Cfp: "Literature as Communication," Philosophy of Communication Section, European Communication Research and Education Association, Abo Akademi University, Finland, September 2-3, 2011.

Not only among literary theoreticians and critics, but also among students of rhetoric, communication and media, stylisticians, discourse and dialogue analysts, historians of the book, and social and cultural philosophers and historians, there is a growing tendency to see literary activity as one among other forms of human communication. The Symposium will provide a forum in which to assess both the broader and more detailed implications of this trend for our understanding of literature’s place within the lives of individuals and communities.

The Symposium will assume a nominalistic and broad definition of literature. Literature, that is to say, will be viewed as consisting of all those texts which, either now or in the past, have been referred to as literary, and as not necessarily restricted to merely poems, plays and novels.

Papers on the following kinds of topic will be especially welcome:

• Literary-communicational insights in current work within any of the disciplines mentioned above: new paradigms;
• Literary communication as community-making;
• Literary communication as philosophical reflection;
• Literary-communicational ethics; for instance, the relevance of Keats’s remark that “we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”;
• The communicational workings of implied writers and implied readers;
• Communicational similarities and contrasts between singly, collectively and anonymously authored texts;
• Manuscript culture, book culture, digital culture: the consequences for literary communication;
• The politeness (or otherwise) of literary writers;
• The communicational dimensions of literary styles and / or genres.

Proposals (max. 300 words) for papers should be submitted as e-mail attachments to the Conference Secretary, Gunilla Ritkaew (gunilla.ritkaew@abo.fi), before March 31st, 2011.