Lectures on video: Michael North | Marjorie Perloff | Gilles Philippe | Gisele Sapiro | Ted Underwood

Recognizing that (modern) literary history is currently one of the main sites of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studies, this conference aimed to investigate how literary historical research has modified our understanding of writing between 1900 and 1950. The following perspectives were considered:

• The practice of literary history has revaluated many crucial notions in literary studies. These include archive, book, event, genre, objects, and style. How has this conceptual reconsideration affected our view of literature’s and writers’ complex dynamics between 1900 and 1950?
• Recent decades have seen an explosion of revised approaches to literary history. These include digital humanities, media archaeology, cognitive approaches, ecocriticism and affect theory. Which of these are of special value to the history of literature from the modernist period and why?
• Recently, our understanding of literature’s ‘context’ has gone through drastic changes. Once universally understood as the immediate institutional, economic or political constellation surrounding a text, ‘context’ nowadays ranges, from the ‘brain’ (in cognitive studies) to the ‘universe’ (in so-called Big History). How can these drastic redefinitions help us to reconceive the history of literature between 1900 and 1950?
• Place and space always have been said to be of significance to the historical development of European literature. What new approaches to space and place allow us to reread the regional, national and transnational circulation of European writing during this half century?
• Which new forms of reading to have gained weight in recent years (from distant reading and uncritical reading to non-reading and beyond) are of relevance to the historiography of literature from the modernist period?
• The first half of the twentieth-century saw the rise of many historiographical methods (from Formalism to Critical Theory) that went on to play a crucial role in literary history. What other approaches hold innovative promise?

The conference was held in September 2015 in Leuven.