Dear colleagues,
I am organizing a seminar for the Annual Meeting of the ACLA in New
York, entitled 'Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century'. If you are
interested in participating, please let me know. The deadline for
paper proposals is 1 November. An abstract is below:
Walter Benjamin's designation of Paris as the capital of the
nineteenth century sets the tone for a spatio-temporal approach to
cities, which is developed by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic
of Letters: here Paris is construed not only as the capital of the
transnational literary field, but also as the Greenwich Meridian of
literature. However, as Janet Wolff has recently argued with regard
to Manchester, convincing claims may be made for other centres of the
nineteenth century, not just for world metropoles such as Berlin,
London, Moscow, New York and Vienna, but also for other cities and
loci with a particularly significant cultural role, such as
Alexandria, Brussels, Chicago, Copenhagen, Dublin, Florence, Oxford,
St Petersburg, Taormina or Worpswede. Casanova's approach owes an
acknowledged debt to Pierre Bourdieu's The Rules of Art, which
considers the relationship between economic capital and its symbolic
counterpart through the example of the late nineteenth-century French
literary scene. But Bourdieu's analysis excludes sub-genres such as
the Symbolist novel, which offers in some cases an intriguing amalgam
of the two types of capital.
This seminar invites participants to rethink the notion of
nineteenth-century capital(s) from the geographical, economic and
symbolic perspectives, thinking with, against and beyond both Bourdieu
and Casanova. It understands the transnational literary field in
terms such as cosmopolitan cities, international communities,
linguistic affinities, artistic colonies, and communities of authors
and readers rooted in specific places. Papers that propose new
readings of the world literary field and/or alternative centres are
particularly welcome.
Further information is available here:
http://acla.org/acla2014/
http://acla.org/acla2014/other-capitals-of-the-nineteenth-century/
Best wishes,
Richard
Dr Richard Hibbitt
Senior Lecturer in French
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT
tel: 0113 343 3495
fax: 0113 343 3477
email: [log in to unmask]
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