Call for Papers: International Conference in Literary Studies 'Poetics of Home/House'

Dear colleagues!

On occasion of its 20th anniversary, Professor V. Fesenko Chair of Theory and History of World Literature, Kyiv National Linguistic University announces call for papers to be presented at the International Conference in Literary Studies 'Poetics of Home/House' to be held at the Kyiv National Linguistic University on 17-18 March 2016.

The concept of ‘home’ has always been basic for human communities as a transhistorical constant. In Satya Mohanti’s words, “all human beings require warmth, rest, nourishment and shelter”. These needs can best be satisfied by ‘home’, and the fact that this truth is always culturally specific and variably instantiated is no argument against is universal validity. It is no wonder, therefore, that ‘home’ has figured prominently in literature throughout its history as a fundamental element of human life representing stability, shelter, protection, and family bliss, or, on the contrary, repression, stifling atmosphere, conservatism, and philistinism. In late 20th – early 21st cc. marked by global migration and deterritorialization processes, as well as the emergence of extensive diasporic communities, the concept of ‘home’ became subject to dramatic metamorphoses. We are interested in the ways ‘home’/’house’ has been (re)conceptualized over centuries (and over the past decades) in various cultures and literatures.

Therefore, we invite papers exploring a multiplicity of approaches to the concept of ‘home’ in national literatures at different stages of their development. Proposals for interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary papers are especially welcome. Possible subjects for discussion may include, but are by no means limited to the following:

• Phenomenon of home in cultural-historical paradigm

• Imagological dimensions of ‘home’

• Poetics of home: intermedial aspect (the architecture of text, ‘home’ in film and on television, in photography and painting, etc.)

• Rhetorics of home

• Semiotics of home

• Phenomenology of home

• Values ​​of home. ‘The feeling of home’ as a worldview landmark

• Ideology of home

• Sociological dimensions of home

• Anthropology of home

• Home vs. Universe: anthropo-cosmological dimension

• Home as the center of life and safety

• The space of home in the light of the theory of everyday life

• Chronotope of home

• Home and homelessness

• Destruction, decline and loss of home. Expulsion from home and return home

• ‘Home’ and diaspora, search for home, protection of home

• Existential dimension of home

• Substitutes of home

• Metamorphosis of home

• Modification of the concept ‘home’ for deterritorialised communities and displaced persons

• Gender coordinates of home

• Home and violence

• Images of individual inner spaces

• Increasing role of imagination in constructing the concept of ‘home’ under conditions of electronic mediation of reality and mass migration on a global scale

• Poetics of secrets in literature: home as a private and collective space

• Home as family space / space of lonely existence in the twentieth century literature

The conference will result in selected papers’ publication in the journal Contemporary Literary Studies (Issue 13, 2016).

Applications containing abstracts (200 words) should be sent to svitlit1@gmail.com by February 1, 2016. Application form can be found here.

Looking forward to fruitful cooperation,

Organizing Committee.

V.I. Fesenko Department of Theory and History of Literature

About us  

V.I. Fesenko Department of Theory and History of Literature was established at the Kyiv National Linguistic University (then Kyiv State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages) under the Decree of the Ministry of Education of Ukraine in June, 1996 at the instigation of O.K. Romanovsky, Doctor of Philology, ex-rector of the Institute and a well-known expert in literary theory.

The introduction of the comprehensive “History of World Literature” course and such courses as “Introduction to Literary Studies”, “Literary Theory” and “Methodology of Teaching Literature” contributed to bestowal of university status (and later the status of national university) to the Institute, since the courses in question made it possible to launch a comprehensive program in Philology.

From the time of its establishment till 1999 the Department was headed by Sergiy Mykhaylovych Prygodiy (1953-2013), Doctor of Philology, Professor, scholar in the fields of American literature, literary theory, and comparative literature renowned both in Ukraine and abroad.