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Masterclass on 3 June at the GCSC, JLU, Gießen

This Masterclass will take an innovative and interactive format with two parts. In the first part, Dr Clara Dawson and other researchers (from JLU and other univrsities) in the environmental humanities will present 'lightning' papers on different aspects of the Environmental Humanities and how its methods apply to their research. Dr Dawson will then provide responses to 'lightning papers', drawing them together into a more general discussion of the issues raised, and broadening to a Q&A with other attendees. The second part of the Masterclass will include a group reading and discussion of several 'texts' (both literary and material) pertaining to the environment and the natural history, which will be provided and contextualised by Dr Dawson. Overall, the Masterclass promises to be an enriching experience for anyone interested in new developments in the Environmental Humanities, as well as an opportunity for those early career researchers pursuing this area to engage in knowledge-transfer and networking with other researchers across this exciting field. It is also an excellent opportunity for advanced BA and MA students in literary studies to leanr about the Environmental Humanities, and to engage with leading scholars in the field.

The line up for "lightning papers" so far includes: Clara Dawson (Manchester), Deborah de Muijnck (Giessen), Dorothea Sawon (Giessen), Oliver Voelker (Frankfurt), Fabricio Belsoff (Giessen), with more to come!

GGK/GCSC | MFR
Otto-Behaghel-Straße 12
35394 Gießen

More info here.

May 14, 2024
4 pm CET
IG 1.414, Campus Westend

This presentation is based on data from interviews conducted with 1005 Croatian respondents about literary texts which they had read, and how they remembered them. It was collected as part of the PoKUS project, focusing on how non-professional readers conceptualize and use literature (https://pokus.ffzg.unizg.hr/en/). It is an ongoing project which serves to record and give a voice to the 99% percent of non-professional literary readers, who have historically been underrepresented compared to the 1% of professional readers (writers, critics, editors, professors, teachers…), whose memories and opinions formulate our collective memory of literature. The presentation will first lay out the project methodology, and then provide its basic findings. These will include an overview of the reader sample, a list of the most remembered texts and writers, and a breakdown of the texts by year of publication and genre. The second part of the presentation will look into some particular aspects of the readers' collective memory, such as the discourse they used to talk about literature, the most impressive parts of the text, the emotions they felt during reading, their reading motivation, writer recognition, and transmedial memory. Finally, as the last and integral part of the presentation, any interested participants may request any information available from the database (e.g., about a particular text or writer). The author will then try to provide a suitable answer based on the data at hand, to demonstrate how well (or not so well) the everyday memories of literature are represented in it.