International Conference: When is Theory? Shifts of Time Frame in Contemporary Literary Studies

In order to broaden the canon, built on Eurocentric or American premises, recent literary studies have dismantled notions or preconceptions of rigid territorialisation, such as the opposition West-East, South-North, or the nation as the basic unit of cultural analysis. With its insistence on the dependency between space and cultural autonomy, the ?geographical turn? has been one of the most convincing platforms of redefining the literary system in more democratic terms. An equally important agent for reconsidering the general frames of literary studies, that of temporality, has never been fully acknowledged. For reasons which are worth questioning themselves, the ?temporal turn? failed to become a privileged angle of re-examining literary relations. 

The absence of a more systematic reflection on the relationship between time frame and theory is all the more surprising as there are important contributions that denounce the rational periodization rooted in European metanarratives of culture. The priority of long-term time structures (longue durée) over the segmented evental history, as defined by the historian Fernand Braudel, permeated not only economical or sociological approaches (Immanuel Wallerstein?s World Systems theory is openly indebted to this perspective), but also literary re-conceptualizations. World Literature studies, represented by scholars like David Damrosch, Martin Puchner or Wai Chee Dimock, have tried to trace the circulation of literary ideas across what the latter calls ?deep time?, understood as ?a more extended duration (…), planetary in scope?. Following postcolonial accounts that denounced the West refusal to see other cultures existing on the same temporal plane as „chronopolitics” (Johannes Fabian), Pascale Casanova?s The World Republic of Letters, a work whose French/European biases have already been criticized, defines the literary economy as a race of the so-called (semi)peripheral national cultures to arrive at a Greenwich meridian of modernity. Far from being a neutral component of world literary system, as traditional studies may have regarded it, time is an important indicator of power relationships.

Given the above considerations, the conference’s aim is to signal the insufficient interrogation of the temporal premises in literary studies and to invite reflections on the ideological presuppositions of the temporal concepts embedded in the vocabulary of theory. Our call for papers openly pleads for a reframing of the material employed in literary studies in order to question the „mechanical clock” that standardized approaches to cultures. It also calls for an elaboration of theories or concepts encompassing diverse and heterogeneous experiences of time.

Perspectives on the outlined topic may include, but are not limited to:

1. Concepts and preconceptions of time in literary studies
2. The meaning of synchronicity, modernity, development, progress in culture
3. The politics of Eurochronology
4. Multiple, disjunctive, incommensurable experiences of time
5. Alternative time units of analysis: longue durée, deep time, structural time, planetary time
6. The Schizophrenic, fragmented, compressed time of postmodernity/ virtual reality/ late capitalism

Please submit your paper proposal to metacriticjournal@gmail.com including: your name and affiliation, a paper title, a 150 words proposal with 5 key words, and a 100 words bio-note.

Submission deadline: March 15, 2021

Acceptance Notice: March 22, 2021