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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.
