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Advisory Board: Pierre Bourdieu (Paris), Umberto Eco (Bologna), Claudio Guillén (Barcelona), Wolfgang Iser (Konstanz), Murray Krieger (Irvine), Ziva Ben-Porat (Tel Aviv).
Directors: Darío Villanueva (U. of Santiago de Compostela), Mihai I. Spariosu (U. of Georgia at Athens).
The School for Theory in the Humanities at Santiago de Compostela will bring together leading junior and senior scholars from various fields and diverse cultures to explore issues of common interest that will play an important role in shaping the future of the humanities. Four five-week advanced seminars will be led by prominent scholars in the humanities. Each week a distinguished visiting scholar will conduct a plenary session and participate in a roundtable discussion with the entire School. There will be additional lectures and/or workshops offered by the School's directors, associate directors, and other guest lecturers. The Fellows will attend one seminar and take part in all plenary activities. During the summer, fellows will write one scholarly essay or participate in a collaborative research project. A selected number of individual and collaborative essays will be published under the auspicesof the School.
Fields, Margins, and Thresholds:
Literary Discourse and Its Interdisciplinary Contexts
In future global and crosscultural interchanges, traditional cognitive fields and boundaries will increasingly be challenged and reconfigured. Many reconfigurat-ions occur at the margins of constituted fields, but also in the grey areas between disciplines, in what may be called liminal interstices (from the Latin limen, threshold). One of the most productive of these interstices is literature, which is often seen as a marginal cognitive activity, but which can, precisely because of its marginality, propose and develop alternative modes of thought and behavior. The School's seminars will address the issue of literature as a liminal activity both historically and speculatively, examining past concepts of liminality as well as paradigms for future reconceptualizations of human knowledge.
| Wolfgang Iser (U. of Konstanz & Irvine): | Unfolding Interpretation: Translatability in Literature and Culture |
| Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale University): | Margins and Thresholds in Renais-sance and Baroque Thought |
| Gabriele Schwab (U. C. Irvine): | Imaginary Ethnographies: the Anthropological Turn in Literary Studies |
| Mihai Spariosu (University of Georgia): | Liminality, Literary Discourse, and Alternative Worlds |
| Jean Bessière (University of Paris III): | A Pluridisciplinary Approach to the Notion of Context in Literature |
| Ronald Bogue (University of Georgia): | Margins and Thresholds in Gilles Deleuze |
| Claudio Guillén (Barcelona): | Exile as Liminal Experience |
| Stanley Cavell (Harvard University) Itamar Even-Zohar (Tel Aviv University) Jane Flax (Howard University) Wlad Godzich (University of Geneva) Jenaro Taléns (University of Valencia) |
Santiago de Compostela, a famous Medieval and modern site of religious pilgrimage, has preserved its traditional charm and has developed into an important academic and artistic center in contemporary Spain. Known for its hospitality, sophisticated cuisine and nearby sea resorts, the city has also been designated the Cultural Capital of Europe for the year 2000. Lists of activities in and around Santiago de Compostela will be provided during the session. Weekend trips to the Spanish coast and Portugal will be organized upon request. The University of Santiago de Compostela, established in 1495 by Don Lope Gómez de Marzoa, has for over five hundred years maintained one of the most important academic traditions in all of Europe. Originally established as a grammatic academy, today the University has campuses at both Compostela and Lugo, the two thousand year-old city of "Lucas Augusta." Its 1,3000,000 square meters of facilities are home to over 40,000 students, a teaching and research faculty of 2,000 and an administrative staff of over 1,000.
APPLICATIONS: The School will consider applications from interdisciplinary scholars at the postgraduate level. Under special circumstances, highly-qualified doctoral students will also be considered. A limited number of fellowships is available. Application deadline for admissions and fellowships: February 1, 1998.
COST: Tuition, lodging, and meals for five weeks: US$2,950. Transportation: special air fares from Iberia Airlines will be available for School participants.
An international conference on life writing co-sponsored by the University of Beijing Department of English and the Society of World Biography of the Chinese Comparative Literature Association, will be held Monday-Wednesday, June 21-23, 1999.
The increasing popularity of lifewriting suggests that it will occupy a prominent position in the literary history of the 21st century. This conference will investigate the auto/biographical practices of past centuries, and address the foreseeable developments of the genre in the 21st century. The conference also aims to deepen the understanding of lifewriting between East and West, to promote lively exchange between lifewriters and scholars, critics, and readers, and to initiate interdisciplinary studies in lifewriting.
The conference is divided into three sections: Section 1: Agency and Autobiography; Section 2: Visions and Versions of Biography; Section 3: The Ab/Use of Memoir, Letters, Diary and Dialogues.
We solicit papers on topics including, but not limited to, the following: lifewriting and multiculturalism; auto/biography and religion; lifewriting and gender identity; theories of lifewriring; lifewriting in film and television; oral tradition and lifewriting.
Please forward inquiries to: Zhao Baisheng, Department of English, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China. (Fax: 86-10-6275-1587). Abstracts and/or papers should be sent by regular mail and must be postmarked no later than October 15, 1998.