Modern literary theory encompasses a variety of interlocking approaches and fields of knowledge: Philosophical aesthetics, folklore studies, national literary history, stylistics, structuralist poetics, academic (principally classical and medieval) philology, comparative literature, world literature. In this way, we will challenge the common narrative according to which literary theory was a twentieth-century phenomenon that began with Russian Formalism and came to an end when it was subsumed into critical theory and/or when cultural studies came to dominate language and literature departments in Europe and the US. Instead, we locate the emergence of literary theory in the late eighteenth century, when Herder turned to folklore, Hegel related the history of artistic forms to long-term societal changes, and Wolf founded philology by denying the integrity of the Homeric poems.
Symposium Schedule
October 24, Friday
10:00 Mikael Males and Boris Maslov, welcoming remarks
10:10-11:30 Session I: Theories, Recollected
Chair: Boris Maslov (University of Oslo)
- Kate Holland (University of Toronto) - “Recovering a Positivist Narratology for the Novel: Veselovsky, Lukacs, Jolles, and Bakhtin”
- Leon Wash (Trinity College, Dublin) - “Reading Ancient Greek Rhyme as Folk Parallelism with Veselovsky and Others”
Coffee break
11:40-13:00 Session II: Effects of Form
Chair: Michael Kunichika (Amherst College)
- Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo) - “Mimicry, Mimesis and Make-Believe”
- Ilya Kliger (New York University) - “History as What Hurts: Chernyshevsky and Jameson on Form”
Lunch at the Frederikke cafeteria (meal vouchers will be provided)
14:30-15:50 Session III: Literature on the Peripheries
Chair: Ilya Kliger (New York University)
- Alfred Sjödin (Karlstad University) - “Henrik Schück and the Scale of Literary History in Sweden”
- Alexandra Urakova (Södertörn University, University of Helsinki) - “Out of Line: Queering the Literary Genealogy of the Superfluous Man”
Coffee break
16:00-17:20 Session IV: Back to the Sources
Chair: Eirik Welo (University of Oslo)
- Bernhard Hollick (University of Oslo) - “Ad codices: Ludwig Traube and Medieval Philology”
- Bianca Patria (University of Florence) - “‘The Emergence of the Poet’: Notions of Authorship and Old Norse Verse”
18:30 Dinner for conference participants
October 25, Saturday
10:20-12:20 Session V: Texts and Ideas, Translated
Chair: Mikael Males (University of Oslo)
- Silvio Bär (University of Oslo) - “Translation and Theory: Homer in German from Voss to Schrott”
- Gabriel Trop (University of North Carolina) - “Speculative Philology from Vico to Schelling”
- Boris Maslov (University of Oslo) - “The Difficult Birth of Content”
12:20-13:20 Lunch for conference participants ordered to GM 452
13:20-14:40 Session VI: Philology, Stratified
Chair: Kate Holland (University of Toronto)
- Mikael Males (University of Oslo) - “Fossilized Romanticism and Nationalism in Old Norse Philology”
- Michael Kunichika (Amherst College) - “Geology and Philology: A Stratigraphy on their Ongoing Relation”
18:30 Dinner for conference participants