Literature today and tomorrow...
19-20 April 2019 - Tunis, Tunisia
Venue: Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of Tunis- Tunisia
PRESENTATION
“The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.” C.S. Lewis
“Poetry is the finer breath and spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.” William Wordsworth
Teachers of languages and literatures nowadays often complain of their students’ aversion to reading. Reading assignments are often shunned and reading lists relegated to dusty drawers or dust bins. To young eyes, dazzled by the quick pace of floating screen images and flashes of information from social networks, sitting down for hours over thousands of words scribbled on white or yellowish pages has become superfluous.
How often do literature teachers hear strange answers to the question: “Have you read your assigned book?” such as “I watched the movie” or “I read a summary online”? The era we are living in is hardly literature-friendly. It is thus no longer possible to ignore the challenges facing literature and literary studies in the digital culture era. The age of technological revolution disdainfully rejects arts, humanities and literature as governments implement budget cuts affecting language and humanities departments.
Degrees in humanities, languages and literatures are often considered to be of no great use in the job market. The consequences of this global atmosphere eschewing literature are dire cultural impoverishment and a further drift away from our essential humanity and beauty. If we look at the arguments presented by those who have taken up the debate, to the question ‘what is the use of literature today?’ several convincing and interesting answers present themselves. In an article titled: “The Decline and Fall of Literature” published in the New York Review of Books 1999 Issue, Professor Andrew H. Delbanco discusses the challenges American English departments had to face in recent years and presents an overview of “books whose tone is somewhere between a coroner’s report and an elegy” of literature.
These books include Professor Alvin Kernan’s in The Death of Literature and What’s Happened to the Humanities as well as Professor John Elliss’s Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities, and others. The debate, however, is not just a recent one for it goes as far back as the late nineteenth century, when Matthew Arnold predicted in his Introduction to Thomas Humphry Ward’s anthology The English Poets that “the day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted” religion and philosophy “for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize ‘the breath and finer spirit of knowledge’ offered to us by poetry”. This conference thus proposes to take part in the ongoing debate and ideally enrich it by discussing the importance of literature in all fields of life and rethinking its role in light of the new requirements and particularities of the era.
TOPICS
We invite 300 word-abstracts for twenty minute presentations. Contributions may explore, but are not limited to the following topics:
The death and/or revival of Literature
Literature and education
The use of literature in ELT classrooms
Therapeutic uses of literature (Literary therapy, Drama therapy, Bibliotherapy...)
Literature and culture
Literature and identity
Literary editing and publishing businesses
Literary studies and the job market
Literature and critical thinking
Literature and tolerance
Literature and human values
Literature and reality
Literature and technology
Digital/electronic literature
Performative literature
Literature and screenwriting
Literature and / in social media
The future of literature
ABSTRACTS
Abstracts along with a short biography should be sent to: literature.today2019@gmail.com no later than the 15th of December