Revolutions in Reading: Literary Practice in Transition

How to read and why? Reading is intimately connected to the materiality and mediality of texts, as well as to dominant assumptions about what texts are and how they should be approached. Today, digitalization is profoundly changing practices and cultures of reading, a development which is often seen as a threat, risking to change the human cognition in ways that makes the traditional book obsolete. At the same time, it presents exciting possibilities for new and innovative ways of consuming and studying literature. Indeed, within the field of literature studies there is a renewed interest in re-assessing reading as a methodology, including the various epistemological and political implications of our approaches to texts: should we read critically or postcritically, closely or distantly, globally or locally, comparatively or monolingually?

The conference puts the searchlight on contemporary and historical revolutions of reading with four main streams of inquiry: “Critical and Postcritical Reading”; “Reading Across: Multilingualism, Translation and Comparison”; “Materialities of
Reading”; and “Zooming In and Out: Reassessing Reading Methodologies”. 
Deadline for submission is 15 January, 2020.

Full Call for Papers

The conference is organised by Literature as a Leading Research Area at Stockholm University.

Heads of organising committee:
Markus Huss, Assistant Professor of German Literature
Anna Jörngården, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Email: revolutionsinreading@su.se