The term environment may refer to a variety of levels and entry points: from the environments depicted within works of art and literature to the infrastructural and technological conditions surrounding their creation and circulation. We welcome contributions that examine how aesthetic environments today are shaped by shifting historical, political, and technological parameters — including digital platforms, algorithmic filtering, and planetary ecological concerns.
We ask: How is the environment articulated aesthetically and critically? What codes, constraints, and affordances shape our encounter with it? What environments are imagined, constructed, and navigated in literature, visual culture, and other expressive forms? And in turn, how do these environments reflect or resist broader structures — political, social, ecological — in which they are embedded? What imaginative spaces do they open or foreclose?
A main emphasis will be placed on literary environments, including those evoked within works of literature and those constituted by literary production, publication, and reading. This may involve reflections on the materiality of the book, the ecology of publishing, the temporalities of reading, or the spatialities of narrative form. However, the seminar also welcomes contributions from adjacent fields and disciplines — such as art history, media studies, performance studies, and philosophy — that engage the aesthetic dimensions of environment in broad or experimental ways.
The seminar will feature three keynote speakers:
- Gisèle Sapiro, director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris
- Frederik Tygstrup, professor of comparative literature at Copenhagen University
- Raphaëlle Guidée, professor of comparative literature at the Université Paris 8 – Vincennes Saint-Denis
- Application deadline: October 1.
Applications should include an abstract and CV.
- Selection criteria for participation will include:
(a) Seminar relevance to the project;
(b) number of TBLR courses attended previously (first-time applicants will be given priority);
(c) early registration;
(d) geographical spread.
Organizers: Knut Ove Eliassen, NTNU, Charles Ivan Armstrong, UiA, Sigurd Tenningen, UiA