Dear Colleagues,
I write to remind that the abstract deadlines for our Forgotten Books and Cultural Memory conference in Taipei are coming up soon (January 4 for scholars who wish to be notified by January 18 and February 1 for all others).
As our conference is in Taiwan, we particularly hope to organize several panels that address the forgetting and remembering of texts in interactions between the East and the West. While many papers given at this conference will address literatures in English (and our keynote speakers work on medieval and Victorian British texts), we are eager to include papers (in English) from scholars working on Chinese texts and to have conversations about forgotten books that cross disciplines.
A full CFP can be found at our website, along with information on the conference, the keynote speakers, companion cultural events, the abstract and presenter information form, and a list of significant archives in Taiwan: https://forgottenbookstaipei.wordpress.com/archives-in-taiwan/. If you know of another archive of interest that is not listed, please send me an e-mail, and I will add it to the site.
Some of the CFP topics that may be of interest include
- What is a forgotten book? How do we define the term?
- Contextualizing the forgotten book
- Recovering (or failing to adequately recover) literary history using digital methods, macroanalysis, distant reading, sampling, statistics, etc.
- Famous unrecoverable, unreadable books. (Books, influential in the past, that have been lost or destroyed and are now only known from summaries or excerpts quoted elsewhere)
- Forced forgetfulness (when conflicts, revolutions [e.g. China’s Cultural Revolution], censorship, and changes in government have made publishing or procuring certain kinds of books difficult).
- The significance of forgotten or nearly-forgotten Mandarin, Japanese, Taiwanese, Hakka, aboriginal-language, and English texts in Taiwanese history.
- Transported/Transplanted books. Books originally written in one place for one culture that, while forgotten or ignored by that culture, have become influential in another place and/or time. Similarly, books that are more popular in translation than they ever were in their original language.
- The reception history of translations of works that were highly successful in one country, were translated to meet a particular interest or need in another country, and have since been forgotten either in their original or in their translated form.
- The effect of the internet, e-readers, or other technology on literary memory and books’ survival.
Thanks, and I hope to see you in Taiwan in May!
Sharin Schroeder <sharinschroeder@mail.ntut.edu.tw>