The Phenomenology of Reading: Experiencing Literature Today
October 11th-12th, 2013
Temple University: Philadelphia, PA
Keynote: Charles Altieri (Berkeley)
As a result of the ongoing rhetoric of “crisis” in the humanities, literary and cultural studies scholars seem to be perpetually reassessing their vocation. While the introduction of new theoretical models or critical approaches promise to carry the torch for scholarship into the era of the globalized university, other scholars seek to exhume past methodologies that were possibly lost in the scramble for innovation. Within this intellectual climate one topic has repeatedly come under critical scrutiny: reading. Whether it is the concern over the fate of close-reading, the return to aesthetics, surface reading, distant reading, new formalism, the digital humanities, ethics, affect theory, “world” literature, philosophical approaches, medical humanities, network/systems theory, newer historicisms, pedagogy, or new materialisms, all of these topics are not only attempts to rethink how we read, but also efforts to buttress what seems to be a perilous state for certain disciplines and practices.
This conference seeks to assess these recent scholarly trends and, to this end, we invite papers from different fields and disciplines that interrogate the relationship between theories of reading and past, present, and future directions for literary and critical theory. Because the goal of this conference will be to foster a dialogue concerning these debates, we will attempt to limit the conference’s size to prevent overlapping panels and allow for ample feedback from respondents, other speakers, and guests.
The conference will take place at Temple University in Philadelphia on October 11th and 12th, 2013 and is co-sponsored by the Temple English Dept., Temple Graduate English Association, and Temple Philosophy Dept. Feel free to ask any questions and send abstracts of 250-500 words by June 30th, 2013 to: templegeaconf@gmail.com.