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2011 LCL Colloquium: Image-Media-Text

Exploring the Study of Literatures, Cultures & Languages in the 21st Century

September 15-16, 2011
Konover Auditorium, Dodd Center

Susan Buck-Morss
Cornell University 		Todd Presner
University of California Los Angeles 		Francisco Goldman
Trinity College
Thursday 3:30pm: "Seeing Global"
 Watch Recording 		Friday 10:00am: "Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities"
 Watch Recording 		Friday 2:00pm: "The Ethics of Naming: Memoir and Fiction"
 Watch Recording
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The integration of the study of various regional cultures, periods, and methodologies is essential to literary and cultural scholarship in the context of an emerging global community. The central focus of the future integrated doctoral program in Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut is the study of literature, media, and culture through language, emphasizing that in the second decade of the 21st century, scholarship in these fields needs to show awareness of, and exceed, boundaries set by disciplines, nations, and regions.

These developments also make clear that the study of language and culture cannot be reduced to the spoken or written manifestations of a culture. It must include manifestations which are essentially multimodal, such as digital film, video games, social media, digital humanities, electronic literature and interactive fiction, virtual worlds, and the relation of all these new media to the products of earlier discursive technologies, like non-digital artistic forms (i.e., traditional art and literature), film, and other traditional media. At the same time, the study and teaching of the historical grounding of languages, literatures, and entire cultures in the ancient, medieval, and pre-modern worlds has paradoxically also gained in importance: the extraordinary fluidity of our present cultural landscape makes it imperative to produce scholars and teachers who can ground their research and their students' learning in a thorough study of the past as prologue.

This colloquium invites speakers to consider the products and practices of the interrelations of image, media, and text across disciplines. We envision a conversation that will explore different approaches to understanding their contact zones and symbolic terrain, their acts of fusion, cross-fertilization, or antagonism both historically and conceptually. We are also interested in discussions concerning the relationship between literature/media and the public sphere. How do literature and (new) media help create, react to, or intervene in regional or global domains of public opinion? How are they related to socioeconomic structures and political systems?