Dear colleagues,
I am organizing a seminar for the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association 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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