Leeds-Swansea Colloquia on Contemporary German Literature

The Leeds Colloquia on Contemporary German Literature series is the successor to the Bradford Series of Colloquia on Contemporary German Literature. Like its precursor, the Leeds Series has as its focal point of departure a three-day, biennial colloquium devoted to a particular theme. The colloquia have been supported by a range of cultural institutions over the years including the Goethe Institut, Austrian Cultural Forum and Modern Humanities Research Association, enabling them to act as a forum for dialogue between Germanisten in the German-speaking world and established and aspiring scholars based in the UK, Ireland, the USA and Australia. It is of equal importance that a broad understanding of what constitutes literary writing is fostered. Thus while ‘canonical’ literary figures have always featured, there has been a commitment to new writing which has given rise to the first academic discussions in English of several significant contemporary writers. The organising editors are Professor Julian Preece (University of Wales, Swansea) and Professor Frank Finlay (University of Leeds) who work in tandem with an international Advisory Board. The Leeds Colloquia on Contemporary German Literature series is the successor to the Bradford Series of Colloquia on Contemporary German Literature. Like its precursor, the Leeds Series has as its focal point of departure a three-day, biennial colloquium devoted to a particular theme. The colloquia have been supported by a range of cultural institutions over the years including the Goethe Institut, Austrian Cultural Forum and Modern Humanities Research Association, enabling them to act as a forum for dialogue between Germanisten in the German-speaking world and established and aspiring scholars based in the UK, Ireland, the USA and Australia. It is of equal importance that a broad understanding of what constitutes literary writing is fostered. Thus while ‘canonical’ literary figures have always featured, there has been a commitment to new writing which has given rise to the first academic discussions in English of several significant contemporary writers. The organising editors are Professor Julian Preece (University of Wales, Swansea) and Professor Frank Finlay (University of Leeds) who work in tandem with an international Advisory Board. The Leeds Colloquia on Contemporary German Literature series is the successor to the Bradford Series of Colloquia on Contemporary German Literature. Like its precursor, the Leeds Series has as its focal point of departure a three-day, biennial colloquium devoted to a particular theme. The colloquia have been supported by a range of cultural institutions over the years including the Goethe Institut, Austrian Cultural Forum and Modern Humanities Research Association, enabling them to act as a forum for dialogue between Germanisten in the German-speaking world and established and aspiring scholars based in the UK, Ireland, the USA and Australia. It is of equal importance that a broad understanding of what constitutes literary writing is fostered. Thus while ‘canonical’ literary figures have always featured, there has been a commitment to new writing which has given rise to the first academic discussions in English of several significant contemporary writers. The organising editors are Professor Julian Preece (University of Wales, Swansea) and Professor Frank Finlay (University of Leeds) who work in tandem with an international Advisory Board.

3 publications

Contemporary Critical Concepts and Pre-Enlightenment Literature

ISSN: 1074-6781

"Writers who worked before the beginning of rationalist universalism's triumphal period which may be ending now-explored issues of consciousness, ideology, and culture that recent criticism and critical theory, using various specialized vocabularies of concepts, have returned to the center of literäry and social criticism. These early modern figures often anticipated some of our clilemmas; How to manipulate an apparently quite mutable world and, at the same time, preserve belief in an immutable "centered" self? How to reconcile rationalist universalism with personal and cultural stability? Rene Descartes's postulate of man as the master and proprietor of an increasingly built world is fundamentally incompatible with his effort to underwrite man as a stable philosophical subject. Man's technical and linguistic mastery devours his "transcendent subjectivity." Students of literature are now using the ideas of what Larry Riggs calls "post-enlightenment thinkers"-Max Horkheimer, Jacques Lacan, Michael Foucault, Rene Girard, and others-to elucidate the implicit and explicit debates about rationalism that are embedded in literary works. This trend is most usefully seen as a renewal of contact with preoccupations that were quite current in medieval, Renaissance, and seventeenth-century European literature. To date, however, innovative criticism has focused an more recent literature. Some post-structuralists-most notably Jacques Lacan-have tried their hand at interpreting early works. Their ideas are interesting, but their knowledge of the periods in question is often weak. Manuscripts on Elizabethan and Restoration theater, French, Italian, and German writers of the medieval and Renaissance periods, and die seventeenth-century French dramatists and moralists are welcome. "

3 publications