OSL PhD Day 2023: Full Program
OSL PhD Day 2023 – Literary Studies: Tools of the Trade
Date: Friday, 9 June 2023
Time: 10.00-18.00
Venue: Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 2-3, room 019
ECTS: 1-2 EC. See below for more information on the readings and assignments.
Organizers: Sofía Forchieri (RU), María Isabel Marin Morales (RUG), Maria Menzel (UvA)
Open for: PhD candidates and RMA students; OSL members have first access.
Registration via this link
NOTE: When registering for the OSL PhD, please indicate your research interests (up to three keywords) at REMARKS.
After the success of the previous editions in 2021 and 2022, we are excited to announce that the upcoming OSL PhD day will take place on Friday, June 9, 2023. The day’s theme will be “Literary Studies: Tools of the Trade.” The program will consist of a keynote lecture by dr. Inge van de Ven and two panels, each consisting of fifteen-minute presentations in which OSL PhDs will present their work in progress.
The first panel will focus on methodological tools in literary studies and will include reflections on ways of reading. The second panel will revolve around new and not-so-new conceptual tools that can enrich and expand the literary studies toolset.
The panels will be followed by a networking session in which presenters and participants can get to know each other’s work better. The conversation sparked during the session will then continue in a more informal setting during the concluding drinks at Hofman.
Keynote Dr. Inge van de Ven
Scaled Readings & Attention Modulations, or: How to Attend to Literature in the Information Age
Where there was once a scarcity of information, we are now dealing with an excess, and a shortage of time, cognitive resources, and especially attention. As a principle that originated in marketing, the attention economy describes how attention becomes currency. Attention is quantified and commodified in a world saturated with media, where we express the value of things in views, clicks, likes, and shares. The main question I address in this lecture is, how literary studies is, or should be, changing, due to the fact that literature is part of this economy. The attention economy influences the choice of whether we read: in the timespan of reading a novel, I could binge one or two television series or finish a computer game. It also influences the what: our objects of study. These might expand in scale: think of individual works, both paper-based and digital, that incorporate or perform effects of overload. Due to new methods like distant reading, moreover, we can now easily move beyond individual objects to tackle enormous corpora of texts. Besides whether and what we read, the changing mediascape and large volumes of text at our disposal affect how we read. Whereas transformations in reading have been framed in terms of a shift from close reading and deep attention to hyperattention, I argue for the importance of attention modulation, zooming in and out and reading with scale variation. Especially in the information age, I argue, an excess of text might reward or stimulate an openness to (seemingly) irrelevant stimuli. I reflect on the usefulness of skills and tools of attentional modulation for literary studies, but also outside of it, in realms like law, advertising, and politics, and on their potential for new, critical, and creative forms of reading.
Programme
10:00-10:15 Welcome and introduction
10:15-11:30 Keynote lecture Dr. Inge van de Ven “Scaled Readings & Attention Modulations, or: How to Attend to Literature in the Information Age” + Q&A
11:30-12:00 Break
12:00-13:30 Panel session 1: “Tools of the trade I: Methods”
- Ye Jiang: “How Close Can It Be? Reading Online Fan Fiction by Close Reading”
- Sasha Richman: “‘Vous n’aurez pas ma peau!’: Imaginaries of Photographic Violence”
- Sofía Forchieri: “Reading for Form: From Theory to Practice”
- Q&A + panel discussion
13:30-14:30 Lunch
14:30-15:45 Panel session 2: “Tools of the Trade II: Concepts”
- Kim Schoof: “But it’s my book, mine!”: A Butlerian reconceptualization of relationality in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts”
- Carlijn Cober: “Postcritique and the personal: The noema of Camera Lucida”
- Q&A + panel discussion
15:45-16:00 Break
16:00-16:45 Networking Session
16:45-17:00 Closing remarks
17:00-18:00 Drinks!
Assignments
Readings:
- Letzler, David. The Cruft of Fiction. Mega-novels and the Science of Paying Attention. University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Introduction, pp. 1–29.
- Trasmundi, Sarah Bro, Juan Toro, and Anne Mangen. “Human Pacemakers and Experiential Reading.” Frontiers in Communication 7:897043 (2022).
Assignment for 1 EC:
- Read the texts by Letzler and Trasmundi et al.
- Take good notes during the PhD day and make sure to contribute at least one question to the Q&A after the keynote lecture or to the Q&As following the panel discussions.
- Write a 500 word conference report, in which you reflect on a) what interested you most about van de Ven’s talk, b) how van de Ven’s argument relates to some of the questions and concerns outlined by Letzler and Trasmundi et al, c) what you learned from one or two of the other talks with regard to the tools of our trade. The report should be submitted to osl@rug.nl by Friday June 30th, end of day.
Assignment for 2 EC:
- Read the texts by Letzler and Trasmundi et al.
- Take good notes during the PhD day and make sure to contribute at least one question to the Q&A after the keynote lecture and to the Q&As following the panel discussions.
- Write a 2,000 word essay in which you a) reconstruct how van de Ven defines the practice of attention modulation, b) discuss how this concept relates to one or two of the methods and/or concepts presented by the PhD speakers, and c) bring the concept of attention modulation into dialogue with a primary material of your choice. The essay should be submitted to osl@rug.nl by Friday June 30th, end of day.