Organizer: Christopher Kuipers
Contact the Seminar OrganizersDelineating the Concept-Field of Literature: What Are the Basic Units of Analysis of Literary Study?
In contrast to many other academic fields where the subject matter is clearly defined across its given scalar range—such as the cell and the organism in biology, the atom and the star in physics, and the individual and community in sociology—literary studies has long grappled with the challenge of locating its central focus or range. This seminar seeks to address this fundamental disciplinary issue by revisiting the core concepts that underpin literary study. The seminar’s goal will be to explore what things constitute the unique disciplinary concept-field of literature and how these foundational ideas shape our approach to literary analysis.
As an initial roster, this seminar seeks papers devoted to this constellation of seven core concepts:
TEXT: what are the scalar limits of the phenomenon of literature, i.e., what are the smallest and larges texts that are “literature”? Are titles integral to texts, and if so, when and how did this happen (ancient texts seem to lack them)? How do keywords relate to texts? What is a selection, a pericope, a passage, a quotation? How many “levels” of textuality are there: primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, more…?
GENRE: setting aside the historical “hierarchies of genre,” what about the heterarchies of genre, or how two or more seemingly coexist, non-conflictually, within texts? If genres come into being and die, what is the variation of lifespans? In other words, what are the mayflies and the bristlecone pines of literary genres?
AUTHOR: why won’t it die? Is the author the primary or the double reader (qui scribit, bis legit)? What have been the conceptual consequences for the literary field of separating “reading”/literature and “writing”/composition into two separate human activities? How does oeuvre function as a useful literary concept?
CHARACTER: what is the ontology of the literary character? How does a character live or die? What sorts of characters can change (“character arc”), and what sorts never do? When did the sidekick become a/the primary character? What about characters that appear in multiple authors?
STYLE: how did this Latinate word (stilus, “pen”) become spelled like a Greek word (stylos, “pillar”)? What new kinds of stylometry can be performed with digital corpuses and AI tools? How do authors’ styles change across their lifespan?
CANON: how did this term become a dirty word, versus its harmless alternatives: repertoire, grammar (etc.) rules, corpus, selection, syllabus, anthology? Can this term recuperate its generative heritage of the Greek building tool or the system of elegant embodied proportions?
THEME: how do these inhere in literary works? Why do authors not necessarily have to have any themes in mind for them to be present? Do themes (like genres, authors, characters) come and go over time? What are the scalar dimensions of themes, from the motif and beyond?
In contrast to many other academic fields where the subject matter is clearly defined across its given scalar range—such as the cell and the organism in biology, the atom and the star in physics, and the individual and community in sociology—literary studies has long grappled with the challenge of locating its central focus or range. This seminar seeks to address this fundamental disciplinary issue by revisiting the core concepts that underpin literary study. The seminar’s goal will be to explore what things constitute the unique disciplinary concept-field of literature and how these foundational ideas shape our approach to literary analysis.
As an initial roster, this seminar seeks papers devoted to this constellation of seven core concepts:
TEXT: what are the scalar limits of the phenomenon of literature, i.e., what are the smallest and larges texts that are “literature”? Are titles integral to texts, and if so, when and how did this happen (ancient texts seem to lack them)? How do keywords relate to texts? What is a selection, a pericope, a passage, a quotation? How many “levels” of textuality are there: primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, more…?
GENRE: setting aside the historical “hierarchies of genre,” what about the heterarchies of genre, or how two or more seemingly coexist, non-conflictually, within texts? If genres come into being and die, what is the variation of lifespans? In other words, what are the mayflies and the bristlecone pines of literary genres?
AUTHOR: why won’t it die? Is the author the primary or the double reader (qui scribit, bis legit)? What have been the conceptual consequences for the literary field of separating “reading”/literature and “writing”/composition into two separate human activities? How does oeuvre function as a useful literary concept?
CHARACTER: what is the ontology of the literary character? How does a character live or die? What sorts of characters can change (“character arc”), and what sorts never do? When did the sidekick become a/the primary character? What about characters that appear in multiple authors?
STYLE: how did this Latinate word (stilus, “pen”) become spelled like a Greek word (stylos, “pillar”)? What new kinds of stylometry can be performed with digital corpuses and AI tools? How do authors’ styles change across their lifespan?
CANON: how did this term become a dirty word, versus its harmless alternatives: repertoire, grammar (etc.) rules, corpus, selection, syllabus, anthology? Can this term recuperate its generative heritage of the Greek building tool or the system of elegant embodied proportions?
THEME: how do these inhere in literary works? Why do authors not necessarily have to have any themes in mind for them to be present? Do themes (like genres, authors, characters) come and go over time? What are the scalar dimensions of themes, from the motif and beyond?