International Conference “Digitality and the Public Sphere: Literature, Mediality, Practice”

Panel 1: Generating Attention: The Search for Visibility, Emotional Connection, and Authenticity

The public nature of literature produces different strategies for attracting attention. They relate to the selection and use of media, especially the internet, but also to the presentation, the launch by opinion leaders, the politics of the work or the (self-)staging of the authors. Attention-grabbing factors such as commodity aesthetics, advertising, ranking/rating, but also scandals prove to be extremely relevant for the understanding of cultural artifacts, their perception by the public and their reception.

Panel 2: Public Conditions of Literary Production: Digitality, Popularity, Subversion

Literary communication is not solely based on the spontaneous, free behavior of individuals and organizations as actors, but is contextualized, takes place in a system-bound manner and is conditional. Conditions affect communication by enabling, privileging, demanding or preventing production or distribution of literature. They result from the cultural self-image, the political constitution and the other functional systems of a society as well as from the technological possibilities, and they are characterized by historical developments.

Panel 3: Literature, Materialities, and the Virtual: Objects, Roles, Concepts of Creativity

The digitalization of literatures in the present day – more precisely of reading, writing and publishing – calls into question long-established concepts such as the printed book, the first edition, the original, authorship, intellectual property, the completed work, even the individual page, or changes its noticeability, function, ‘dignity’ and perception in the public sphere.

Panel 4: Literary Reflection and Digital Literacy

The structure of literary texts has undergone significant changes with digitalization. Conventional categories such as author, reader, and text are undergoing a fundamental revision and are being redefined. Literary texts are both shaped by these changes and also reflect deeply on these processes. These two aspects – restructuring and processes of reflection – will be the focus of this panel.

Panel 5: : Literary Knowledge Production: Narrative, Creation, and Circulation

Literatures not only have the capacity to hold canonical knowledge at different levels of comprehensibility for the public and thus function as archives of their own kind, but also to produce alternative or subversive knowledge and offer it to different publics of the second and third spheres. Literatures present themselves as centers for the preservation and processing of cultures, their own media and their differentiated practices.

Panel 6: Ethics & Politics: The Politics of Belonging and Exclusion

Without wanting to reduce literature to a partial or substitute discipline of politics or philosophy, at least in modern societies it must be recognized as having a genuinely public responsibility, its own critical potential and its own forms of aesthetic resistance.

The conference will take place at Kreuz & Quer, Bohlenplatz 1, Erlangen (A).

We recommend some hotels:

1. Zeitwohnhaus, Luitpoldstraße 10
2. The Kepos Hotel, Östliche Stadtmauerstraße 7
3. Hotelchen, Theaterstraße 10
4. Altmanns Stuben, Theaterplatz 9
5. A.B. Hotel,  Harfenstraße 1c (keep it small and simpel; booked out very quickly)

From main station to the event location it is a 10 minute walk.

From the event location to Hotel 5 it is a a 12 minute walk.

In addition to the DFG, this conference is funded by

• Dr. Alfred-Vinzl-Stiftung

Papers we solicit could address but need not be limited to the following research fields:

• strategies for generating attention in the literary marketplace (economies of reaction, scandalization, forms of polarization and populism, aspects of cancel culture)
• public conditions of literary production and reception (digital spaces, platforms, and their specific forms of communication)
• mechanisms that regulate access, exclusion and canonization, form community, inform political participation, or lead towards practices of opting out
• literary materialities (algorithms and communication, AI and human creativity; altered technologies of publication, altered practices of reading, digitality and materiality) and their function for the adoption of literary aesthetics, shifting forms and genres, and the self-reflexivity of literature on its own affordances
• literary knowledge production (fiction and non-fiction engaging with the future of the digital, posthumanism, the utopian/ dystopian imaginary)
• literary ethics and politics (negotiations of the public sphere as a place of deliberative politics; as a set of platforms providing air time under specific conditions of inclusion and exclusion)

Please submit abstracts (300 words) and short bios by December 10, 2023 Extended Deadline: February 18, 2024.