"LIT CRI '12," Fine Arts University of Mimar Sinan, Istanbul, May 2-5, 2012.

LIT CRI 2012 intends raising questions on new dimensions of literature, literary theory and literary criticism in the new millennium.

Themes

Re-reading 20th century

Roots of contemporary literature

Creative heritage of 20th century
Texts preserving actuality in different places of the world
Recent date masterpieces
Historical and geographical interactions

Actual Tendencies

Budding genius authors in different places of the world
Re-discovered ones
Newly emerged themes, forms, styles
Experimental works
Reflections of politic and social life to literature

Discussions

Relations between literatures of countries/languages

The problem of centrality and locality
Literature criticism in recent period
Literature history
Literature theory
Translation discussions

Relation of literature with other close disciplines

New media, technology and daily life

Cities and culture
Literature and politics
Literature and philosophy
Literature and sociology

Logistics of literature

Activities, fests, fairs

Rewards, institutes, funds
Creative writing education
Magazines, publishers, web-portalS

http://www.litcriconference.org/

Epstein, Joseph. "What Killed American Lit." WALL STREET JOURNAL August 27, 2011.

The Editors of The Cambridge History of the American Novel decided to consider their subject—as history is considered increasingly in universities these days—from the bottom up. In 71 chapters, the book's contributors consider the traditional novel in its many sub-forms, among them: science fiction, eco-fiction, crime and mystery novels, Jewish novels, Asian-American novels, African-American novels, war novels, postmodern novels, feminist novels, suburban novels, children's novels, non-fiction novels, graphic novels and novels of disability ("We cannot truly know a culture until we ask its disabled citizens to describe, analyze, and interpret it," write the authors of a chapter titled "Disability and the American Novel"). Other chapters are about subjects played out in novels—for instance, ethnic and immigrant themes—and still others about publishers, book clubs, discussion groups and a good deal else. "The Cambridge History of the Novel," in short, provides full-court-press coverage.

"In short," though, is perhaps the least apt phase for a tome that runs to 1,244 pages and requires a forklift to hoist onto one's lap. All that the book's editors left out is why it is important or even pleasurable to read novels and how it is that some novels turn out to be vastly better than others. But, then, this is a work of literary history, not of literary criticism. Randall Jarrell's working definition of the novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it" has, in this voluminous work, been ruled out of bounds.

Most readers are unlikely to have heard of the contributors to "The Cambridge History of the American Novel," the majority teachers in English departments in American universities. I myself, who taught in a such a department for three decades, recognized the names of only four among them. Only 40 or 50 years ago, English departments attracted men and women who wrote books of general intellectual interest and had names known outside the academy—Perry Miller, Aileen Ward, Walter Jackson Bate, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Joseph Wood Krutch, Lionel Trilling, one could name a dozen or so others—but no longer. Literature, as taught in the current-day university, is strictly an intramural game.

This may come as news to the contributors to The Cambridge History of the American Novel, who pride themselves on possessing much wider, much more relevant, interests and a deeper engagement with the world than their predecessors among literary academics. Biographical notes on contributors speak of their concern with "forms of moral personhood in the US novels," "the poetics of foreign policy," and "ecocriticism and theories of modernization, postmodernization, and globalization."

Yet, through the magic of dull and faulty prose, the contributors to The Cambridge History of the American Novel have been able to make these presumably worldly subjects seem parochial in the extreme—of concern only to one another, which is certainly one derogatory definition of the academic. These scholars may teach English, but they do not always write it, at least not quite. A novelist, we are told, "tasks himself" with this or that; things tend to get "problematized"; the adjectives "global" and "post"-this-or-that receive a good workout; "alterity" and "intertexuality" pop up their homely heads; the "poetics of ineffability" come into play; and "agency" is used in ways one hadn't hitherto noticed, so that "readers in groups demonstrate agency." About the term "non-heteronormativity" let us not speak.

These dopey words and others like them are inserted into stiffly mechanical sentences of dubious meaning. "Attention to the performativity of straight sex characterizes . . . The Great Gatsby (1925), where Nick Carraway's homoerotic obsession with the theatrical Gatsby offers a more authentic passion precisely through flamboyant display." Betcha didn't know that Nick Carraway was hot for Jay Gatsby? We sleep tonight; contemporary literary scholarship stands guard.

The Cambridge History of the American Novel is perhaps best read as a sign of what has happened to English studies in recent decades. Along with American Studies programs, which are often their subsidiaries, English departments have tended to become intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die. If one is still looking for that living relic, the fully subscribed Marxist, one is today less likely to find him in an Economics or History Department than in an English Department, where he will still be taken seriously. He finds a home there because English departments are less concerned with the consideration of literature per se than with what novels, poems, plays and essays—after being properly X-rayed, frisked, padded down, like so many suspicious-looking air travelers—might yield on the subjects of race, class and gender. "How would [this volume] be organized," one of its contributors asks, "if race, gender, disability, and sexuality were not available?" . . . .

A stranger, freshly arrived from another planet, if offered as his introduction to the United States only this book, would come away with a picture of a country founded on violence and expropriation, stoked through its history by every kind of prejudice and class domination, and populated chiefly by one or another kind of victim, with time out only for the mental sloth and apathy brought on by life lived in the suburbs and the characterless glut of American late capitalism. The automatic leftism behind this picture is also part of the reigning ethos of the current-day English Department.

As a former English major—"Indeed! What regiment?" asks a character in a Lionel Trilling story—I cannot help wondering what it must be like to be taught by the vast majority of the people who have contributed to "The Cambridge History of the American Novel." Two or three times a week one would sit in a room and be told that nothing that one has read is as it appears but is instead informed by authors hiding their true motives even from themselves or, in the best "context-centered" manner, that the books under study are the product of a country built on fundamental dishonesty about the sacred subjects of race, gender and class.

Some indication of what it must be like is indicated by the steep decline of American undergraduates who choose to concentrate in English. English majors once comprised 7.6% of undergraduates, but today the number has been nearly halved, down to 3.9%. . . .

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576468011530847064.html

Herring, Scott. "Literature Brings the Physical Past to Life." CHRONICLE August 20, 2011.

Recently, literary theorists have been making another of their occasional efforts to restore a trace of earthly reality to criticism. This time those efforts have taken the form of Darwinian literary studies, which attempt to relate the universal impulse to tell stories to human nature, as shaped by evolution.

My guess is that those theorists are motivated partly by a desperate realization that, in the process of deconstructing the profession, we in the literature business have shot ourselves not in the foot, but in the head. At a time of contracting education budgets, the public is no longer willing to pay for courses titled "Bat[woman] and Cat[man]: Queering the Canonical Comix."

If nothing else, people may appreciate the application of scientific thinking to a field that has known little of it. Americans admire practicality, and our profession has become esoteric and politicized. Today's literary scholarship too often serves as a vehicle for politics, and even professors who care little for public opinion are eager to indoctrinate students in their views. We seem to have given up on the notion that literature itself can be useful. But in doing so, we are forgetting a crucial function of the books we study.

History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By reclaiming this use of literature in the classroom, perhaps we can move away from the political agitation that has been our bread and butter—or porridge and hardtack—for the last 30 years.

Besides literary Darwinism, I suggest another way that scholars can ground their studies in reality: Start with a piece of the physical world. . . .

http://chronicle.com/article/Literature-Brings-the-Physical/128706/

Kundert, Matt. "What is Literary Theory?" MATT KUNDERT'S PIRSIG AFFLICTION June 7, 2011.

The underlying intuition to first condition this question is that what is picked out by the word “philosophy” is basically the same as what is picked out by 'theory.'  'Theory' is whatever part of a discipline that reflects on the tools that discipline deploys to do its work. Thus, for example, 'theory' is what is being done when a sociologist reflects on what is picked out by 'society' or 'group' or an anthropologist on 'culture' or 'ritual.' Almost every discipline these days has its own theory department, and no longer farms out the work to philosophy. (This didn’t used to be the case.) This has been a problem for philosophy, insofar as it has been harder for it to justify itself, but just insofar as it’s a problem for philosophy, it is—often covertly to those independent disciplines asking philosophy to justify itself—also a problem for the disciplinary theory-heads. The reason for this is that the experience of philosophy for 2500 years has been with abstract concepts and their relationships to each other. It has dabbled in concrete stuff from time to time, but every time it gets on a roll, the group of people in charge of the inquiry become full of themselves and secede from the union (a typical origins-story about disciplines from philosophy’s point of view). Without a doubt, every discipline has its own special problems that it needs its own special tools for, and for the most part it is best that a discipline make and improve its own tools (though outright stealing works, too). However, when it comes to seeing the relationship between those special tools and the special tools that other people are using, no one has any special province. The closest you can get is philosophy—that group of people with 2500 years of experience dealing with that kind of thing.

If you start with this understanding of 'philosophy' and 'theory,' the relationship between literary criticism and literary theory becomes a little clearer. It’s really the relationship between practical criticism of literary texts and theoretical reflection on the tools you use in those practical contexts. When you read Hawthorne through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis or Melville through the lens of Derridean deconstruction, you’re doing practical criticism when the primary goal of your train of thought is reading Hawthorne or Melville. If you’re trying to make a comment on psychoanalytic theory or deconstruction using whatever insight you may have pulled from reading Hawthorne or Melville, the comment itself is theory and besides the point of reading Hawthorne or Melville. Getting the theory right is a different context than using it to read other texts. It’s important to understand this. In the act of writing, one can attempt to do many things. But to know you’re doing many things, or to just do one thing and not those other things, one needs to see how to differentiate between different activities. And in the terms I’ve laid out, 'getting theory right' means doing philosophy, which means attending to the problems generated in a different disciplinary sector than that of getting the literary text right. . . .

Visit: http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-is-literary-theory.html.

Seminar Series on the Philosophy of Literature, Royal Holloway College, University of London, February-March, 2011.

During the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, the characteristics of the philosophical approach to literature have undergone some important changes. Alongside the continuation of the traditions of Continental thought, representatively symbolized by the work of Badiou and Rancière, can be detected a move back to elements that were challenged 40 years ago by the generation of Barthes, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. The death of the author is now being countered by the notion of the author as intentional subject; the disconnection between life and art-work is giving way to a new interest in biography; the notion of the self-contained work of art, or of art-as-textuality, is being displaced in favour of a view of literary language as a hard-wired element of human cognition. From Marion’s version of phenomenology to Currie’s Arts and Minds, the philosophy that might underlie literature is being re-appraised.

Session 1 (23 February 2011) : The Intentional Subject
Session 2 (16 March 2011): (T)exteriors
Session 3 (23 March 2011): The Intentional Act

Visit: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/03/the-philosophy-of-literature/.

Cfp: "Literature as Communication," Philosophy of Communication Section, European Communication Research and Education Association and the Literary Communication Project, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, 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

Visit: http://web.abo.fi/fak/hf/enge/ECREA/Papers.html.

Death: Frank Kermode (1919 - 2010).

Flood, Alison: Celebrated Critic Frank Kermode Dies Aged 90 Guardian August 18, 2010:

Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held "virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles", according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and professor of poetry at Harvard, along with honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was knighted in 1991, the first literary critic to be so honoured since William Empson.

A renowned Shakespearean, publishing Shakespeare's Language in 2001, Kermode's books range from works on Spenser and Donne and the memoir Not Entitled to last year's Concerning E. M. Forster.

His publisher, Alan Samson, at Weidenfeld & Nicolson said Kermode would probably be most remembered for The Sense of An Ending, his collection of lectures on the relationship of fiction to concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis, first published in 1967, as well as for Romantic Image, a study of the Romantic movement up until WB Yeats. . . .

He fundamentally changed the study of English literature in the 1960s by introducing French theory by post-structuralists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and post-Freudians such as Jacques Lacan, into what Sutherland described as "the torpid bloodstream of British academic discourse". Speaking to Sutherland in 2006, Kermode admitted that the move had "attracted quite a lot of opprobrium".

Although he later moved away from theory, he told Sutherland that the time considering it was not wasted. "One of the great benefits of seriously reading English is you're forced to read a lot of other things," he said. "You may not have a very deep acquaintance with Hegel but you need to know something about Hegel. Or Hobbes, or Aristotle, or Roland Barthes. We're all smatterers in a way, I suppose. But a certain amount of civilisation depends on intelligent smattering." . . .

Mullan, John: Sir Frank Kermode Obituary Guardian August 18, 2010:

When Frank Kermode's elegant, melancholy, often very funny autobiography, Not Entitled, was published in 1995, many reviewers commented on the irony of its title and its tone. Its author was an academic who had gained every honour in his field, who had occupied several of the most illustrious chairs of English literature and, rarest of achievements for a literary critic, even been knighted. Yet Kermode, who has died aged 90, presented himself in his memoir as a slightly bemused outsider, unworthy of most of his successes, drifting into appointments and undertakings, guided mostly by accident.

This self-image, however artful, was true to the man, and the ironic, self-deprecating voice of Not Entitled was his voice. What he called there his "permanent condition of mild alienation" was temperamental – a distance from things that made him, in person, a wry observer of academic follies. The separateness was also, as he saw it, something to do with his upbringing. . . .

Sir Frank Kermode Telegraph August 18, 2010:

Sir Frank Kermode, who died on August 17 aged 90, was the most eminent critic of English literature since FR Leavis; his teaching career culminated in the senior English professorship at Cambridge University, a post he surrendered in 1982 in the aftermath of a widely reported doctrinal rift within the faculty. . . .

The Sense of an Ending gave notice of Kermode's increasing tolerance of modern literary criticism and of its interest less in the content of a work than in its form and structure. From 1967 to 1974 he taught at University College, London, a period that witnessed the birth of new literary theories, notably structuralism and deconstruction. These held that readers should no longer study a text with a view to discerning an objective meaning, since in the modern world texts might have an infinite number of equally valid meanings, each of equal cultural weight, each peculiar to the reader.

Although Kermode was later capable of castigating the gibberish written by many proponents of these ideas, he was always open-minded, and in the late 1960s was an important supporter of the further investigation of these new theories. In a celebrated coup, he arranged for the structuralist Roland Barthes to lecture at UCL. . . .

When he was offered the Regius Professorship in 1974, he hesitated to accept, as he was happy in London and had been warned about the atmosphere at Cambridge. Once there, he found a badly-organised faculty which was ill-disposed to change. Kermode later said that the happiest of his eight years at Cambridge was the one he spent as a visiting professor at Harvard.

The row that brought about his resignation in 1982 was presented in the press as a conflict in teaching methods between the traditionalists and the modernists, among whose ranks was Kermode. In reality, the dispute revolved around a junior lecturer, the structuralist Colin MacCabe, whose promotion the traditionalists had tried to block. Kermode's support was not so much for a dogma as for a talented colleague he thought had been unjustly treated; but his arguments did not carry the day. Shortly afterwards he resigned his post and fled Cambridge for a post in New York. . . .

See also:

• Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher: Frank Kermode, a Critic who Wrote with Style, is Dead at 90 New York Times August 18, 2010
• Shapiro, T. Rees: British Literary Critic Frank Kermode Dies at Age 90 Washington Post August 19, 2010.

Di Leo, Jeffrey R. "In Praise of Tough Criticism." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION June 13, 2010.

Professor Jones is well known for her generosity. She encourages nonconfrontational exchanges of ideas and is always upbeat and positive about her colleagues and their work. She is patient with her graduate students, encouraging them to be patient with one another as well. When a student makes a comment in class that is weak or off base, unlike some other faculty members in her department, Jones will not make a fuss. When the appropriate opportunity presents itself, she will try to work with the student to improve his or her thinking. Jones's critical credo is, "If you don't have something positive to say, then it is best not to say anything at all—at least not in public."

Her colleague Professor Smith is quite the opposite. He has built a successful career by telling people that they are wrong. The goal of criticism, he believes, is to persuade other people to see the world his way, and if they don't, then he will do everything he can to prove to them—and anyone else who will listen—that they are wrong. Criticism is a competition of ideas, a nasty business in which it is acceptable and sometimes necessary to be a brute. Strong ideas survive, weak ones perish; there is no room for wishy-washy opinions and people. Smith's assessments are harsh but well argued and persuasive. His critical credo is, "Public criticism is as valid as public praise."

Most of us probably know someone like Jones. Others have either heard of someone like Smith—or have been attacked by someone like Smith. The bulk of literary scholars and critics, I think, believe that our profession would be better off if it contained more people like Jones and fewer people like Smith—more compassion, less confrontation. The critic Jane Tompkins has bemoaned scholarly attacks as evidence of a "decline of civility," and Herbert S. Lindenberger, a professor emeritus of humanities at Stanford University, has lamented the "warlike atmosphere" of English studies.

Such comments are indicative of a broad dissatisfaction with harsh criticism, which is frowned upon both because of its potential for emotional disruption and for its alleged divisiveness. Therefore critics like Jones, who believe that solidarity is not possible in a climate where ideas are publicly dismantled, call for the adoption of a more civil form of criticism. But when it comes to criticism, is compassion really preferable to combativeness? Does an upbeat style actually encourage positive tendencies in the profession? Is compassion an intellectual virtue? The answer to those questions is no. If a compassionate, caring form of criticism entails removing the "critical" from "critical exchange," then I would rather see the field move toward a more combative, confrontational style—even if it means ruffling a few feathers. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Tough-Criticism/65831.

"Literary Theorists of Late Renaissance Italy," University of Agder, Norway, July 4-5, 2009.

The Kristiansand Renaissance seminar is a research forum for specialists in the Early Modern period in the Nordic countries and beyond. It is part of the activities of the research programme in Early Modern Urban Culture at University of Agder, Kristiansand, which focuses on relations between literary arts and urbanism in Renaissance Europe. The summer 2009 seminar concerns literary theorists of the late Renaissance. The seminar features papers on Castelvetro, Varchi, Fracastoro, Robortello, Tasso and Gaurini. Speakers include: Morten Bartnfs, University of Agder / University of Tromsx Clare Guest, University of Agder Claudia Rossignoli, University of St Andrews Stefano Rota, Swedish Institute in Rome / Libera Universita Maria Santissima Assunta, Rome Matthew Treherne, Univeristy of Leeds.

For further details, contact clare.e.guest@uia.no.

(From Renaissance Lit Blog: http://earlymodern-lit.blogspot.com/)