International Conference Series in Games and Literary Theory

Second Annual Conference hosted by the University of Amsterdam, Department of English and the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL), Amsterdam, November 20-22, 2014
The Digital Games and Literary Theory Conference Series addresses the scope and appeal of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of games and games’ impact on other fields in the Humanities. We are particularly interested in digital game modalities and how these might be seen as reconfiguring and questioning concepts, practices and orthodoxies integral to literary theory (i.e. textuality, subjectivity, authorship, the linguistic turn, the ludic, and the nature of fiction).

Master Class Date: June 18, 15:00-18:00 I Location: University of Amsterdam (room tba) I1 ECTS
In this master class, professor Roche will discuss a number of questions that he will address in an upcoming volume on “Idealism Today.” More specifically, he will expand on the ways in which his own orientation as a literary critic has—somewhat anomalously in the contemporary academic landscape—been oriented towards the German idealist tradition, but in a systematic rather than simply historical way. Among his key scholarly aims ranks the striving to make idealist categories relevant for the analysis of, among other objects of study, tragedy and comedy, the value of literature in the technology, and the aesthetics of the ugly.

The Planetary Remaking of Cultural Studies: Steps toward a Geomethodology Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro The Netherlands Research Institute for Literary Studies, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Date: May 14, 2014 Time: 15:00-18:00 Venue: University Library – Belle van Zuylenzaal Credits: 1 EC LECTURE DESCRIPTION: In his talk, Professor Moraru will present his […]

OSL/English Department Lecture
University of Amsterdam
27 February 2014, 5pm, Bungehuis, Spuistraat 210, Amsterdam, room 004
This talk examines Thoreau’s pedagogy in Walden. The first part investigates what the book teaches us (if anything) about the “true necessaries and means of life.” The second part concerns what Thoreau himself learns from living at Walden and writing Walden.

Helsinki, June 8 to June 13, 2014
It is a truism that literature does not exist unless there is someone who reads it. We are used to think of reading as a meeting of text and reader. We are familiar with debates about which of the two dominate this encounter: do the embedded reception structures, conceptualized as, for example, the distinction between authorial and narrative audiences guide the reader’s response? Or is reading primarily steered by our reading strategies that are institutionally formed?