, and economic imaginaries? How do we inquire about the theoretical foundations of degrowth and sustainability cultural narratives? What is the overarching role of narratives in shaping public discourse and policy? How can we inform social change through case studies of communities and movements that have embraced narratives of degrowth and sustainability? What challenges and opportunities are associated with implementing narratives of degrowth and sustainability?
As operating non-normative terminological frameworks, we suggest conceptual points of entry for discussion and dialogue based on the following understanding of
Culture: “A set of beliefs, practices, rituals, and traditions shared by a group of people with at least one point of common identity (such as their ethnicity, race, or nationality). At its core is the sense that it is different from nature in that it is a product of conscious choice and not the instincts. But as authors like Donna Haraway have shown, the nature/culture divide is difficult to sustain. A wide range of disciplines—predominantly anthropology, archaeology, Cultural Studies, history and sociology—make use of the concept of culture, each one adding its own qualification, making it problematic to say that what is meant by this word is exactly the same in any two disciplines. In the humanities, from the time of Matthew Arnold in the late nineteenth century up until very late in the twentieth century, culture referred to artistic production of all types, and was further classified into categories of ‘high’ and ‘low’ reflecting the perceived relative aesthetic merit of a particular work. The advent of Cultural Studies in 1950s Britain began to change that, as it combined ways of thinking about culture from history and sociology and conceived of culture as the glue holding society together. Culture came to refer to any form of creative production, from the self-consciously artistic work of professional artists to the relatively banal habits and practices of everyday life. It is this sense of the word that has lately become dominant. The principal theoretical problem culture raises is one of reproduction: why do people adhere to a given culture and to what extent are their actions determined by this?”. (Buchanan, I., 2018)
“UNESCO defines culture as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only art and literature, but lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs”. (UNESCO, 2001)
Narrative: “We make sense of our memory and others’ behavior by constantly constructing narratives from an information stream that unfolds over time. Comprehending a narrative is a process of accumulating ongoing information, storing it in memory as a situational model, and simultaneously integrating it to construct a coherent representation (Zwaan et al., 1995; Langston and Trabasso, 1999; Polyn et al., 2009; Ranganath and Ritchey, 2012). Forming a coherent representation of a narrative involves comprehending the causal structure of the events, including the causal flow that links consecutive events or even a long-range causal connection that exists between temporally discontiguous events”. (Song et al. 2021, Cognitive and Neural State Dynamics of Narrative Comprehension)
Degrowth: “Degrowth can generally be defined as a collective and deliberative process aimed at the equitable downscaling of the overall capacity to produce and consume and of the role of markets and commercial exchanges as a central organising principle of human lives (Schneider et al., 2010)”. (Sekulova et al. 2013, Degrowth: from theory to practice)
Sustainability (also known as sustainable development):
“In 1987 the UN World Commission on Environment and Development published the Brundtland Report under the title Our Common Future. The report was named after the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland who chaired the commission. In it sustainable development was defined as “development which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” There are two very important principles the definition invokes. The first is that sustainability is inherently intergenerational; namely, it is future oriented. The second is that sustainability is an ethical issue. It demands current generations act responsibly vis-à-vis future generations and consider the long-term consequences of their actions. ” (Parr, A., 2014)
“Sustainable development has been defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable development calls for concerted efforts towards building an inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for people and planet. For sustainable development to be achieved, it is crucial to harmonize three core elements: economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection. These elements are interconnected and all are crucial for the well-being of individuals and societies. Eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions is an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. To this end, there must be promotion of sustainable, inclusive and equitable economic growth, creating greater opportunities for all, reducing inequalities, raising basic standards of living, fostering equitable social development and inclusion, and promoting integrated and sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems”. (UN 2023, The Sustainable Development Agenda)
4th Industrial (Knowledge) Revolution: “The fourth industrial revolution, a term coined by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, describes a world where individuals move between digital domains and offline reality with the use of connected technology to enable and manage their lives. (Miller 2015, 3) The first industrial revolution changed our lives and economy from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing. Oil and electricity facilitated mass production in the second industrial revolution. In the third industrial revolution, information technology was used to automate production. Although each industrial revolution is often considered a separate event, together they can be better understood as a series of events building upon innovations of the previous revolution and leading to more advanced forms of production”. (Xu et al. 2018, The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Opportunities and Challenges)
We welcome abstracts related but not limited to the areas listed below:
Each paper will be allotted 20 minutes. PhD students from Hermes partner institutions are welcome to send their proposals, including an abstract (300 words) and a short bio note (150 words, with name, email address, institutional affiliation, dissertation topic, and disciplinary anchoring), to osl@rug.nl by November 30, 2023.
Masterclasses by Hermes faculty for small groups: the program will include three seminars for small groups, each focusing on a topic related to the general theme of “Narrating Degrowth and Sustainability”.
The Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL) is a member of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies, a long-standing collaboration of twelve doctoral schools in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, 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 24 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.
The school will take place in Utrecht. Accommodation for delegates, speakers and student participants will be provided for five nights (10th June to 14th June 2024). A conference fee of EUR 350.00 per participant will include participation, accommodation, cultural activities, coffee breaks, lunch on five days, and conference dinner. Participants are requested to make their own travel arrangements.
Buchanan, I. (2018). culture. In A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 24 May. 2023., https://www-oxfordreference-com.proxy-ub.rug.nl/view/10.1093/acref/9780198794790.001.0001/acref-9780198794790-e-154
Büchs, M. & Koch, M. (2019). “Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing,” Futures, Volume 105.,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2018.09.002
D’Amato, D. (2021). “Sustainability Narratives as Transformative Solution Pathways: Zooming in on the Circular Economy”. Circ.Econ.Sust. 1, 231–242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43615-021-00008-1
Johns-Putra, A. (2017) Literature and sustainability: Exploratory essays. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Johns-Putra, A., Parham, J. and Squire, L. (eds) (2017) Literature and sustainability: concept, text and culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Landau, M. J. (2017) Conceptual metaphor in social psychology: the poetics of everyday life. New York, New York: Routledge.
Levine, C. (2015) Forms: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kuipers, G. (2019). “Cultural narratives and their social supports, or: sociology as a team sport,” The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 70, Issue 3, 708-720.
Parr, A. (2014). Sustainability. In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 24 May. 2023. https://www-oxfordreference-com.proxy-ub.rug.nl/view/10.1093/acref/9780199747108.001.0001/acref-9780199747108-e-701
Prádanos, L. I. (2018). Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain. Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt6rjgt
Schröder, P., Bengtsson, M., Cohen, M., Dewick, P., Hofstetter, J., Sarkis,J. (2019) “Degrowth within – Aligning circular economy and strong sustainability narratives,” Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Volume 146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2019.03.038
Sekulova, F., Kallis, G., Rodríguez-Labajos, B., Schneider, F., (2013) “Degrowth: from theory to practice”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 38, 1-6, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.06.022
Song, H., Park, B., Park, H., Shim, W. M., (2021) “Cognitive and Neural State Dynamics of Narrative Comprehension”, Journal of Neuroscience, 41, 43, 8972-8990. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0037-21.2021
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2022) Culture and Cognitive Science.
Stephenson, J. (2023) Culture and sustainability : exploring stability and transformation with the cultures framework. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stockwell, P. (2020) Cognitive poetics: an introduction. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
UNESCO (2010) The UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics.
UNESCO (2022) Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability.
United Nations (2023) The Sustainable Development Agenda.
Valdivia, P. (2017) “Literature, crisis, and Spanish rural space in the context of the 2008 financial recession”, Romance Quarterly, 64:4, 163-171, 5. https://doi.org/10.1080/08831157.2017.1356135
Valdivia, P. (2019) “Narrating crises and populism in Southern Europe: Regimes of metaphor,” Journal of European Studies, 49(3–4), 282–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244119865083
Xu, M., David, J., Kim, S. (2018) “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Opportunities and Challenges”, International Journal of Financial Research, Volume 9, No 2, 90-95. https://doi.org/10.5430/ijfr.v9n2p90
Over the past decades, Possible Worlds theory has proved one of the most fascinating fields in the theoretical study of aesthetics and narrative imagination, both in literature and other media. It has increased our insight on the relationship between artistic representation and reality, and on the role of fictional imagination in human life, as scholars of different disciplines – psychology, anthropology, cognitive sciences – have acknowledged the idea of narrating as the primary human activity. Creating, representing and ‘visiting’ imaginary world are practices situated somewhere between children’s games of make-believe (Walton 1990) and the dual structure of religious thought (that postulate the concrete existence of an afterlife): they bring back and revitalize the experiential energy of play in the adult world, but without the supplementary energy of a religious approach, and therefore keep it entirely lay and human; they provide a space for experimentation and reasoning (Doležel 1998, Schaeffer 2010) and preserve the creative side of social behaviors, that tend to be sclerotized by rules and conventions (Pavel 1986). More recently, cognitive and social scientists have discussed from different disciplinary perspectives the crucial role of narration as a tool to make sense of individual and collective experiences by filtering and interpreting singular events through pre-existing narrative patterns; and even to prevent potential future traumas by an act of imaginative training or ‘premediation’ (Grusin 2010). Conversely, other scholars, while acknowledging the revolutionary power of narration, emphasize the dangers of surrendering to fictional imagination, and the progressive erosion of the very distinction between truth and fiction in the time of pervasive mediation, virtual reality and ‘post-truth’ (Baudrillard 1994, Žižek 1997, Lavocat 2016).
These are just a few of the aesthetical, cultural and political perspectives intertwined in an incredibly rich and lively field of study, whose implications concern not only artists and scholars, but also the communities and cultures to which they belong and refer. This is the main reason why we believe in the relevance of a renewed, comprehensive and articulated reflection on the world-building power of aesthetic imagination from ancient myths to today’s fantasies of the Multiverse; on the creative and falsifying role of fiction, from Plato’s mistrust in mimesis to Baudrillard’s complains of iperreality; and on the vital importance and at the same time the dangers of projecting ourselves in a different, possible world brought to existence by an act of artistic creation.
The starting point of this reflection are the theories on imaginary worlds and their relation to the actual world. Since its origins, Western culture has known two primary contrasting conceptions of the relationship between aesthetic imagination and reality. The theory based on the Platonic idea of art as “copy” (eikon) and on the Aristotelian concept of mimesis has been a tenet of Western aesthetics for centuries. Regardless of its multifarious and ever-changing guises, the key principle of the mimetic paradigm is that fictional entities are imitations or representations of actually existing entities, be they historically determined or psychological or sociological types and categories. An alternative approach to mimetic theory is based on the idea of art as creation of ‘other’ worlds. Victor Stoichita (2006) has claimed that such conception originates in the Ovidian myth of Pygmalion and in the related idea of phantasma, or simulacrum. The conceptual backbone of this alternative position is to be found in the philosophic theory of Possible Worlds, which first appeared in Gottfried Leibniz’s Theodicy and has been properly developed in the second half of the 20th century by philosophers of the analytic school. Starting in the 1970s, the application of PW theory to artistic imagination has allowed literary studies to overcome the structural moratorium on questions of reference (Pavel 1986) and created the premises for the modern study of fictional semantics (Ryan 1991, 2013). Adapting the logical-philosophical theory of PW to the aesthetic field allows us to describe literary works as fictional worlds generated by a textual act. In the light of these remarks, the idea that art represents (copies, imitates, describes) reality is no longer viable, since the fictional world does not pre-exist the act of representation: it is a unique world brought into existence by the twofold creative act of the author and the reader (Eco 1984). In this perspective, the setting of a story is not perceived as a simple feature of the text, but as the logical condition for its existence, determining its attributes and its development. Moreover, these new visions of artistic creation and reception have been the ground for new aesthetical experiences, in which the cooperation of the reader/viewer plays a crucial role in structuring the imaginary world and its relations of reference to the actual world: from the obscurities and riddles of symbolist poetry to the ontological uncertainties of postmodern realities, from the experiments of the avant-gardes up to today’s interactive works inspired by video games and virtual reality models (McHale 1987, Bell 2010).
Beyond and apart from cognitive and aesthetic insights into PW theory and its use in understanding the operation and the function of literary representation, we are specifically interested in discussing the cultural and political implications involved in the concept of PW that are hinted at by the three keywords in the subtitle.
‘Environment’ is a key concept which can be meant in – at least – two different senses. On the one hand, it stands for the wide range of possible spatial structures within literary texts (settings, interior/exterior spaces, landscapes, descriptions, architecture, referentiality, non-places etc.), which have recently been punt under scrutiny by several critical approaches (commonly linked to the label of Geocriticism: Westphal 2011). On the other hand, ‘Environment’ represents a political concern which is becoming more and more urgent nowadays, and which is reflected both within recent works dealing with environmental issues on the thematical and ideological level, and within new critical perspectives orienting our readings of literary texts: Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Human-Animal Studies, Posthuman Studies.
‘Community’ hints at the cultural and especially political function of fictional modelling of reality. Communities exist so far as they can be ‘imagined’ and narrated as such (Anderson 1983): traditional communities share a common heritage of significant stories; other are founded or refounded through an act of collective storytelling, which sometimes takes the form of a counternarrative, a retelling and a manipulation of the canonical texts produced by the (former/present) dominant culture from a postcolonial, feminist, queer or posthuman perspective (Newman 1995, Spivak 2006).
Finally, ‘Heterotopia’ reinforces the political connections evoked by ‘Community’, and stresses the creative and critical elements of speculative imagination: scholars of utopia, science fiction and fantasy (Suvin 1987, Jameson 2005) have convincingly discussed the functioning of speculative works as cognitive exercises, which by offering the reader alternatives to her world always compel her to not take her own world and system of values for granted, and to conceive the possibility of alternatives to them. At the same time, writers and critics have also highlighted the dangers of all fanatical idealizations of supposed upcoming or past utopias (or retrotopias, as Zygmunt Bauman has defined them), which may lead to the loss of critical thinking and the surrender to totalitarian ideologies.
We welcome abstracts related but not limited to the areas listed below:
Each paper will be allotted 20 minutes. Please send your proposals, including an abstract (300 words) and a short bio note (150 words, with your name, email address, institutional affiliation, dissertation topic, and disciplinary anchoring), to hermes.siena2023@gmail.com by January 31, 2023.
Emily Baker (University College London), Culture, Inequality and Queer Ecology: Constellations, Tentacles and Cyborgs in Contemporary Speculative Fiction
Maria Boletsi (Leiden University & University of Amsterdam), Weird Futures: The Weird Turn and Future Thinking
Thomas Pavel (University of Chicago), Being in Touch with Fictional Characters
Tiziana De Rogatis (University for Foreigners of Siena), Heterotopia, Trauma and Storyworld in The Handmaid’s Tale
Florian Mussgnug (University College London), The Last Possible World? Anthropocene, Apocalypse, Affect
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen (University of Aarhus), Afrofuturism: Reshaping Imperial Pasts for the Future. On Anachronisms and Transhistorical Dynamics
The doctoral school in “Phylology and Criticism (Filologia e critica)” is a member of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies, a long-standing collaboration of twelve doctoral schools in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, 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 24 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.
The school will take place on the Arezzo Campus of the University of Siena. Accommodation for delegates, speakers and student participants will be provided for five nights (12th June to 17th June 2023). A conference fee of EUR 325.00 per participant will include participation, accommodation, cultural activities, coffee breaks, lunch on five days, and conference dinner. Participants are requested to make their own travel arrangements.
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983
Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation (1981). Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.
Bauman, Zygmunt, Retrotopia, Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
Bell, Alice, The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010.
Doležel, Lubomír, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.
Eco, Umberto, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (1979). Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1984
Jameson, Fredric, Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London-New York: Verso, 2005.
Lavocat, Françoise, Fait et Fiction. Pour une frontière. Paris: Le Seuil, 2016.
McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.
Newman, Judie, The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions. London: Arnold, 1995.
Pavel, Thomas G., Fictional Worlds- Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986
Ronen, Ruth, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994
Ryan, Marie-Laure, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1991
Ryan, Marie-Laure, ‘Possible Worlds’, in P. Hühn, et al. (eds): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg U.; http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/possible-worlds
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, Why Fiction? (1999). Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010.
Semino, Elena, Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. London: Longman, 1997.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987). New York, Routledge, 2006.
Stoichita, Victor, The Pygmalion Effect. Towards a Historical Anthropology of Simulacre. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2006.
Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven (CT)-London, Yale UP, 1979
Walton, Kendall, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990
Wegner, Phillip. Imaginary Communities: Utopia, The Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
Westphal, Bertrand, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2007). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Žižek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.
Scholarly attention surrounding the notion of hospitality was, to a great extent, fueled by political discussions about illegal immigration in France in the 1990s, which gave origin to the seminal works by Jacques Derrida among other significant texts on this subject (Shérer 1993; Fassin 1997; Derrida 1999, 2000, 2001; Rosello 2001). Since then, the word “hospitality” has continued to attract critical attention all over the world, particularly in relation to debates about the legacies of colonialism (Rosello 2001), ideas of cosmopolitanism (Baker 2011), ethics and asylum legislation (Farrier 2011), new approaches to security culture (Clapp and Ridge 2016) and, obviously, in light of social phenomena such as the so-called “Refugee Crisis”.
As Derrida explains (following Benveniste), the latin word hostis suggested two opposite meanings: ‘host’ and ‘enemy’ (as in “hostile”), but as the philosopher notices there is a difference between the foreigner (xenos, étranger, stranger), with whom a pact of hospitality with mutual obligations exists, and the so-called barbarian, who is deprived of name and of rights. In fact, in different historical, political, cultural and geographic contexts, the reactions and relations with the other have varied from acceptance and hospitality, to rejection and exclusion, as the opposition between the ‘Refugees Welcome’ movement and the increasing number of xenophobic attacks directed towards migrants and asylum seekers illustrates; a relation of attraction and rejection that could be linked with the concept of Unheimliche or the “uncanny”, in its multiple manifestation. Types of otherness have also been categorised and classified, determining the form of “hospitality” required or imposed; societies have, therefore, created a myriad of places to receive or accommodate these others according to their specific classifications: hotels, hospitals, hospices, refugee camps, detention centres, etc. Homelessness, on the other hand, represent a specific and extreme state of individual and collective exclusion.
The ethics of hospitality involves not only welcoming the familiar into the home, but calling the home into question. There is, therefore, another element to be considered in this discussion: the gender and sexual differentiation in the roles involved in a relation of hospitality, and in particular the role of the “hostess” (McNulty 2007). The concept of “feminine hospitality”, by describing qualities supposedly innate in women (like maternal love, empathy, or care), should also be brought into discussion, for it often produces a reductive understanding of femininity, supported by a gender ideology that makes woman no more than a welcoming vessel or a synecdoche of home. A new conception of home and homeliness is required, one that not only includes a new role distribution, but which deconstructs and moves beyond them and welcomes non-binary conceptions of hospitality.
It can be argued that the current pandemic Covid-19 has also changed the way in which we conceive some of these spaces, and even our own homes. Unexpectedly, some of us were compelled to imagine or confront images and ideas of ourselves as hostes in the etymological duality: we have all become potential hosts to an uninvited guest (a deadly virus) and, consequently, we have also become potential threats to ourselves and others. Our homes, spaces of domestic comfort and privacy, were subject to rules of sanitation or isolation, and have been – at least temporarily, for some – transformed into extensions of the hospital, while hospitals themselves were, tragically, unable to offer hospitality to some in need of it. Similarly, the current situation of environmental and climate crisis has also put into question our role as hosts (and also enemies) of our own planet, our relation with nature and the biological world, and also the concept of humanity itself, in connection and articulation with the idea of the post-human (Haraway 2016).
In what scholarly and artistic work is concerned, it is also worth mentioning that literature, culture, theory and the arts can be themselves spaces of hospitality where new or other forms, themes and genres can be applied, accepted, mixed or reconfigured. These processes can be considered key factors for the renewal of traditions and canons. In art, and literature in particular, the other is, again following Derrida, ‘that who asks questions’, that who can promote, through their work, processes of “defamiliarization” allowing new perspectives to emerge, fostering new ways to see and imagine the world and allowing for productive hybridizations that give birth to new artistic processes and cultural products. Examples of defamiliarization and hybridisation, can however be rejected by the “official” canons, in the name of nationalistic or defensive conceptualizations of culture. More problematically, forms of defamiliarization and hybridization can also be objects of cultural appropriation.
In this Hermes summer school we aim to revisit notions, ideas and metaphors of (in)hospitality; we hope to explore the way images, ideas and metaphors of (in)hospitality have been approached by literary, cultural, theoretical or artistic texts. We also invite papers that consider the fictions and narratives, the cultural phenomena and artistic experiments associated with the meanings and terms of (in)hospitality, or that examine the place and topoi of homes, hospices and hospitals in literary and other artistic works. We would also like to reflect on how literature and the arts reacted or reflected the increasing sanitization, securitization, and clinicization of our “homely” spaces, exacerbated but not limited to the recent pandemic. Approaches to literature, culture and the arts themselves as spaces of hospitality are also of interest.
We welcome abstracts related but not limited to the areas listed below:
Applying
Each paper will be allotted 20 minutes. Please send your proposals, including an abstract (300 words) and a short bio note (150 words, with your name, email address, institutional affiliation, dissertation topic, and disciplinary anchoring), to hermes.lisbon2022@gmail.com by January 31, 2022.
Keynote Speakers
Inocência Mata (University of Lisbon)
Judith Still (University of Nottingham)
Tracy McNulty (Cornell University)
General Information
The Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon is a member of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies, a long-standing collaboration of twelve doctoral schools in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, 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 24 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.
Practical Information
Accommodation for delegates, speakers and student participants will be provided for five nights (20th June to 25th June 2022). A conference fee of EUR 325.00 per participant will include participation, accommodation, cultural activities, coffee breaks, lunch on four days, and conference dinner. Participants are requested to make their own travel arrangements.
References
Baker, Gideon. Politicising Ethics in International Relations: Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality. London/New York: Routledge, 2011.
Clapp, Jeffrey, and Emily Ridge, eds. Security and hospitality in literature and culture: Modern and contemporary perspectives. London/New York: Routledge, 2016.
Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. 1997. Trans. M. Naas and P.A. Brault. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
____. “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida”, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, eds, Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. London/New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 65–83.
____. Of Hospitality. 1997. Trans. R. Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
____. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. 1997. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. London/New York: Routledge, 2000.
___. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. 1997. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London/New York: Routledge, 2001.
____. “Hostipitality”, in Barry Stocker, ed. translator, Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings. London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 235-264.
Farrier, David. Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011.
Fassin, Didier, Alain Morice, and Catherine Quiminal, eds. Les Lois de l’Inhospitalité: Les Lois politiques de l’immigration à l’épreuve des sans papiers. Paris: La découverte, 1997.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
McNulty, Tracy. The Hostess. Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Shérer, René. Zeus Hospitalier: Éloge de L´hospitalié. Paris: Armand Colin, 1993.
Organising Committee
Catarina Nunes de Almeida
Santiago Pérez Isasi
Susana Araújo
Ben Anderson (Durham University): “Capitalism and Affective Change: A Geohistory of Boredom”.
Introduction by Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza.
Chair: Jennifer Rushworth.
Tim Gupwell (Montpellier) “Space, affect, Memory: D. H. Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico (1927)”.
Kateřina Kovářová (Prague): “The Landscape of Memory: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or The
Evening Redness in the West”.
Anne‐Sophie Bogetoft Mortensen (Roskilde): “Writing and Reclaiming the Shore in Anglocreole
Caribbean Literature”.
Chair: Catarina Nunes de Almeida.
Flavio Paredes Cruz (Montpellier): “Nostalgia for the defeated: images of pre‐Columbian America in
French‐Belgian comics”.
Richard Vargas (Giessen): “The Representation of Spaces of Conflict in Contemporary Graphic Novels.
Case‐study of La Palizúa, Sin Mascar Palabra, and Caminos Condenados”.
Joanne Britland (OSL): “Comedic Performance: Cinematic Responses to the 2008 Social and Financial
Crisis in Spain”.
Chair: Christine Reynier.
Sarah Moxham (UCL): “Excavating the Sky, Ulassai 1981: Community Remapping through Poetic‐
Performative Pedagogy”.
Jonas Prinzleve (Lisbon): “The Coloniality of Urban Narrative Space: City Branding, Cultural Memory
and ‘Affective Mis‐Interpellation’ in Lisbon and Hamburg”.
Angela Princiotto (USC): “Performing Space, Affect and Memory in the diaspora”.
Keynote Lecture 2 (18:30h)
Helena Míguélez‐Carballeira (Bangor University): “Galicia on Netflix: rural spaces and queer
temporalities”. Introduction by César Domínguez.
Chair: Florian Mussgnug.
Asmaa Hassaneen (Aarhus): “Homeland, One Journey, Two Paths. Space and Affect in the Travelling
Memory of Palestine in Two Sagas”.
Miriam Miscoli (Siena): “The vanished motherland. Mnestic topographies in the poetry of Paul Celan”.
Katia Marcellin (Montpellier) “Wandering Traumatised Spaces: Performing Spatial and Temporal
Vulnerabilities in Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs”.
Chair: Karen‐Margrethe Simonsen.
Rebecca Marie Murray (Prague): “Gambling, Capital and Self‐Regulation: Adventure‐Making as Risk‐
Taking in Godwin’s St. Leon (1799)”.
Laura Camino (USC): “Affectivity in History: An Exploration through Medieval Texts”.
Eva Zimmermann (Giessen): “The Influence of Affect on the Positioning of Dramaturgical Work within
Discursive Spaces”.
Chair: Pablo Valdivia.
Ana Romão Alves (Lisbon): “Performing Warfare from Afar: The Gendered Implications of Spatial
Displacement in Good Kill (2014) and Eye in the Sky (2015)”.
Eric Wistrom (Wisconsin‐Madison): “Affect and the Limits of Cultural Performativity in Y.B.’s Allah
superstar”.
Lyu Guangzhao (UCL): “The Heterotopic Enclaves and Capitalist Monster in China Miéville’s ‘New
Weird’ Story ‘Perdido Street Station’”.
Germán Labrador (Princeton University): “Colombuscopies. Migrant geographies of the Hispanic
Atlantic and national memory sites, from 1898 to 2020”. Introduction by Tomás Espino.
Bringing together the notions of space, affect, and memory results in an appealing intersection in the field of literary and cultural studies, as each one of them can act as an axis for setting in motion a reorientation of cultural studies, and even of social sciences (because of their strong impact on what have been called the spatial turn, the memory turn, and the affect turn). These things, we are aware, are not new. However, we believe that the interaction between these three notions opens a path for new, complex analyses of the events taking place in the context of the contemporary revival of humanities.
What’s more, this brings about new, exciting research prospects for literary studies, as well as for cinematic, artistic or visual studies. The connections between memory and space (or place) are rooted in a well-known theoretical and methodological tradition that includes classical authors as Halbwachs, Benjamin, Poulet, Nora, Assmann, and Shama. Many of them, indeed, gave an important role to the category of affect in their theories, as is the case with Poulet, who reinforced it with the notion of affective memory that he developed in his work L’espace proustien. Still, it was not until recently that affect gained a more firm, established position in cultural and literary studies, especially in spatial studies. The influence of psychogeography and, at a different level, of nonrepresentational geography has been a determining factor in this respect.
We want Hermes Summer School 2020 to set up a framework for exploring these interconnections. That is why we will certainly welcome proposals offering original theoretical analyses on the matter, but we also encourage applicants to submit case studies on artistic, visual and literary works that approach these relations aesthetically, not only in theory but also in practice.
We consider the tension between practices relying on representation and those based on performativity to be especially relevant, since it constitutes one of main the turning points that currently affect the ongoing debates on gender studies, ecocriticism, memory studies, and poetry and drama studies. Applicants are free to focus on any of the suggested notions –affect, space, or memory– but we strongly encourage participants to explore the intersections between them, knowing that the spatial dimension can be used as a rallying point for structuring proposals.
Each paper will be allotted 20 minutes. In addition to presenting their own research,speakers are strongly encouraged to reflect on the concepts they employ in their analyses. Please send your proposals including an abstract (200 words) and a short bionote (150 words, with your name, email address, institutional affiliation, dissertation topic, and disciplinary anchoring) to hermes.2020.compostela@gmail.com by January 31, 2019. We welcome abstracts related but not limited to the topics listed below:
Theories of affect, memory and place
Affect and memory as space connectors in fiction
Affective performances of local and global spaces
Ecocriticism and affect theory
Haunted spaces in literary, cinematic, artistic or visual representations.
Emotional and/or mnemonic communities and the sense of place
Gendered and/or queer places of affect and memory
Affect and memory: the predicament of representation
Historical perspectives on affect, space and memory in literature and visual arts.
Walking as performance
Ben Anderson, Department of Geography, Durham University.
Germán Labrador, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University.
Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, School of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, Bangor University.
Iván Villarmea Álvarez, Department of Art History (Film Studies), University of Santiago de Compostela.
The University of Santiago de Compostela is a 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, France, 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 a selected number of PhD students. 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.
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:
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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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.
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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
In the symposium in Leuven we would like to explore the influence of the ever-transforming media landscape on literary genres. How do media affect and change literary genres? Which new literary genres emerge under the influence of other media? And what is the influence of transmediality and convergence culture on comparative literary studies?
Another set of questions relates to genre as a classification instrument in both literature and other media. Do accepted terms like drama, comedy… but also autofiction mean the same thing in different media e.g., literature or television? This question can be explored from a diachronic or a synchronic perspective: how do genres change under the influences of developments in media culture (e.g., the invention of print, film, television and internet)? How do specific genres (e.g. thriller, western, detective…) relate to or differ from each other in various media (film, literature, TV)? What about remediation: how do new media affect existing genres in ‘older’ media and vice versa?
A third line of questioning is a set of specific concepts in recent critical discourse that are related to but that also transcend genre. More specifically, we are thinking about the notion of seriality that re-emerges in contemporary literature, maybe under the influence of television series, and raises questions about older forms of seriality. A second theme is the blurring of reality and fiction in a transmedial context: how does it differ from older forms of such blurring boundaries in literature, for instance in the context of postmodernism?
We welcome papers from various disciplines and literatures but strongly encourage papers that have a distinct comparative literary approach and embrace interdisciplinarity.
Fee: 300 € per student (covers hostel, lunch, conference dinner and coffee breaks).
Organisation: Anneleen Masschelein, Heidi Peeters and Gert-Jan Meyntjens
Please send you proposal (500 words) before February 26, 2016 to
Heidi.Peeters@arts.kuleuven.be
Alber, Jan and Hansen Per Krogh (eds.). Beyond Classical Narration: Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges (Narratologia). 2014.
Bolter, David Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Understanding New Media. 2000.
Collins, Jim. Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. 2010.
Flusser, Vilém. "The Future of Writing." 2004.
Genette, Gérard. Introduction à L'Architexte. 1979.
Gripsrud, Jostein. Understanding Media Culture. 2002.
Hutchheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2006.
A Poetics of Postmodernism. 1988.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. 2006.
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. 1999.
Letourneux, Matthieu. "Serializing Imports and Importing Series: France and Foreign Mass-Produced Fiction." 2014.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. 1964.
Mittell, Jason. Complex TV. 2015.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. 2004.
Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. 1992.
Ryan, Marie-Laure and Marina Grishakova (eds.). Intermediality and Storytelling (Narratologia). 2010.
In the past decades, the interest in the textuality, contexts, readership, historicity or materiality of literary production has overshadowed an important area of literary studies focused on the author, authorship and authority. The present time, marked by the predominance of cultural studies and profound changes effected by the new media, their interactive nature and their impact on our understanding of authenticity, originality and intellectual property, invites us to reconsider the status, meaning and potentialities of author-oriented approaches.
Starting from the Prague Structuralism discussions of authorship in terms of intentionality and “semantic gesture,” Wayne Booth’s “implied author,” E.D. Hirsch’s hermeneutics and Michel Foucault’s concept of a historically developing, discursive “author-function,” the author-oriented approaches can be discussed in view of a number of thematic areas and from various conceptual perspectives, for instance:
Papers confronting the approaches based on the notions of intention, literariness, identity, gender, posture, etc., with the reconfiguration of authorship in the age of the new media are especially welcome.
2014 Reading Reconsidered: History, Practices, Materialities, Affects (Helsinki)
2013 New Worlds, New Literatures, New Critiques Hermes Consortium Seminar at the University of Wisconsin (Madison)
2012 Impact and Intervention: The Relevance of Literature in a Changing World (Amsterdam)
2011 Fear and Fantasy in a Global World (Cascais)
2010 Travelling Concepts, Metaphors, and Narratives:Literary and Cultural Studies in an Age of Interdisciplinary Research (Giessen)
2008 Comparative Literature: Models for Interdisciplinarity in the Humanities? (London)
2007 World Literature and World Culture (Aarhus)
2006 Re-Thinking Europe - Literatures and Literary Histories as Media of (Trans)National Identities and Collective Memories (Leuven)
2005 Portraits and Stories of the Self (Cascais / Lisbon)
2004 Literature and Memory. Representations, Functions, Intersections (Giessen)
2003 Literature and Emotion: Text, Ideology, and Conflict (Utrecht)
Seminars prior to the formation of the Hermes network:
2002 Genre and Identity (London)
2001 Narrative, Literature, Media. Integration and Disintegretion in the Era of Glabalization (Aarhus)
2000 European Literature(s), World Literature(s), and Globalization (Leiden)
1999 Reading Text, Constructing Theory, Thinking Ethics (London)
1998 Aims and Methods in Literary Studies (Leiden)
