SAUTE Biennial Conference 2015 – University of Geneva
24-25 April 2015
ECONOMIES OF ENGLISH
combined with CUSO Doctoral Workshop: The Changing Value of English Studies (26 April 2015)
Conference organizers: Dr Martin Leer, Dr Erzsi Kukorelly, Prof. Genoveva Puskas
Description:
As the world still reels from the financial crisis of 2007-8, it seems timely to reflect on the connections between money and value embedded in all our discourses about economy, language and literature. Marxists and neoliberals have classically theorized this as reflecting the mechanisms of capitalism and the market. More recently, however, the literary theorist Marc Shell has seen the invention of coinage as underlying the whole of Western philosophy, while the anthropologist David Graeber has proposed that all of the great religions and political ideologies are responses to the moral confusion of money. These are concerns that go to the heart of English studies, both because English is the global language of money, and because the discipline and its language rest on a goldmine of unexamined economic metaphors: from literary debts to loanwords, from redemption to counterfeit and queer, from currency to exchange, from the economy of syntax to the economy of poetic expression.
The organizers welcome proposals for papers or panels covering all aspects of the conference theme: from linguistics, literature and cultural studies; from all historical periods, including especially those before the invention of economics in the eighteenth century; from medieval numismatics to the rhetoric of financial derivatives; from debt in the novels of Dickens to Anne Carson’s theory of poetry as the Economy of the Unlost; from the pragmatics of metaphor to “economizing with the truth”; from economics vs. ecology to the economics of gender; from the politics of funding for the teaching of English as a second language to the politics of funding for English departments in universities.
Whether you think money is base or superstructure, a penny for your thoughts!
Extended deadline for proposals: 27 February 2015.
Please submit your abstract on this page.
KEYNOTES (confirmed):
Professor Marc Shell, Harvard University
Professor John Joseph, University of Edinburgh
Professor Laura Brown, Cornell University
Professor Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge