Cfp: Harrison, Christine, and Angeliki Spiropoulou, eds. HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. SYNTHESIS 5 (2012).

Deadlines:

1 December 2010 submission of abstracts
1 February 2011 notification of acceptance
1 October 2011 submission of articles

The ‘turn to history’, witnessed in both literary studies and literature since the 1980s, has ensued in part from new developments in the theory of history itself, which have stressed the relevance of literature for history and the affinity of historiography with fictional narration, long suppressed by historiography’s traditional empirical status and positivist claim to truth (c.f. the groundbreaking work of Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur, as well as that of Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt and Dominick LaCapra, for example). The turn to history has, inversely, also derived from an acknowledgement of the need to take into account the historicity of the historiographical, literary and critical acts. Fredric Jameson, for example, contributed to the elaboration of a sophisticated notion of historicity in the field of literary studies in the early 80s, and at much the same time there also appeared ‘new historicist’ and ‘cultural materialist’ trends, inspired by diverse history-based theoretical paradigms.

Simultaneously, and related to the above developments, there has emerged a trend within literature itself of evoking historical epochs, personages and texts of the past, culminating in what Linda Hutcheon has called with reference to fiction ‘historiographical metafiction’, namely a set of texts which exhibits a concern with the historical past and with issues of historiography while retaining an acute language consciousness and a leaning to formal experimentation. Even more recently, over the past decade, both historicist models of criticism and established theorizations of new historical literature have been challenged for some of their presumptions. However, historical literature, and especially fiction, continues to dominate the literary production of the twenty-first century in forms and for reasons that need exploring as they may point to yet newer directions in both literature and the conceptualization of the relationship between history and literature.

We invite contributions that engage with the modes in which contemporary fiction, poetry and drama address, employ and revise history and historiographical practices, and/or discuss new critical trends and theoretical approaches to literature and history. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:
• New trends and subjects of historiographical representation in contemporary poetry, fiction, drama (e.g., gender and topographical approaches; interrogations of particular historical periods, methodologies and mythologies; challenges to divides between the literary/popular and private/public; contemporary historical literature and realism, modernism, postmodernism)
• Revisions of literary history, the literary canon and traditional literary genres (e.g., the historical novel, historical drama, gothic romance)
• New directions in historical literature and critical approaches since 2000
• National/regional contemporary historical literature
• Re-writings of colonial history and the history of the European periphery (Balkan, Mediterranean) through literature
• Memory, auto/biography, visual material and contemporary literature
• Historical fantasies and utopias of the future
• The past-present dialogue in contemporary theory and literature
• New challenges to recent historicist models and critical taxonomies of contemporary historical literature

Detailed proposals (800-1,000 words) for articles of 6,000- 7,000 words, a short bio (up to 300 words) as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both guest editors: Christine Harrison at and Angeliki Spiropoulou.

For their details please contact:

Mata Dimakopoulou
Faculty of English Studies
University of Athens, Greece
Email: sdimakop@enl.uoa.gr.

"Language, Truth, and Literature," Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool, June 7, 2010.

A one day workshop addressing the cognitive value of literature

• Mark Rowe 11 a.m. 'Poetry, Philosophy and the Language of Power'
• Richard Gaskin 2 p.m. 'The Cognitive Value of Literature'
• Peter Lamarque 4 p.m. 'A defence of the "no truth" theory of literature against recent attacks'

The humanistic tradition in literature may be encapsulated in two claims, one about truth and the other about knowledge. Samuel Johnson said that ‘the value of every story depends on its being true. A story is a picture either of an individual or of human nature in general; if it be false, it is a picture of nothing’. And Dylan Thomas remarked that ‘A good poem . . . helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him’. For centuries these claims passed as the merest common sense, but in recent decades they have come under increasing attack, not only from outside the tradition of analytic philosophy, but also by practitioners of that style of thinking. Deconstructionists, as is familiar, have long challenged the presupposition of humanism that literary texts have a stable and determinate meaning; but more recently a number of analytic or analytically inclined philosophers have argued that, although texts do have such meaning, and although they have value, perhaps even value of a broadly cognitive sort, they do not propound or express true (or false) propositions, and so do not serve as a means of transmitting propositional knowledge to the reader. The issue concerns not so much concise, individual aperçus that, as everyone acknowledges, works of literature may contain—passing observations or bits of advice that hit the nail on the head—but rather the meaning of a work of literature taken as a whole (or a significant part thereof). Is the humanist right in maintaining that these larger stretches of literary discourse can in some way contain, or embody, truths that a reader with a suitable background can come, by engaging appropriately with the text, to know? That is the topic of this one-day workshop. Peter Lamarque, who has written a number of important books and articles in this area, will be one of the speakers: Lamarque’s published position is broadly sympathetic to some form of cognitivism, but hostile to propositionalism about literary value. Mark Rowe and Richard Gaskin, the other two speakers, have published work that is more favourable (but in different ways) to the letter of humanism, as explicated above. Visit the conference webpage here: http://www.liv.ac.uk/philosophy/events/conferences/language_truth_and_literature/index.htm.

Cfp: "Realisms in Contemporary Culture: Theories, Politics and Medial Configurations," FRIAS, Freiburg University, September 23-25, 2010.

In the context of structuralist and poststructuralist theory, realism, with its implication of a transparent representation of reality, was deemed at best out-moded and at worst ideologically insidious. Recent years, however, have seen a revival of the term in analyses of contemporary developments in literature and film, at times even as a yardstick for measuring the quality of individual works. A closer look shows that in critical debates widely differing concepts of realism are used, often connected with explicit or implicit ideological positions. The question of what may be understood by realism is thus still very much open to debate and, what is more, highly charged.

The aim of this conference is, firstly, to chart the territory of the usages of the term ‘realism’ in contemporary theory. Secondly, we want to discuss the validity and usefulness of the ‘realisms’ posited for describing and analyzing trends in contemporary literature and film. How does the debate on realism tie in with the ongoing controversies regarding the connections between ethics or politics and form? In what ways do ‘realist’ contemporary works relate to socio-cultural developments? In order to foster an interdisciplinary discussion, we invite papers from a range of different disciplines (e.g. literary studies, media and digital studies, art history) on topics such as Concepts of realism in contemporary critical debate Formal realism and reception aesthetics Medial developments and realism Transmedial comparison of the ‘reality effect’ Case studies of realism in contemporary culture Ethics / Politics and realism … Contributors are strongly encouraged to make explicit their own usage of ‘realism’ by reflecting on the question of what they see as realism and how they would distinguish it from other modes of representation. Application Please send your one-page abstract for a 30-minute presentation to dorothee.birke@frias.uni-freiburg.de. Submission deadline is 31st January 2010. Organizing Institution The Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) is the University of Freiburg’s international research college. It was established after Freiburg’s success in the Federal Excellence Initiative in October 2007. As a centre-piece of the Albert-Ludwigs-University’s institutional strategy, FRIAS pursues three main objectives: to promote top level research, to develop new interdisciplinary areas of competence and knowledge, and to foster the advancement of outstanding junior scholars. Contact For further information, please contact Dr. Stella Butter (sbutter@rumms.uni-mannheim.de) or Dr. Dorothee Birke (dorothee.birke@frias.uni-freiburg.de).

Speight, Allen. Review of John Gibson, et al., eds. A SENSE OF THE WORLD. NDPR (January 2009).

Gibson, John, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci, eds. A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2007. Much has been written about the "ancient quarrel" between philosophy and poetry – as has, by extension, the broader "quarrel" between philosophy and literature. Neither is, of course, in any sense a single-issue quarrel: from Plato alone stem epistemological and ontological debates about the status of images and the activity of mimēsis, ethical and political concerns over the emotional appeal of particular literary genres, as well as theological and philosophical arguments about the nature of good, evil and the gods as represented by literary works. The editors of this welcome volume have taken as their particular focus the question of literature's cognitive potential: whether and in what sense there is knowledge to be gained from our encounter with works of literary fiction. Stated in these terms, as Noël Carroll acknowledges in the second of this volume's essays, the question may strike non-philosophers as having an entirely obvious answer: of course we learn from literature, of course novelists, dramatists and poets expand our understanding of ourselves and the world. But there are many ways of expressing that immediate conviction about literature's cognitive potential that have given pause to philosophers -- both those who would be delighted to have poetry and literary artists in their city and those who wouldn't. Is there, for example, something which deserves to be called artistic truth? Is the knowledge involved propositional knowledge or not? And, if there is knowledge or truth of some sort "in" literary works, does it result from essential features of those works and is it the product of the intentional aims of their authors? The editors have wisely avoided an overly narrow construal of the cognitive issues that literature raises: in the widest sense, as John Gibson puts it in the volume's introduction, the concern is with "the relationship between life and literature itself" or "the worldly interest we take in the literary work of art." The twenty-two essays in the volume (only three of which appear to have been published previously) do have a wide and healthy variety of perspectives on how literature confronts, creates or appropriates the world. The volume's four-part organizational structure -- "Knowledge through Literary Fiction," "Narrating Worlds and Selves," "The Poetic, the Dramatic and the Real," and "Imagination, Objectivity and Culture" -- allows for some of the related issues involved here to be grouped together, but there is actually a much deeper cross-connection among many of the essays than this structure may first make apparent. Many of the essays address in some way, for example, the issue of fictionality and truth, in particular what has been called the "paradox of fiction": how can we respond (emotionally, intelligently) to literary characters and situations if what we are encountering are simply objects of make-believe? . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15125.

Dickstein, Morris. "Fiction and Political Fact." BOOKFORUM.COM (June-August 2008).

The political novel has always been an odd hybrid of fact and fiction. One of the genre’s originators, Benjamin Disraeli, the author of Coningsby (1844), was also one of the few writers who had genuine inside knowledge of the political world. But political novels usually deal with more than the intrigues of cabinet ministers and young men on the make. The boundaries of this genre are very hard to delimit. For some critics, the political novel is precisely the kind of book Disraeli, Trollope, and Henry Adams passed on to a few modern writers like Gore Vidal in Washington, D.C., Burr, Lincoln, and 1876: a novel focused, often satirically, sometimes historically, on the machinations of the political class—the men, usually men, with their hands on the levers of power. At the other extreme, postmodern theorists like Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981) insist that the genre has no meaning, since “everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political.” To suggest that some works are political while others are not, Jameson says, is “a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life.” . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_02/2458.

"Littérature et Vérité," Département de Philosophie, Université de Genève, 14 mai, 2008.

Matin, salle U159, Dufour:

• 9h30-10h15 Jean Marie Schaeffer (Paris) De quelques régimes de vérité (et de fausseté) littéraire
• 10h15- 12h 30 Carola Barbero (Turin) Pleurer et croire: une réponse au paradoxe de la fiction

Après-midi, salle A123, Bastions

• 14h - 15h15 Stelios Virvidakis (Athènes), La critique littéraire a-t-elle besoin de la notion de vérité?
• 15h30-16h45 Patrizia Lombardo (Genève), “la vérité, l'âpre vérité”
• 17h- 18h15 Maurizio Ferraris (Turin), Pleurer et rire vraiment

Le colloque est gratuit et ouvert à tous. Further details are here: http://www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/evenements/2008/LitteratureEtVerite.html.