The debate will take place on Wednesday 17 May 2017 from 18:00-20:00 at New College of the Humanities, with panelists Lesley Chamberlain, Greg Currie, Bernard Harrison, Howard Jacobson, Penny Pritchard and Roger Scruton.

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Lesley Chamberlain is a writer of fiction and an independent scholar with a preponderant interest in German and Russian thought. After a degree in Russian and German Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter she took a research degree at Oxford before joining Reuters as a correspondent in Moscow in 1978. Her freelance career as a writer and critic began in 1986, since when she has written for all the major British newspapers, and also The LA Times�����Ի���The Wall Street Journal. She currently writes occasionally for The New Statesman�����Ի���The Times Literary Supplement, drawing on her background in European literature and Continental Philosophy.

Professor Greg Currie teaches Philosophy at the University of York where he is Director of Research, Greg teaches and researches on many aspects of the arts: literature, film and painting, the narrative arts and their role in learning, the place of the aesthetic in archaeological explanation, the nature of adaptation, the role of emotion in fiction, and the effect of irony in pictures and in language. Educated at the London School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, Greg has taught at universities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. He joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of York in 2013 and has published a number of articles and books, mostly on the arts and their relation to the mind. His next book is Fiction and Cognition (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Professor Bernard Harrison is currently Emeritus E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy in the University of Utah and an Emeritus Professor in the University of Sussex. He is one of a number of analytic philosophers, more numerous now than formerly, whose interests include literature and its relationships with philosophy and the history of ideas. His literary work includes Fielding’s Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Chatto, 1975), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Yale University Press, 1991), What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana University Press, 2015), and numerous papers.

Howard Jacobson lists Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen and Dickens among his foremost inspirations, and has written variously about comedy, Australia, Jewishness and love. In 2010 Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, published by Bloomsbury; in 2014, his novel J was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Mighty Walzer (1999) and Zoo Time (2013) both won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Jacobson’s non-fiction work includes Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It (2011) a collection of the weekly columns he writes for The Independent. His most recent publications include Shylock Is My Name: a novel (2016) and �ʳܲ�������(2017), a comic fairy tale which hopes both to explain why Donald Trump won and to provide the “consolation of savage satire”.

Dr Penny Pritchard is an experienced researcher and lecturer in early modern English literature, with particular expertise in the history and literature of English Protestant dissent and the writing of Daniel Defoe. The principal focus of Penny’s research has considered the relationship between different textual genres in seventeenth and eighteenth-century English writing, both those formally considered as ‘literature’ and others, such as funeral sermons and political pamphlets.

Professor Sir Roger Scruton is a widely translated writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. In ���𲹳ܳٲ���(OUP 2009), Scruton explores this timeless concept, asking what makes an object – either in art, in nature, or the human form – beautiful. Among his most recent publications are: The Disappeared (Bloomsbury 2015), Confessions of a Heretic (a collection of essays) (2016), The Ring of Truth about Wagner’s Ring Cycle (Penguin 2016). In his latest book, On Human Nature (Princeton UP 2017), Scruton defends human uniqueness, arguing, against philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects. Professor Scruton teaches in England and America.

A wine reception will precede the event.

If you would like to attend, please register at:  

Registration is compulsory. Places are limited!

Submission deadline: 20 September 2015

One cannot effectively approach Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical works without recognizing the importance modern literature plays in his writings. From Baudelaire to Dostojevski, from Blanchot to Celan, and from Kafka to Grossman, the references to major modern and contemporary writers are manifest throughout Levinas’s reflections. Whether as a source of inspiration or as metaphoric expression of his thoughts, these references mark a constitutive element of the articulation and development of his own philosophy. This is all the more astonishing given that Levinas has many reasons to distrust the ambivalences of literary works. Indeed, his entire philosophy intends to overcome the tragic model (with its origins in Aristotle) so as to understand being; moreover, he rejects the idea that mimetic representation constitutes a modality for adequate description of the human condition. Levinas states that the meaning of the ethical commandment exceeds all metaphoric and poetic expression, and, at crucial moments in his philosophy, he quotes Talmudic verses as if they are philosophical arguments.

It would seem that Levinas is, in his own way, challenging the Western concept of literature. It may be that he agrees with Jacques Derrida’s idea of the Biblical origin of this concept, yet questions remain as to how Levinas understands this idea and how his philosophy transforms the concept of literature. Answering these key questions will be the general aim of a three-day conference to be held at the Institute for Jewish Studies in collaboration with the Center for European Philosophy.

Special attention will be given to the poems, novel fragments, and reflections on metaphor and literature in the recently published volumes of the Oeuvres Complètes.
 
Call for papers
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The organizing committee welcomes submissions that address the role and the meaning of literature as it can be discovered in or derived from Levinas’s philosophy.

Proposals may address themes such as the following:

– What is the place of literature in Levinas’s philosophy?
– How does Levinas read a specific literary work or writer?
– What is the concept of literature that Levinas implicitly addresses?
– How does the ethical commandment, so central in his philosophy, relate to literature?
– How do the Talmudic references in his texts contribute to a specific (Western?) understanding of literature?

Please submit your abstract, in either French or English, of approximately 500 words (including the paper’s title, the author’s name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email address) together with a short bio-bibliography to ijs@uantwerpen.be BEFORE 20/09/2015. Notification of acceptance will be given by 20/10/2015.

Regular fee: 40 € (includes reception, two lunches, coffee breaks and conference map)
Student fee: 30 €
Conference dinner: 40 €

Further information about the conference will be available on the site: www.uantwerpen.be/ijs

Organizing committee: Prof. dr. Vivian Liska (Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp), Prof. dr. Arthur Cools (Center for European Philosophy, University of Antwerp), Dr. Michaël de Saint-Cheron (Histara/Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris 3), Prof. dr. Luc Anckaert (KU Leuven)

Scientific committee : Prof. dr. Vivian Liska (Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp), Prof. dr. Arthur Cools (Center for European Philosophy, University of Antwerp), Dr. Michaël de Saint-Cheron (Histara/Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris 3), Prof. dr. Luc Anckaert (KU Leuven), Prof. dr. Eric Hoppenot (ESPE, Université Paris-Sorbonne), Prof. dr. Johan van der Walt (Université de Luxembourg)

The conference aims at offering an opportunity to carry on pondering over different theoretical approaches; over how to conceptualise the various relations within the creative and reception processes of any art work; and finally over any further critical readings of them all.

Keynote speakers:
Carola Barbero (Università di Torino, Labont)
Jean-Pierre Cometti (Aix-Marseille Université)
Roberto Diodato (Università Cattolica, Milano)
Bernard Vouilloux (Université Paris IV Sorbonne)

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Paper proposals (max 300 words) together with a bio-bibliographical note (max 100 words) should be submitted by 15 February 2015 to

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Acceptance for proposals will be sent by 15 March 2015.

Authors of accepted proposals are expected to submit full papers prior to the conference by 15 October 2015. Preliminary research results will thus be shared among the conference participants to further enhance conversation and discussion.
Accepted and presented papers will be published in the official conference proceedings.

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Description
An interdisciplinary research group bringing together scholars, researchers and PhD students from the Modern Languages (LCM) and Philosophy (DAFIST) department at Genoa University announces an international conference themed around issues relating to recent experimental phenomena in the field of contemporary art and literature.
After the extraordinary flourishing avant-garde and new avant-garde art, in the last decades of the 20th century and early 21st century, an increasing number of hybrid works has been produced in literature, visual arts, and new media: the way creative practices circulate within them is not only worth noting but plays a role of paramount importance.

Hybridism, intermediality, transmediality, multimediality, and intersemiosis are the terms that allow us to deal with the variety of such intertwining processes where all sorts of blending take place – i.e. loans from film, photography, digital and video art, literature, etc. – but a clear-cut distinction among these concepts has not been drawn yet. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this international conference aims to enhance critical reasoning around the topic and to create a lively theoretical debate.

In the art field, nowadays, there is an increasing openess among artists to make their practices combine different media – i.e. pictorial storytelling, reading/video/performance, conceptual art, new artistic media, etc. More and more works are conceived regardless of their traditional boundaries and away from institutional places. In addition artistic collaborations stemming from a range of cultural backgrounds have increased exponentially.
In the literary field, the word-image relationship is a topic that has been and continue to be extensively explored and the one criticism has mainly focused on. Equally consistent is the amount of works devoted to themes that span across different art fields. Lately, an up-to-date, innovative critical trend has seen attention intensify around literature “outside” the text, namely forms of representation and performance stemming from a written work that reshape it into a vast array of genres.

More and more actively, critical enquiry has examined transmedial phenomena. As a matter of fact, several are the research areas in which epistemological approaches have been applied – e.g. media and visual studies, literary theory, cognitive philosophy and sciences – some of the most popular researched topics for istance are: the central role played by the addressee in the transmedial arts and his/her role in the building up of meaning/message; the role played by the body in the artistic creation – i.e. the “virtual body” as a “body-image”; the new media performance; the intersemiotic relations; etc.

Scientific Commitee:
Elisa Bricco (Università di Genova, Dip.LCM) Michaela Bürger (Università di Genova, Dip.LCM) Jean-Pierre Cometti (Aix-Marseille Université) Nicola Ferrari (Università di Genova, Dip.LCM) Céline Flécheux (Université de Paris 7) Marcello Frixione (Università di Genova, DAFIST) Oscar Meo (Università di Genova, DAFIST) Luisa Montecucco (Università di Genova, DAFIST) Nancy Murzilli (Università di Genova, Dip.LCM/IFI) Magali Nachtergael (Université de Paris 13) Laura Quercioli (Università di Genova, Dip.LCM) Chiara Rolla (Università di Genova, Dip.LCM) Bernard Vouilloux (Université de Paris IV Sorbonne)

Organizing Committee:
Elisa Bricco Ilaria Boeddu Alessandro Bruzzone Michaela Bürger Anna Fochesato Marcello Frixione Oscar Meo Luisa Montecucco Valeria Mosca Nancy Murzilli Laura Quercioli Chiara Rolla Laura Santini