History of the Modern Practice of Fiction
International Conference, October, 10–11, 2019, Göttingen (Germany)Organizers/Contact: Benjamin Gittel, Tilmann Köppe
Over the last few decades, the establishment of fictionality or a so-called “consciousness of fictionality” has been postulated by different disciplines for different periods of time: for antiquity, the High Middle Ages, the early modern period and, depending on the language areal considered, for different phases of the 18th century. However, the comparability of these studies, even if they are related to the same period of time, is hampered by various factors: divergent concepts of fictionality, different sources or aspects of these sources taken into account and different methodologies.
Concurrent to this collection and analysis of diverse empirical material, pragmatist approaches have in recent decades gained importance in systematically oriented theories of fiction. Today, fictionality is increasingly understood as a social practice or institution that is essentially determined by sets of rules for authors and readers and their shared knowledge of these rules: the so-called “modern practice of fiction”.
Against this backdrop the conference aims at clarifying the assumptions that should be built into a history of fiction, testing quantitative and qualitative methods for investigating the history of the modern practice of fiction and discussing different models of its change and its periodization.
Confirmed Speakers
Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford)
Stefan Descher (Göttingen)
Carsten Dutt (Notre Dame)
Helmut Galle (São Paulo)
Eva-Maria Konrad (Frankfurt a. Main)
Françoise Lavocat (Paris)
Henrike Manuwald (Göttingen)
Stein Haugom Olsen (Bilkent)
Nicholas Paige (Berkeley)
Dirk Werle & Uwe Korn (Heidelberg)
Frank Zipfel (Mainz)