Dates: 3, 10, 17, 24 April; 15 and 22 May 2019 | Time: 15.00-18.00 hrs. | Venue: University of Amsterdam, P.C. Hoofthuis – 4.28, Spuistraat 134, Amsterdam | Open to: PhD Candidates and RMa Students, OSL members will have first access | Organiser: prof. Karina van Dalen-Oskam (UvA) | ECTS: 3-6

Bring your own laptop to all classes

Registration 

Scholars working in computational literary studies make use of computer software that helps them to analyze digital textual data. Software can support the exploration of a much larger amount of data in systematic ways than was possible before. In this course, students will get introduced to the most important current approaches in computational literary studies, ranging from the analysis of style and methods for the verification and attribution of authorship to various forms of ‘distant reading’ and discourse analysis.

The first part of the course explores the new horizons and possibilities as well as the limitations of computational approaches in literary studies. Several computational tools will be demonstrated such as concordance software that can be used for discourse analytical approaches and specialized R-scripts for authorship attribution and stylistic analysis. The questions to be addressed in the first four sessions of the seminar include: How can different authors be distinguished from each other using computational tools? In which ways do their writing styles exactly differ? What are the options for computer-assisted discourse analysis? What kinds of reasoning and logic play a role when computational tools are applied and what are their epistemological implications? How can we evaluate the results of the new methods and techniques? Each class, a new tool will be introduced and the students will learn the basics of their use hands-on.

The second part of the course is optional and more practical. In two workshop-like meetings students will conduct small research projects of their own. In this way, they will learn to use the computational tools themselves and gain practical experience with their possibilities and limitations. The research projects can be devoted to the cases presented in the first part of the course but also be proposed by the students themselves.

Course objectives:

• Students learn to employ empirical and computational methods in literary studies, including the selection of tools and the reflection on their possibilities and limitations.
• Students get an overview of international discussions in the fields of computational literary studies and digital humanities and learn to relate their research to these debates.
• Students learn to reflect on the relation of research questions and digital methods in literary studies.

Programme

April 3: Introduction: Authorship attribution

April 10: Stylometry: quantifying literary style

April 17: Analyzing the genesis of digital-born literary works

April 24: Computational analysis of online book discussion

May 15 and 22: Hands-on sessions: using the presented tools and designing the experiment for the paper

Credits

Students receive 3 EC for active participation (readings and small assignments) in the first four meetings and an additional 3 EC for participation in the workshops and the preparation of a final assignment (= paper of 3000 words).

For more information please contact Dr Alberto Godioli (a.godioli@rug.nl)

Date: 23-25 January 2019
Location: Utrecht University
Organisation: Susanne Knittel (UU), László Munteán (RU), Liedeke Plate (RU), Ann Rigney (UU)
Speakers: Tim Ingold, Birgit Meyer, Chiara de Cesari, Rob van der Laarse, Wayne Modest et al.
Credits: 5 EC
Open to: PhD candidates and RMA students, OSL members will have first access
Registration

THE WINTER SCHOOL IS FULLY BOOKED, please send an e-mail with your name, university and research school to osl-fgw@uva.nl. We will put you on our waiting list.

“Perhaps the universe is a memory of our mistakes,” Jeanette Winterson writes in The Stone Gods (2007). Over the past decade, a material turn has been revolutionizing the Humanities and Social Sciences. Following a period of empirical oblivion, the idea that “stuff matters,” as the anthropologist Daniel Miller puts it, has taken hold across an increasing number of disciplines, fuelling new inquiries into novel and established fields alike. The material turn is a trend with multiple sources and faces that finds an echo in the growing public interest, in part because of climate change, in how the natural world is entangled with social practices. Interdisciplinary and diverse, drawing on multiple traditions of materialist analysis, it has far-reaching theoretical and methodological implications for our research practices. This Ravenstein Seminar will inquire into the implications of the so-called material turn for memory studies including the new challenge to engage in new ways with work in the field of critical heritage studies. We will explore the complex entanglements of matter and memory, inquiring into the ways in which people remember materially, using things as aides-mémoire, but also how things remember in and for themselves, thing-memory being integral to the life of materials. In part because the material turn is the result of “a different image of thought in which everything has turned” (St. Pierre et al.), the Ravenstein Seminar “Memory Studies and Materiality” also specifically aims to reconnoitre the methodological implications of the material turn in and for memory studies, reflecting on the methods with which we can study the entanglement of memory and materiality and how we can do material memory studies.

Ravenstein 2019 Preliminary Programme

Surface Memories: Inscription and Erasure

Date: 24 January 2019
Time: 10.15 – 11.15 hrs
Venue: Utrecht University, Drift 21, room 032
To register: send an e-mail to osl-fgw@uva.nl, with your full name and affiliation

How are memories written into material surfaces? How are they retained or erased? Materials vary, depending on their capacity both to be marked by use and to retain the marks that have been made in them. They also respond differently to wear and tear or erosion. Thus, qualities of hardness and softness, solidity and fluidity, all affect the mnemonic capacities of surfaces. The hardest of surfaces will remain unmarked by use; whereas in the most fluid of surfaces the traces of use are instantly dissipated. Mnemonic surfaces are in between: they are neither hard nor fluid but solid and soft. Thus the forest floor retains the footpath, the parchment the inky traces of the scribe, the house-timber the traces of the axe.The properties of these surfaces will be explored, showing that what they have in common is an anti-stratigraphic principle according to which memories from the past gradually rise to the surface even as they are undercut by the marks of the present.

The OSL Award winners of 2018 are Anne-Fleur van de Meer and Alex Rutten. They received their prize during the annual OSL Research Day in Groningen on October 12, 2018.

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.

The jury’s praise

With “‘Ik kan niet genezen van een kwaal die ik niet ken.’ Depressie en intertekstualiteit in Kikker gaat fietsen (2008) van Maarten van Buuren,” Anne-Fleur van der Meer has written a highly accomplished and original article on autobiographical texts on depression. Her article stresses the important point that as literary scholars, we have to withstand the temptation to emphasize the non-fictional content of novels like Maarten van Buuren’s. This temptation runs rampant in society, as is evidenced by talk shows that will invite authors who write novels with autobiographical content, and then fail to address the literary nature of such texts. Van der Meer urges us to consider the literary merits and devices of literary works on depression. She has a masterful grip on the theories she uses. She impressed us with the meticulous and sophisticated nature of her close readings and narratological analyses of the primary source. She then manages to embed these close readings in an extra-literary scientific discourse and social context in convincing ways. This makes her work both technically precise and socially relevant, which is quite an achievement for an early-career literary scholar.

Anne-Fleur van der Meer. “‘Ik kan niet genezen van een kwaal die ik niet ken.’ Depressie en intertekstualiteit in Kikker gaat fietsen (2008) van Maarten van Buuren.” Nederlandse Letterkunde 23.1 (2018): 11-39.

Alex Rutten’s monograph De publieke man: Dr. P.H. Ritter Jr. als cultuurbemiddelaar in het interbellum (Hilversum, 2018) offers a first comprehensive examination of the legacy of (radio) critic, journalist and writer Dr. P.H. Ritter Jr. in a cultural-historical framework. What struck us as extraordinary is the originality of Rutten’s work. Not only in terms of its object of study, as Ritter’s output has never before been systematically researched in an academic study, but also in its innovative contextual and literary-sociological method. Rutten’s analysis includes a whole range of media, organizations, and cultural institutions that have not been traditionally considered part of literary history, such as newspapers, movie theatres, and radio shows. He convincingly argues that an examination of these is not only vital for understanding Ritter’s oeuvre, but for Dutch literary history as a whole.

The jury consisted of prof. dr Hans Bertens (UU), prof. dr Jos Joosten (RU) and dr Inge van de Ven (TU).

Congratulations, Anne-Fleur and Alex, on behalf of the jury and OSL Board!

Location: Utrecht University, see below
Teaching period: May-June 2019 (meetings on for May 24 and June 7, 14, 21, 28)
Time: 14.00-17.00
Instructor: Prof. Neil ten Kortenaar (University of Toronto)
Credits: 5 EC
Open to: RMA students and PhD candidates

Registration

THE SEMINAR IS FULLY BOOKED. Please send an e-mail with your name, university and research school to osl@rug.nl. We will put you on our waiting list.

When they first encountered novelistic realism, writers all over the world felt it encouraged a new kind of vision: an invitation to write about things that had never been written about in order to make people see those things as for the first time. Yet at the same time realism observes rules of verisimilitude that suggest the new can be understood in terms of the already known. These twin pulls, toward the new and towards the same, make realism’s great contradiction and, no doubt, its attraction.

We will examine the meaning realism acquired as it made its way around the world by looking first at two Western texts to suggest the history of realism—novels by Balzac and Updike—and then at six more realist novels from other traditions, that is, from Africa, India, and China.

The critical theory of realism is understandably focused on the nineteenth century British, French, and Russian novel. In this course we will examine whether what is said of realism by Hegel, Lukács, Auerbach, Barthes, Raymond Williams, Jameson,

Catherine Gallagher, Moretti and others is also true of realism in the 20^th century elsewhere in the world. Realism is often associated historically with the bourgeoisie, the working class, liberalism, the Enlightenment, perspective in painting, the documentary impulse, the visual, the status quo, social activism, heteronormativity, and secularism. Does it retain those (contradictory) associations in, say, India or China? Realism appears to be the product of a particular time and place. What happens when it is found elsewhere at a later time?

Programme:

Session 1: Europe: Honoré de Balzac

Session 2: United States: John Updike

Session 3: China: Lu Xun, Eileen Chang

Session 4: South Asia: Anita Desai, Amit Chaudhuri

Session 5: Africa: Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie

Assignments:

• Preparation of and active participation in the meetings
• Final paper and brief presentation

Venues:

• 24 May – Sweelinckzaal: Drift 21 – 0.05 (entrance via Library, Drift 27 Utrecht)
• 7 June – Sweelinckzaal: Drift 21 – 0.05 (entrance via Library, Drift 27 Utrecht)
• 14 June – Sweelinckzaal: Drift 21 – 0.05 (entrance via Library, Drift 27 Utrecht)
• 21 June – Sweelinckzaal: Drift 21 – 0.05 (entrance via Library, Drift 27 Utrecht)
• 28 June – Room 1.06, Kromme Nieuwe Gracht 80, Utrecht