The conference will consider modern literary theory as a body of critical thought that spans at least two centuries, encompassing a variety of interlocking approaches and fields of knowledge: philosophical aesthetics, folklore studies, national literary history, stylistics, structuralist poetics, academic (principally classical and medieval) philology, comparative literature, world literature. In this way, we will challenge the common narrative according to which literary theory was a twentieth-century phenomenon that began with Russian Formalism and came to an end when it was subsumed into critical theory and/or when cultural studies came to dominate language and literature departments in Europe and the US. Instead, we locate the emergence of literary theory in the late eighteenth century, when Herder turned to folklore, Hegel related the history of artistic forms to long-term societal changes, and Wolf founded philology by denying the integrity of the Homeric poems.
Co-organized by Boris Maslov (IFIKK) and Mikael Males (ILN)
Confirmed participants:
Silvio Bär (University of Oslo)
Kate Holland (University of Toronto)
Bernhard Hollick (University of Oslo)
Ilya Kliger (New York University)
Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo)
Michael Kunichika (Amherst College)
Mikael Males (University of Oslo)
Boris Maslov (University of Oslo)
Jessica Merrill (Columbia University)
Bianca Patria (University of Florence)
Alfred Sjödin (Karlstad University)
Gabriel Trop (University of North Carolina)
Alexandra Urakova (Södertörn University)
Leon Wash (Trinity College, Dublin)