This first day of the workshop will feature a lecture series. During this, the lecturers will present their current research into literature in its capacity as a mode of knowing and in its capacity as a modal ontology (the contested boundaries of fiction). Literature is not just a set of texts but an embodied practice, an institution, an access to the real and medium for the production, dissemination and critique of ways of knowing, and indeed for the imaginative creation of reality itself.
We will consider literature from the point of view of modal ontology, in other words not-yet-being, from the point of view of cognitive ecology and ecological linguistics and from the point of view of knowing reality through reading. We claim that “literature” as a cultural practice is diversifying and democratising in an unparalleled way today, which upends familiar distinctions such as that between writer and reader, text and enjoyment, writing and speaking/listening. Which conceptualities are available to guide us through these changing parameters?
For the second day of the workshop, we conduct a small experiment: we will, as a group, close-read and interpret a story. We will film the process and conduct an analysis of the video material. What did we observe? Where are traces to be found of the ideas that we have presented? What does the process tell us about the place of literature in the contemporary sensorium?
No preparation is required.
Registration
To register or hear more about the event, please contact Sarah Bro Trasmundi:
s.b.trasmundi@ilos.uio.no
Day one — Programme
Lectures on Epistemology: literature as knowing & Ontology: literature and reality
13:00–14:00 — Johan Siebers: "Literature as Objective Fantasy"
14:00–15:00 — Paul Cobley: "Knowing reality through reading"
15:15–16:15 — Sune Vork Steffensen: "Cognitive ecology and ecological linguistics"
Photo: Middlesex UniversityPaul Cobley is Professor in Language and Media at Middlesex University. His research interests include semiotics, close reading, narrative, and popular fiction. His books include Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (2016), Narrative 2nd edn. (2014) and The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s (2000).
Sune Vork Steffensen is Professor in Language, Interaction, and Cognition at the University of Southern Denmark, where he heads the university’s Centre for Human
Photo: University of Southern Denmark
Interactivity (together with Sarah Bro Trasmundi), as well as Senior Fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. Focusing on how language and cognition intersect in complex social and dialogical systems in ways that transform social and ecological systems, his research draws on ecological, dialogical, and distributed approaches to language, interaction, and cognition. He has contributed to the development of Ecolinguistics and to the development of Cognitive Event Analysis. He has edited five books/special issues on ecological and distributed approaches to language and authored more than 50 articles/chapters in journals and books. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language Sciences.
Photo: Middlesex UniversityJohan Siebers is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Middlesex University and director of the Ernst Bloch Centre for German Thought at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. His research interests include philosophy of language and communication, futurity and post-Kantian German thought, areas in which he has published widely. He is founding editor of Empedocles: European Journal for Philosophy of Communication and series editor of Routledge Research in Anticipation and Futures. Recent book publication: Working with Time in Qualitative Research: Case Studies, Theory and Practice (2022).
