Reading Live: Literature, Science and Humanities

In collaboration with the Slovenian Writers’ Association, the Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences), and the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana), the Slovenian Comparative Literature Association will host the 9th annual International Comparative Literature Colloquium. This year, the colloquium is entitled Reading Live: Literature, Science and the Humanities.

The colloquium will offer three thematically divided albeit interconnected and overlapping problematics. The first one will examine the contemporary relevance of humanities and transgressive literary thought for the historiographic and nomothetic epistemological positions of scientific knowledge. Following up from the first, the second focus will be on the field of literature as a living, inconclusive or non-finalised totality, and particularly on the idea of autopoiesis of living systems as conceptualised by science and its link with poiesis in humanities. Finally, the third problematic will include conceptual questions of performativity as an aesthetic and social effect of literary practice on the one hand and as an imposed imperative of science policy on the other.

Possible themes include but are not limited to: life, reflexivity, dialogism and narrativisation in science, the humanities and literature; the nomothetic vs. idiographic knowledge; the linguistic turn in semiotics, physics and biology; the performativity of literary discourse; historicity of knowledge; realism and the real.