Abstract
In recent years, the academic field of literary studies has changed radically. Literary scholars are now working on objects other than poems, dramas or fiction. This essay presents an ongoing strategic project, Cultural Literacy in Contemporary Europe, which was founded in 2007 and run in 2009-11 as an European Science Foundation & Cooperation in Science and Technology (ESF-COST) synergy. Its aim is to investigate and celebrate the range of research currently being conducted in the field we have renamed “literary-and-cultural studies”, or LCS. This research aims to enhance cultural literacy. Cultural literacy is an attitude to the social and cultural phenomena that shape our existence—bodies of knowledge, fields of social action, individuals or groups, and of course cultural artefacts, including texts—which views them as being essentially readable: it is a way of looking at social and cultural issues, especially issues of change and mobility, through the lens of literary thinking. The project focuses on four academic fields—cultural memory, migration and translation, electronic textuality, and biopolitics and the body—and four concepts: textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity and historicity. It stresses multilingualism and is part of the movement of interdisciplinarity within the humanities and between the humanities and other disciplines, but remains a distinctive activity within that larger movement.
Highlights
Picture a researcher in an international academic forum—perhaps an interdisciplinary research committee or assessment panel—who is asked, over coffee or during the opening tour de table, to describe her research field
The project focuses on four academic fields—cultural memory, migration and translation, electronic textuality, and biopolitics and the body—and four concepts: textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity and historicity
Problems of Literary Studies within European Research In October 2007, it came to the notice of the Standing Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation (ESF) that there was a “problem” with literature
Summary
Picture a researcher in an international academic forum—perhaps an interdisciplinary research committee or assessment panel—who is asked, over coffee or during the opening tour de table, to describe her research field. The project I shall present in this essay was first formed in 2007 to chart the activities of a large group of humanities scholars. These scholars began their academic life in literary studies and have taken literary questions into areas well beyond the philological study of literary texts. In doing so, they are entering the field of strategic developments in humanities across (and beyond) Europe and across (and beyond) their own discipline. The project aims to make this activity more visible and to explore ways of taking it further
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