Workshop/ Panel at the International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI): “Thought in Science and Fiction”

Global Consciousness: Fictional Narratives of Changing World Realities
Literature has always been a platform for reflecting upon reality. The world, as an ‘imagined space’ (Edward Soja), has, for instance, provided a fertile canvas for the creative imagination in a variety of literary genres. As more of the world has been explored, conquered and gradually perceived to be ‘smaller’, the need has also arisen to mould and conceive new world realities in fiction; especially as science still grapples with the blurring of categories intended to capture the global dimension of these realities. In this way, literature has always been intertwined with globalising realities and may figure as a fruitful source in an intellectual and cultural history of global consciousness. The proposed workshop, thus, intends to investigate literary texts which display a concrete sense of the ‘global’ or how it has evolved over time and been conceived in distinct contexts by specific fictional authors.

Literature, of course, explores, transports and communicates ideas to the reader in its own distinct ways and can also be seen as a wider part of certain societal debates that deal with political, economic and social transformations. The contribution it makes to these debates, then, rests, firstly, on the way literary texts remap and re-imagine supposed changing realities (e.g. utopian, post-/colonial, science fiction or popular adventure writing) and, secondly, on how they are received by the extended readership. Thus, papers may focus on the picture of the world created and depicted in certain literary texts or the way they are embedded in wider societal and cultural discourses. Moreover, literature consists of diverse narrative elements such as place, time, character, voice and linguistic style. How these key elements of literary texts are affected by dealing with the globality of their time, and the type of global consciousness they create are certainly intertwined with the general focus of the workshop.

Broadly, the workshop will concentrate upon the Anglo-German context, i.e. literature written in English and German, and especially encourages cross-cultural and diachronic comparative approaches. We invite you to submit proposals. They should include an abstract of the presentation (about 300 words in English) and a short CV of no more than two pages, including a list of relevant publications.

Chairs:
Fergal Lenehan and Nadine Jänicke (University of Leipzig)
Email: jaenicke@rz.uni-leipzig.de, feargal_l@yahoo.com