Dates: 12-13 December 2019
Venue: Amsterdam, Roeterseiland REC A 1.02 (12 December); Amsterdam, NIAS Seminar Room, Korte Spinhuissteeg 3 (13 December)
Open to: PhD Candidates and RMa Students, OSL members will have first access
Credits: 1-2 EC (depending on attending 1 or 2 days)
Organizers: Dr Nilgun Bayraktar (California College of the Arts; NIAS) and Dr Alberto Godioli (University of Groningen)
Registration
Please specify which day(s) you want to attend when you register (see below).

NOTE: The conference is fully booked, however we still have places available on the first day (12 December). Please send an e-mail to osl@rug.nl if you want to attend the first day. Don’t forget to mention your name, university and national research school.

If you want to be on the waiting list for both days, please send an e-mail to osl@rug.nl. Don’t forget to mention your name, university and national research school.

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The notion of defamiliarization is strikingly undertheorized; when it comes to systematic definitions of this concept, not much progress has been made since Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s work on ostranenie in literature in the early 20th century, or German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theorization of Verfremdungseffekt in the 1930s to describe theatrical devices that break audiences’ passive absorption in theatrical illusion.

Defamiliarizing practices today play a key role in contemporary artworks engaging with highly topical issues, such as migration, climate change or the rise of right-wing populist discourses. Whether we are dealing with retro-futuristic dystopias, films breaking the fourth wall, or darkly humorous cartoons, defamiliarization can be an effective tool for political activation – one based on formal innovation, rather than on content or on superficial emotional engagement.

But how exactly can we distinguish between different forms of defamiliarization? How can we investigate its effects on the reader/viewer? How does defamiliarization relate to neighboring notions such as the weird, the eerie, or the uncanny? During this two-day conference, a team of scholars working on defamiliarization across media will tackle these questions. The conference will also feature a panel with artists whose work addresses these issues.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Prof. Caroline Levine (Cornell University; Skype lecture and discussion) and Prof. Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi (Utrecht University).

Confirmed speakers: Dr Nilgun Bayraktar (California College of the Arts / NIAS); Prof. Dr. Maria Boletsi (UvA / Leiden); Prof. Dr. Esther Pereen, Lora Sariaslan (UvA); Dr Alberto Godioli, Dr Christian Kirchmeier, Dr Florian Lippert, Prof. Dr. Annie van den Oever, Prof. Dr. Pablo Valdivia, Ruby de Vos (RUG); alaa minawi, Jo-Lene Ong.

FULL PROGRAMME AND BIOS AVAILABLE HERE

Credits: 

• 1 EC can be obtained by attending 1 day of the conference and writing a critical review of one chosen session (750 words, +/- 10%, not counting bibliography). 2 EC can be obtained by attending both days, and writing a critical review about two sessions (one per day; 750 words per session, +/- 10%).
• Critical reviews should directly engage with the talks given in the selected session(s), and include references to at least two relevant academic sources. They should be submitted via email to osl@rug.nl by Monday 13 January 2020, 23:59.
• If you wish to find out more about the concept of defamiliarization before the conference, you can start with Viktor Shklovsky’s ‘Art as Technique‘ (1917) and with the volume Ostrannenie. On “Strangeness” and the Moving Image, ed. by Annie van den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). More reading suggestions for your critical reviews will come from the speakers’ presentations.

Centre for Advanced Studies (CIEDUS), Universidade de Santiago de Compostela | 22-26 June 2020

Research Group – Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature, PhD Programme in Literary and Cultural Studies. University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)

Call for Papers

Bringing together the notions of space, affect, and memory results in an appealing intersection in the field of literary and cultural studies, as each one of them can act as an axis for setting in motion a reorientation of cultural studies, and even of social sciences (because of their strong impact on what have been called the spatial turn, the memory turn, and the affect turn). These things, we are aware, are not new. However, we believe that the interaction between these three notions opens a path for new, complex analyses of the events taking place in the context of the contemporary revival of humanities.

What’s more, this brings about new, exciting research prospects for literary studies, as well as for cinematic, artistic or visual studies. The connections between memory and space (or place) are rooted in a well-known theoretical and methodological tradition that includes classical authors as Halbwachs, Benjamin, Poulet, Nora, Assmann, and Shama. Many of them, indeed, gave an important role to the category of affect in their theories, as is the case with Poulet, who reinforced it with the notion of affective memory that he developed in his work L’espace proustien. Still, it was not until recently that affect gained a more firm, established position in cultural and literary studies, especially in spatial studies. The influence of psychogeography and, at a different level, of nonrepresentational geography has been a determining factor in this respect.

We want Hermes Summer School 2020 to set up a framework for exploring these interconnections. That is why we will certainly welcome proposals offering original theoretical analyses on the matter, but we also encourage applicants to submit case studies on artistic, visual and literary works that approach these relations aesthetically, not only in theory but also in practice. We consider the tension between practices relying on representation and those based on performativity to be especially relevant, since it constitutes one of main the turning points that currently affect the ongoing debates on gender studies, ecocriticism, memory studies, and poetry and drama studies. Applicants are free to focus on any of the suggested notions –affect, space, or memory– but we strongly encourage participants to explore the intersections between them, knowing that the spatial dimension can be used as a rallying point for structuring proposals.

Each paper will be allotted 20 minutes. In addition to presenting their own research, speakers are strongly encouraged to reflect on the concepts they employ in their analyses. Please send your proposals including an abstract (200 words) and a short bio note (150 words, with your name, email address, institutional affiliation, dissertation topic, and disciplinary anchoring) to hermes.2020.compostela@gmail.com by January 31, 2020. We welcome abstracts related but not limited to the topics listed below:

• Theories of affect, memory and place
• Affect and memory as space connectors in fiction
• Affective performances of local and global spaces
• Ecocriticism and affect theory
• Haunted spaces in literary, cinematic, artistic or visual representations.
• Emotional and/or mnemonic communities and the sense of place
• Gendered and/or queer places of affect and memory
• Affect and memory: the predicament of representation
• Historical perspectives on affect, space and memory in literature and visual arts.
• Walking as performance

Keynote Speakers

• Ben Anderson, Department of Geography, Durham University.
• Germán Labrador, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University.
• Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, School of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics,
• Bangor University.

Doctoral Workshop

Iván Villarmea Álvarez, Department of Art History (Film Studies), University of Santiago de Compostela.

General Information

The University of Santiago de Compostela is a member of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies, a long-standing collaboration of eleven doctoral schools in Belgium, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the USA. The Consortium’s annual summer school, hosted in turn by each partner institution, brings together specialists, delegates from the partner universities and a selected number of PhD students. An intensive training workshop and work-in-progress presentations focus on shared methodologies and interdisciplinary themes and lead to the publication of an annual edited volume, published by UCL Press in the Comparative Literature and Culture series.

Practical Information

Participants in the conference (delegates and PhD students) will be provided accommodation by the organization at hotels and university housing facilities in the area of the conference’s venue, the Centro de Estudios Avanzados (CEA) of the University of Santiago de Compostela. The CEA building and the accommodation facilities are a 10-minute walk from the city’s historic centre. Santiago de Compostela’s airport is at a 15-minute ride from the city (transport from the airport includes bus or taxi). The railway station is located at the city centre, a 30-minute walk from the conference’s venue (the CEA building). Transportation to and from Santiago will be covered by the participants.

The conference fee (EUR 270.00 per participant) covers the applicant’s participation in the conference, accommodation, lunch on four days, and the conference dinner. The payment method will be indicated once attendance is confirmed.

Some Bibliographic References

Ben Anderson, Encountering Affect. Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions, Ashgate, Farnham, 2014.

Aleida Assmann, Cultural memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Roberts Hudson (eds.), Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life: Memory, Place and the Senses, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, 2015.

Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino (eds.), Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, U of Nebraska P., Lincoln, 2018.

Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Park, and Rob Shields (eds.), Ecologies of Affect. Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo (Ontario), 2011.

Stef Craps and others, “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable”. Memory Studies, 11 (2018), 498-515.

Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (eds.), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, De Gruyter, Berlin, 2010.

Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, Duke University Press, 2010.

Ursula K. Heise, Jon Cristensen, and Michelle Niemann (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Environmental Humanities, New York, Routledge, 2017.

Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene”, New Literary History, 45 (2014), 1-18.

Doreen Massey, For Space, SAGE, London, 2005.

Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, Galicia, A Sentimental Nation: Gender, Culture and Politics, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2013.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003.

Organizing Committee

Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, César Domínguez Prieto, Büke Saglam, Cristina Tamames Gala, Belén Tortosa Pujante

Groningen | 11 October 2019

The winners of the 2019 OSL Awards are Marieke Winkler and Tom Idema. They received their prize during the annual OSL Research Day in Groningen on October 11, 2019.

Each year, OSL rewards two of its members with an OSL Award for the publication of an excellent scholarly book and article. The Awards are intended to acknowledge original and innovative contributions to the field of literary studies and to highlight the work of talented scholars at the beginning of their careers. The OSL Awards come with prize money of € 500,- for each award.

Marieke Winkler is assistant professor in Literary Studies at the Open University in Utrecht. Her research mostly focuses on the interaction and mutual exchanges between literature, literary criticism and literary studies. For the OSL Awards, she submitted an article titled ‘Criticism in the History of the Modern Humanities. The Case of Literary Studies in the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Netherlands’, published in the 2018 Fall Issue of the journal History of Humanities (University of Chicago Press).

In the words of the Jury, her article provides a ‘clear and well documented exposition of a neglected historical critical debate situated in the Netherlands,’ but also a ‘well-reflected approach to a highly relevant topic in both past and contemporary humanities, convincingly illustrated through two illuminating case studies.’

Tom Idema is a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Utrecht. In his book Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism, published by Routledge in 2019, he analyzes contemporary works of American science fiction, reading these novels together with biological and philosophical theories of human-environment interaction. By so doing, the book show how the novels offer biocultural stories in which bodies are socially and culturally constructed, while social and cultural systems are ecologically constructed.

Quoting from the Jury’s motivation: ‘Published by a very renowned international publisher (Routledge), this book comprises a cutting-edge study of contemporary science fiction literature in view of the concept of the posthuman and ecocriticism. The close readings of these understudied works of fiction are very solid and provide reflections on our current times and environmental change. The works are placed in the longstanding tradition of the genre in fiction and sometimes even cinema. This is a well written and compelling study, addressing a timely topic from a fresh perspective.’

Dates: 17-18 October 2019 | Time: Oct 17 9.00 – 18.00 – Oct 18 10.00 – 17.00 | Venue: University of Amsterdam, exact location see below | Open to: PhD Candidates and RMa Students, OSL members will have first access | ECTS: 1, more details, see below | Registration 

Please note that you can only register for the first day of the workshop via OSL (see below, Registration and Credits).

Organizers

Maria Boletsi (Leiden University and University of Amsterdam), Natashe Lemos-Dekker (University of Amsterdam), Kasia Mika (University of Amsterdam), Ksenia Robbe (currently: Leiden University; from August 2019: University of Groningen)

Theme description

This 2-day workshop will probe contemporary crisis-scapes in order to explore the ways ‘crisis narratives’ structure experiences and representations of time and space, i.e., the ways ‘crisis’ as a framework, concept, rhetoric, affective or discursive structure forms or taps into specific chronotopes.

Historically, the term ‘crisis’ has denoted choice, decision, judgment or critique; it can signal a turning point but also a perpetual state without prospect of resolution. Discursive uses and experiences of ‘crisis’ may involve a sense of disconnection and disorientation, collapsing linear temporality. Crisis can also function as an immobilizing framework for regions deemed to be in chronic crisis. ‘Crisis’ in Europe and elsewhere today often becomes an instrument of rule in neoliberal governmentality, legitimizing ‘states of emergency’ that limit people’s rights and access to public space. Crisis-scapes, however, can also trigger a heightened awareness of the present and foster critical or creative practices that question received notions of the past, initiate different conceptions of history and futurity or form alternative communities and infrastructures.

By approaching crises as chronotopes—what Mikhail Bakhtin termed the enmeshing of temporal and spatial experience into a common condition of a given era—we seek to explore questions of crisis, time and space, as experienced, imagined and represented across a range of contexts, and particularly in Europe and its margins. Chronotopes of crisis partake in complex constellations of meanings, discourses, and affective structures that call for interdisciplinary engagement. The workshop will thus combine perspectives from literary and cultural studies with sociology, cultural anthropology, memory studies, migration studies, post- and decolonial studies, and the energy and environmental humanities, to consider how recent and contemporary crises—economic, environmental, social, political, humanitarian—trigger memories of earlier historical narratives, traumas or practices of resistance, and how they foster or foreclose specific visions of the future.

We are also interested in the ways alternative narratives—what Janet Roitman has called “noncrisis” narratives (2013)—that sidestep ‘crisis rhetoric’ may form alternative chronotopes in the present. Through exploring crises as chronotopes, the workshop also aims to revisit the relation of “crisis” with its cognate, critique, in order to ask which narratives or practices could effectively address problematic mobilizations of ‘crisis’ today and shape other, more inclusive, chronotopic structures. To that end, emphasis will be laid on literary narrativizations of ‘crisis’ as a means of disrupting or reconfiguring the chronotopic structures involved in contemporary crisis-scapes.

The workshop will thus ‘think through’ how the study of crises as chronotopes can take shape across diverse disciplinary contexts and critical debates (e.g., in the context of debt and economic crises; in rethinking infrastructures and repair; in (re)tracing and conceptualizing memory-scapes emerging in crisis-situations); and how crisis figures or disfigures the ongoing question mark about the fate of critique in a postcritical world.

The talks, discussion, and writing that will take place during the workshop will be organized around the following thematic streams:

• Crisis Rhetoric and Alternative Grammars: Dominant representations of subjects of/in crisis (e.g. the tropes of the “victim” or “threatening agent” in the ‘migrant crisis’) often fall short of accounting for dispossessed individuals and their experiences. Which ‘grammars’ can help articulate alternative subjectivities and accounts of agency? Which expressive forms, narrative structures, and reading practices can articulate alternatives to the “slow cancellation of the future” (Berardi, Fisher) and disrupt restrictive or violent chronotopes of crisis?
• Crisis and Memory: How are the periods of revolution and eventful socio-political transformation remembered in current times? This stream will address the ways in which 20^th-century global historical junctures are recollected in political rhetoric, projects of memorialization, critical discourses, and artistic productions. It will explore the temporalities and cultural sensibilities shaped through these interpretations of turning points. How can past crises be imagined beyond narratives of traumatization which have spread globally, producing subject positions of victimhood and moral superiority? Which critical approaches to remembering crises could foster ‘redistribution of the sensible’?
• Critique Under Duress: What is the role of critique and radical critical theory in times of crisis? Rather than decrying an ‘’end of theory’’, the theme aims to rigorously engage with the Frankfurt School, opening it up to the concerns of postcolonial, decolonial (Allen 2016), and environmental theory and its theorizations of the present in crisis. If critique aims to historicize the present, which periodizing schemes have helped bring the contemporary into relief, such as Ernst Mandel’s “late capitalism,” Elizabeth Povinelli’s “late liberalism,” or Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen’s “the Anthropocene”? And which no longer bring descriptive or diagnostic weight to the structures of feeling folding in on the changing climate of crises (and crisis of climate) today? In this context, we will take up the task of trying to ‘think otherwise’ and challenge, in Ann Stoler’s gloss, some of the “ready-made concepts on which we rely and [the] work we call on them to do.” As such, the theme, among others, aims to work across meanings of duress (Stoler 2016)—as “a relation to a condition, a pressure exerted, a troubled condition borne in the body, a force exercised on muscles and mind”—and conceptualize what can critique be and do across shared, yet asynchronous, crises.
• Chronic Crisis: This theme addresses instances where crisis becomes chronic. It asks how the duration and integration of the disruptive and the normal reorient our engagement with past, present, and future as it affects modes of anticipation, waiting, and endurance. Crisis and uncertainty can produce what Rebecca Bryant (2016) has termed the ‘uncanny present’, disrupting the possibility of imagining and acting upon the future. When and how do crises, including illness and economic and environmental crises, fade into chronicity and normality, and what futures does this enable or foreclose? How do we continue living in the face of chronic disruption and finitude?

Workshop format

The format for this event aims to facilitate collaboratively generated output. Instead of sharing finalized research in a traditional conference format, our primary aim is to establish key concepts, questions, and frames for interdisciplinary research on crisis across the humanities and social sciences. This will unfold across the following structures during the 2 days of the workshop:

Day One (October 17)

Plenary Talks and discussion; the program of Day 1 is open to a wide academic public. Confirmed Plenary Speakers: Rebecca Bryant (Utrecht University); Nick Nesbitt (Princeton University); Dimitris Papanikolaou (University of Oxford); Oxana Timofeeva (European University in St. Petersburg).

Day Two (October 18)

This part of the workshop will involve the plenary speakers as well as a group of invited scholars that will form reading and writing groups. The main objective will be to start co-writing a prospectus on the present and future of crisis research, to be submitted to an open access journal. Format:

1. Parallel reading & discussion groups on the 4 thematic streams
2. Collaborative writing in break-off groups on the 4 thematic streams
3. Reconvening: Conclusions and Next Steps

The reading groups on Day 2 will discuss selected pre-circulated articles and set the ground for moving to the writing groups with a shared sense of the major positions, debates, and findings brought together under each thematic heading.

In the second part of the day, the groups will engage in collaborative writing: each group will be asked to compose a document on each thematic stream. Each group will receive a set of common questions in advance to facilitate the writing and ensure the coherent structure of the final output (prospectus).

This workshop is sponsored by OSL and ASCA. It is organized by members of the following networks: the ASCA Cities project and its “Repairing Infrastructures” seminar, the ASCA research group “Crisis, Critique and Futurity,” the “Memory and Identity” reading group at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), and the “Anthropology of Health, Care and the Body” program group of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the UvA.

Registration and credits

The lectures on the first day of the workshop are open to anyone who wishes to attend. Research Ma students and Phd candidates who wish to earn 1 EC by participating in this workshop should register through OSL. Those who wish to attend the lectures without earning EC credits are welcome to do so and do not have to register through OSL. OSL members will have first access. NB: It is not possible to register for the second day of the workshop, which will only involve a smaller group of invited scholars. OSL RMA and PhD students can acquire 1 EC by:

a) Attending the first day of the workshop and participating actively in discussions;
b) reading the assigned texts for one of the thematic streams (Crisis Rhetoric and Alternative Grammars; Crisis and Memory; Critique Under Duress; Chronic Crisis)
c) writing a response of 600-800 words to one or more of the questions or topics of the thematic stream of their choice by engaging with (some of) the assigned texts.

This will be a pass / fail assignment (not graded). The deadline for submitting the assignment is October 22, 2019.

Programme: (Un)Timely Crises – workshop description and full program

Day 1: October 17

Venues: Oudemanhuispoort 4-6, Amsterdam
9:30 – 12:00: D0.08 (Oudemanhuispoort)
12:00 – 17:10: D1.08 (Oudemanhuispoort)

9:30 – 10:00: Registration  and Coffee

10:00 – 10:20: Welcome by OSL director and introduction by organizers

10:20 – 11:30: Lecture by Rebecca Bryant & discussion (location: D0.08) | Chair: Natashe Lemos Dekker

11:30 – 12:00: Coffee break

12:00 – 13:10: Dimitris Papanikolaou, “Past Continuous, Archival Present, Queer Future: Rethinking Our Critical Grammars” (location: D1.08) | Chair: Maria Boletsi

13:10 – 14:10: Lunch (at the hall of Oudemanhuispoort)

14:10 – 15:20: Nick Nesbitt, “Crisis and Critique” (location: D1.08) | Chair: Kasia Mika

15:20 – 15: 40: Coffee break

15: 40 – 16:50: Oxana Timofeeva, “The Time of Catastrophe” (location: D1.08) | Chair: Ksenia Robbe

16: 50 – 17:10: Closing remarks

Day 2: October 18

(NB: Day 2 is only open for a small number of invited participants; it is not open to the public or to those registered through OSL)

The parallel group meetings will take place in the University Library, in the following rooms:

• Belle van Zuylenzaal
• Vondelzaal
• Potgieterzaal

Theme groups

10:00 – 12:00: Theme group meetings I: Discussion of readings

12:00 – 13:30: Lunch break (at Belle van Zuylenzaal)

13:30 -15:30: Theme group meetings II: Collaborative writing

16:00-17:00: Final discussion & next steps

Additional Information

Google Directions

Day 1:-from Amsterdam Centraal Station to Oudemanhuispoort (15min walk): https://goo.gl/maps/MAUb3FTZy5oBRHGY6

Day 2:-from Amsterdam Centraal Station to the University Library (20 min walk): https://goo.gl/maps/vKvHTckb55NGj4qX6

Download a poster of the event here.