The 16th biannual conference of the Nordic Association for Literary Research

The conference was postponed.

New dates: 14–16 June 2022, Trondheim, Norway

Conference theme: Literature and space

Over the past decade, we have experienced new developments in our cultural and political perceptions of space. What was believed, at the turn of the millennium, to be an irreversible movement of spatial expansion towards a postnational, globalized world, has proven to be far more complex and “gritty”. Recent political landscapes have been characterized by a countermovement of contraction, into a remobilization of nationalism, ideals of the nation state, and the preoccupation with borders. The refugee crises of the 2010s and the climate crisis are both embedded into an ideological conflict centring around the idea of geographical and political space as something precarious. The recent corona-virus crisis has reconfigured our perceptions of space in yet another way, in what could be described as a double movement of contraction and expansion: the use of isolation, quarantines, and so-called social distancing, the closing of borders and radical reduction of movement and travel, correspond to a contraction of our living spaces. At the same time, an opposite movement has taken place in the digital domain, in an expansion of our virtual spaces within culture, education, and commerce.  
 
These developments call for responses from the community of literary scholars on the relationship between literature and space, and, by extension, for reassessing the critical approaches in literary studies that have followed the so-called spatial turn of the humanities and social sciences. Although approaches to literature and space are as methodologically as they are thematically diverse, they share a conception of literature being important to how cultures perceive space, and of space being important to literary forms. The urgent questions now are how these approaches can help us understand the political and cultural developments of the new decade, and how these developments in turn can be used to rethink our critical approaches.

Professor Sally Bushell, Lancaster University

Sally Bushell is Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature at Lancaster University (UK) and specializes in spatial material and digital forms of interpretation in nineteenth-century literature. She is currently a primary investigator in the project Creating a Chronotopic Ground for the Mapping of Literary Texts. Her publications include Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickinson (2009); the forthcoming co-edited collection Romantic Cartographies (Cambridge, 2020) and the recently published monograph Reading and Mapping Fiction – Spatialising the Literary Text (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Dr. phil Barbara Piatti

Barbara Piatti holds a PhD in German Studies. She created and lead the project Ein literarischer Atlas Europas Between 2006 and 2014 she was research-group leader at the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation, ETH Zürich, and in 2010 she was appointed as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study. Since 2014 she works as an independent scholar and non-fiction writer. Dr. Piatti has given over 70 lectures in Europe and overseas on her research in literary geography, and is the author of Die Geographie der Literatur – Schauplätze, Handlungsräume, Raumphantasien (Wallstein Verlag, 2008).

Professor Bertrand Westphal (PDF), University of Limoges

Bertrand Westphal is Professor of Comparative literature and Literary theory at the University of Limoges (FR). Founder of geocriticism, he specializes in world literature, postmodernism, and the interplay of art and literary cartographies. His works include Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (transl. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), The Plausible World. A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place, and Maps (2011, transl. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), La Cage des méridiens. La Littérature et l’Art contemporain face à la globalisation (Éditions de Minuit, 2016), og Atlas des égarements (Éditions de Minuit, 2019).