°Õ³ó±šĢżJournal of Comparative Literature and AestheticsĀ (since 1977) is pleased toĀ announceĀ that it is bringing out soon aĀ Special Issue on SomaestheticsĀ (in two volumes, theory and applications) to felicitate Prof. Richard Shusterman on his 70th birth anniversary.

Many eminent scholars like Thomas W. Leddy, Roger T. Ames, Jerold J. Abrams, Kristina Hƶƶk, Leszek Koczanowicz, Tonino Griffero, Wojciech Malecki, Max Ryynnanen, Yanping Gao, Alexander Kremer, Stefan SnƦvarr, Anne Tarvainen, Stefano Marino, Tanehisa Otabe, Dorota Koczanowicz, Vinod Balakrishnan and others have contributed to this ambitious volume.

Submissions are open for the regular Spring 2020 Issue (Vol. 43, No. 1) of the Journal.ĢżEmail:Ā anantasukla@hotmail.com,Ģżjclaindia@gmail.com.Ģż

Submissions are also open for these special volumes:

1. A special volume on “Chinese Aesthetics: Traditional and Transcultural Perspectives”

Concept Note: China has a long and rich tradition of artistic practices and aesthetic theory, but this tradition has, in contemporary times, been underutilized in international philosophical aesthetics and transcultural theory. This issue of JCLA aims to address this problem by inviting papers that explore Chinese aesthetics, the role it has played in international and transcultural aesthetics, and the most promising ways it could contribute to these fields: 1. Chinese Aesthetic Theory (Traditional and Contemporary); 2. The ā€œtravelingā€ of Chinese art and aesthetics in the history, such as Chinoiserie; 3. Chinese aesthetics as inspirations for other aesthetic cultures or theoretical invention; 4. Comparative studies of aesthetics or artistic genres (poetry, painting, music, drama, calligraphy, etc) between Chinese and other cultural traditions.  

2. A special volume on “Aesthetic Taste”
Concept Note: The 18th century was nicknamed the ā€œCentury of Tasteā€ by George Dickie. This is not too surprising with thinkers like Burke, Hutcheson, Mendelssohn, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Kant. But discussions of taste have waned since then. The 2000s saw a revival in the core traditional aesthetic concepts: beauty, aesthetic experience, and the sublime.  However, taste has been slower in making an appearance. Some recent work (e.g., gustatory taste) has begun to show modest signs of renewed interest. However, there has yet to be a sustained effort to develop new theories of taste, even though it remains central part of our lives. Even popular culture has not abandoned the conceptā€”a multitude of TV shows project ā€˜goodā€™ taste, judging peopleā€™s talents, homes, cooking skills, and more. Rather than passively watching popular culture control the discussion, academics should be active participants in it. This special issue is an attempt to showcase how theories of taste matter today. Some suggested topics: 1. Taste in the digital age; 2. Beauty and disgust in politics; 3. Good and bad taste; 4. Taste in popular culture; 5. Standards of aesthetic appreciation in art and nature; 6. Everyday tastes; 7. Comparative aesthetics as it relates to taste; 8. Classical theories of taste in contemporary perspective, etc.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (ISSN: 0252-8169) is a half-yearly journal published by the Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute, India. The Institute was founded on 22 August 1977 coinciding with the birth centenary of legendary philosopher, aesthetician, and historian of Indian art, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947).Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics is the oldest journal of India in the field of literature and philosophy which still continues sans any societal or institutional support. It is also the only Indian journal in humanities that has drawn the attention of and has also published the most revered scholars of the West, past and present, right from its beginning 43 years ago.  The Journal is committed to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural issues in literary understanding and interpretation, aesthetic theories, conceptual analysis of art, literature, philosophy, religion, mythology, history of ideas, literary theory, history, and criticism.The Journal has already published legends like Rene Wellek, Harold Osborne, John Hospers, John Fisher, Murray Krieger, Martin Bocco, Remo Ceserani, J.B. Vickery, Menachem Brinker, Milton Snoeyenbos, Mary Wiseman, Ronald Roblin, T.R. Martland, S.C. Sengupta, K.R.S. Iyengar, V.K. Chari, Charles Altieri, Peter Lamarque, Martin Jay, Jonathan Culler, Richard Shusterman, Robert Kraut, T.J. Diffey, T.R. Quigley, R.B. Palmer, Keith Keating, and many renowned scholars.JCLA is indexed and abstracted in the MLA International Bibliography, Master List of Periodicals (USA), Ulrich’s Directory of Periodicals, CrossRef, EBSCO, ProQuest, and Gale.Celebrated scholars of the time like Rene Wellek, Harold Osborne, Mircea Eliade, Monroe Beardsley, John Hospers, John Fisher, Meyer Abrams, John Boulton and many renowned foreign and Indian scholars were Members of its Editorial Board.

The latter only started in a second phase, when emerging post-disciplinary fields began to make suggestions for research platforms that were more defined and methodologically better founded. Somaesthetics, initiated by Richard Shusterman, and design culture studies, initiated by Guy Julier among others, are two among these most promising new post-disciplines.

Design discourses, practices and products that are constituted in the synergy of all our senses are the protagonists of design culture studies that takes design culture as a flow of cultural products produced by social practices and reflected in cultural discourses. To Julierā€™s mind, design culture as an object of study includes both the material and immaterial aspects of everyday life. At the same time, somaesthetics explores and reconceptualizes the focal point and ultimate reference of human environments, products, practices and discourses, namely, the embodied experience. Whereas somaesthetics reflects the pragmatist understanding of philosophy as a means of improving experience through a reflective art of living, it defines itself as a tool for designing good life. According to Shusterman, somaesthetics is the critical, meliorative study of the experience and the use of oneā€™s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning devoted to the knowledge, discourses and disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it.

Both design culture studies and somaesthetics are interested in body-mind interactions and both include theory, methodology and practice alike within their action radius.
The purpose of this conference is to take a step backward and address design theorists, philosophers, anthropologists, aestheticians, social scientists, healthcare professionals, technology experts, artists, designers and educators to discuss the parallel and complementary possibilities of these post-disciplinary approaches in the spirit of initial dialogue and pragmatic goodwill in order to create platforms of fulfilling and fruitful future collaborations.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
ā€“ Somaesthetic aspects of user experience
ā€“ Virtual reality, immersive technologies
ā€“ Posthumanism, Artificial intelligence and embodiedness
ā€“ Human-computer interaction
ā€“ Ambient experience design
ā€“ Atmospheres in human environments
ā€“ Social body and experience society
ā€“ Everyday aesthetics
ā€“ Object biography, material memory and material engagement

The organisers are expecting original and unpublished articles. A selection of the papers will be published in the forthcoming issues of the peer-reviewed, online, academic research journals The Journal of Somaesthetics and Pragmatism Today or in a volume on somaesthetics and design based on the conference and published in the Brill series Studies in Somaesthetics.

Further details and online submission at:

Or submit your proposal (in no more than 300 words with 5 keywords) of a 20-30 minutes presentation to: conference2019@mome.hu

DEADLINE OF SUBMISSION: 15.02.2019

See the for more details of the conference.

21 – 23 March 2018 at Saarland University

Dreams of Birth and Death: Liminal Bodily Experiences in Dreams: Literature, the Fine Arts, Theatre, Music and Film

The enigmatic anthropological phenomenon of dreaming has always captured the imagination of European cultures: dream depictions can be found in artistic media from the antiquity to the present day. Depending on their specific historical and cultural contexts, the representations of dreams ā€“ whether in literary texts, paintings, music or on the stage ā€“ clearly differ from each other in their aesthetic and formal components. However, representations of dreams share one theme in particular which cuts across all historical and cultural boundaries: the transition between life and non-life as an existential, liminal experience, similar to those found in the processes of giving birth/being born and in dying. It is this theme that our conference takes into view.

Dreams that focus on the limitations and boundaries of human life are negotiated in the Bible, in classical myths (the Iliad, the Oresteia), in medieval epics and tales (Parcifal, die Nibelungen, the Canterbury Tales) and in early modern plays (Shakespeare, CalderĆ³n); they are inscribed into the Enlightenment (Diderot, Rousseau), the Romantic era (Novalis, Brentano) and into modern and contemporary literature (Kafka, Karahasan, Politycki). The fine arts (Daumier, Hodler), music (Berlioz, Korngold) and film (Bergman, Kubrick, Craven) have frequently sought to portray dreamlike (or nightmarish) experiences that are existential and/or transcendental. Birth and death are often found to be disquieting and threatening not least because they invariably involve a highly personal experience of oneā€™s own body. At the same time, they are processes that take place beyond the limits of memory: death and birth are situated at or beyond the borders of life; as such, they occur too early or too late to be perceived and recorded as authentic experiences.

However, dreams ā€“ fictionalized, imagined, and performed ā€“ can open up experiential spaces for these extreme physical transitions. The mysterious elements of dreams ā€“ their disregard for the physical laws of time and space, and for cultural models of identity, coherence and logic, are magnified in dreams of the beginning and end of life. Simultaneously, the artistic depiction of such experience is particularly challenging, as dreams delve into the gap between universal human experiences like birth and death on the one hand, and their subjective, individual inexpressibility on the other, in ways that are every bit as confusing as they are original: memories and stories of dreams find ways and means to transform that which is ā€œelsewhereā€ and unimaginable into something palpable and conveyable.

Since 2015, members of the DFG-funded Research Training Group ā€œEuropean Dream Culturesā€ have been investigating the interrelations between dream aesthetics, culture, and the history of knowledge. Bearing in mind the goal of pursuing a literary, cultural and media history of dreams and dreaming, this international conference is dedicated to the phenomena of dreamed birth and death, related discourses and artistic realisations.

We invite research papers on death and birth in dream ā€“ in all types of art and from the perspectives of various disciplines, ranging from art and literature studies to theatre, film, music and media studies, as well as history, theology and philosophy.

Papers could focus on (but are not limited to) topics such as:

Existential liminal experiences and aesthetic dream depictions
ā€¢ Exploring artistic depictions of dreams of birth and death regarding:
– somatic vs. sensory experience,
– limits of the body / limits of the medium,
– experiences of time and/or space
ā€¢ Positively connoted dreams of death
ā€¢ Dreams of birth and death and their real-world connections (political implications, (post)dictatorial contexts, dream and collective traumata, identitarian functions, colonial and postcolonial implications, etc.)
ā€¢ Dream depictions of existential liminal experiences in multimedia art forms

Poetics-of-knowledge perspectives / interplay of ā€œcultural workā€ and aesthetic construction

ā€¢ Historical evolution of religious discourses and artistic dreams of birth and death
ā€¢ Interplay of cultural and scientific knowledge of birth and death in artistic dream depictions
ā€¢ Gender-specific articulation of birth and death in artistic depictions of dreams
ā€¢ Individual dream poetics and existential liminal experiences between biography and cultural/academic discourses on birth and death

In keeping with the analytical focus areas defined in the Research Groupā€™s agenda, the subjects of study can be approached from diachronic, transmedial and/or comparative perspectives.

If you are interested in giving a paper at the conference, please send your brief abstract (max. 3,000 characters) to: traumkulturen@uni-saarland.de by 31 August 2017, including a short bio. Abstracts ā€“ and papers ā€“ can be in German, English or French.

Following the conference, selected contributions will be published in a volume of the series Traum ā€“ Wissen ā€“ ErzƤhlen by Fink Verlag (Paderborn).

http://www.traumkulturen.de/veranstaltungen/konferenzen-co.html

Bodies are obviously the targets of oneā€™s daily care in terms of personal hygiene, grooming, exercise, and proper nourishment. They are also objects of care in the sense of worry or concern, since we all suffer illness and death through our bodies. However, the sentient, purposive, active body or soma is also a subjectivity that examines and cares for the body as object, whether it be oneā€™s own body or the bodies of others who one wants to help or comfort. We all need such curative help or comfort at some point in our lives; and some people devote their professional and personal lives to giving such care. Bodies need and give care in many ways and for many reasons: to overcome illness and disability, to address and alleviate dependence, to learn new skills and remedy bad habits, to inspire greater confidence for personal flourishing and greater social betterment. This conference will examine the wide range of somatic conditions that require care and the variety of somatic methods of providing such care, while exploring how these conditions and methods are represented in cultural theory, health and wellness studies, literature, and the arts.

Selected papers may be developed for publication in The Journal of Somaesthetics (http://somaesthetics.wordpress.com/) or in an edited book based on the conference papers.

Abstracts of 250 words, and a current CV, should be sent electronically as attachments, no later than October 15, 2015, to Richard Shusterman at bodymindculture@fau.edu. Please direct conference inquiries to the same address. Further information about the conference will be made available at http://www.fau.edu/bodymindculture, where you can also consult the programs of our prior international conferences. Prospective speakers will be notified by mid-November, 2015.

The Journal of Somaesthetics invites submissions from any disciplinary perspective that address the relationship between the soma and belief.

Deadline: September 1, 2015

Papers should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words and prepared for blind review. Authors should submit a separate cover page including: authorā€™s name, institutional affiliation, word count and contact information. All submissions should be sent to the Associate Editor, Russell Pryba at rpryba@gmail.com. Please put ā€œBodies of Beliefā€ in the subject line. General inquires regarding this issue should be sent to the Guest Editor, Bryan Turner at bturner@gc.cuny.edu

ĢĒŠÄŹÓʵ the Journal of Somaesthetics: The Journal of Somaesthetics is a peer-reviewed, online, academic research journal devoted to research that advances the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics, understood as the critical study and meliorative cultivation of the experience and performance of the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-stylization. The journal therefore welcomes contributions exploring the field of somaesthetics through one -or more- of the many disciplines that already inform this field: philosophy, aesthetics, arts and design research, technology studies, somatic, health, and social sciences, history, physiology, psychology and pedagogy. For more information about the journal, see