Third NEWW November meeting
On Friday 20 November 2009, the international networking programme NEWW "New approaches to European Women’s Writing" will organise a workshop in collaboration with the Dutch doctoral school in cultural history Huizinga Instituut (Amsterdam). The theme of this workshop will be:
Quantitative methods in cultural history.
This is the third of a long term series of meetings that allow researchers and graduate students to discuss their work, together and with invited experts. These discussions will also inaugurate the scholarly activities of the new COST Action "Women Writers in History": on Saturday 21 November will take place the first Working Groups meeting (program below).
Keynote speaker of the workshop will be:
Franco Moretti (Stanford University):
PROGRAM:
10.00 Welcome
10.15 Madeleine Jeay (McMaster University, Hamilton Canada):
- “Et autres que nommer ne sai”: when counting is recounting
10.45 Joris van Zundert (Huygens Institute, The Hague):
- The Not So Distant Future of Virtual Research Infrastructures
11.15 Coffee break
11.30 Franco Moretti :
- Network Theory, Plot Analysis
12.15 Discussion
12.45 Lunch
14.00 Presentations by PhD-students; discussions moderated by Agnese Fidecaro (University of Genève)
14.00 Daphne Hoogenboezem (University of Groningen):
- Tracing the illustrated fairy tale. Quantitative methods and the analysis of word-image interaction in fairy tales.
14.45 Tea break
15.15 Birgit Van Puymbroeck (Ghent University):
- Literary networks and the use of quantitative methods: Can we quantify literary relations?
16.00 Els Biesemans (Ghent University):
- Literary networks and the use of quantitative methods: Overcoming the limits?
16.45 Conclusions for the near and distant future
17.15 Drinks
For further information and for registration, contact
Suzan van Dijk or
Anne Hilde van Baal.
Meeting place:
Huygens Institute, The Hague; 10.00 - 17.00
No entrance fee; registration required
Registered colleagues or students have received/will receive confirmation;
please check.
About the theme of the day
In the research and networking projects NEWW has been formulating and submitting lately, frequent references have been made to Franco Moretti’s work, in particular Graphs, maps, trees. Abstract models for a literary history (2005). Without being at the origin of our feeling that large-scale approaches are necessary in order to understand in particular women’s position in literary history and discuss the place they should be given in literary historiography, his work appears to be based on similar starting points.
Within NEWW activities, we need IT-technology because of the decision that had been taken to start our analyses not at the sending, but at the receiving end of the literary communication where women did engage themselves as authors, addressing male and/or female readers. Many of these authors are absent from current literary canons. This is why the reception by contemporaries of the authors – those who these women may be supposed to have addressed – is to be taken into account. They can inform us about the relevance of these women’s works. But again, traces of the reading of women authors are often impossible to be found, disappearing as they are behind the "screen" created by 19th-century canon-formation. However, earlier reception documents although obscured are to be discovered in large-scale sources such as 18th-century press, library catalogues, correspondences and so on. Large-scale sources need to be pursued and manipulated as such, that is to say: by electronic tools. This is how the database WomenWriters came to be developed, and has been filled with a large quantity of information (over 13.000 records) about (for the moment, principally the Dutch) reception of 18th and 19th-century women’s writing.
This insistence on empirical data and on large scale is also one of Moretti’s specialties. In the sense that he does quite a lot more than putting them into databases, which allow generating listings, that produce incentives for textual and/or comparative analysis. For example, he manipulates them into "graphs, maps, trees", which in some cases is particularly relevant for NEWW preoccupations.
His presentation of "British novelistic genres, 1740-1900" forms a challenge for our own research, given the gender aspects implied in the differences between novelistic (sub)genres such as (for example) the Epistolary novel, the Sentimental novel, the Evangelical novel, the Domestic novel, and the New Woman novel on one side, and on the other the Military novel, the Bildungsroman and the Naturalist novel – differences located probably not only at the production, but also at the reception side (2005, p.19).
Another interesting graph is the one showing that "Gender Shifts" (disappearance and reappearance of women as authors of novels) have been rather frequent between 1740 and 1870, undermining in fact suppositions which might have been our own about relative absence or rather domination of female novelists (2005, p.28). Of course it still is possible to discuss the value of the inventories which had been used for the establishment of the graphs, given the frequency with which we have found in the early documents names of women who are not figuring in any modern list, but anyway this is creating an empirical context where it becomes more useful to study women’s place and role.
The degree of "femininity", "femaleness", "feminism", may probably be discussed in a more concrete way thanks to "trees" and diagrams comparable to those Moretti presented for detective fiction (2005, p.73, 75). Presence or absence of clues in detective fiction resembles what he names narrative "turning points" in the article entitled "Serious century" (The Novel, 2006, I, p.366ss) and might well be comparable to narrative topoi studied in the context of SATOR (Société pour l’Analyse de la Topique Romanesque). In the SATOR-NEWW collaboration discussion is going on about how to use the gender-specific-ness of (some of these) topoi for the analysis of the dialogues between women authors and their readers/critics.
Most "simple" to understand and to accept will of course be the use of maps for the illustration of international dissemination and reception of women’s writing. What we are "discovering" (in NEWW) is in fact something like a "virtual network" avant la lettre, linking together women authors influencing each other and exerting influences on their readers, certainly not only their compatriots – as has been abundantly proven for George Sand, who in France until quite recently was considered a prolific, but clearly minor novelist, until it appeared (to those organizing the "Année George Sand" for the bicentennial of her birth) in how many countries she had been read and translated (cf. a quite provisional and incomplete list).
All this provides many questions to be presented and possibly answered during this 3rd NEWW November Meeting. The idea is to engage a fruitful discussion including in particular also young researchers and PhD-students.
For the first Working Groups meeting of the COST Action IS0901, participants will come together from 15 countries at Huygens Institute, The Hague. On Saturday 21 November they will lay the foundations for the 4-years collaboration, that will, for the first time, approach women's literary history from a really transnational perspective - without relying on what 19th-century canon formation had prepared us.
PROGRAM:
9.00 Welcome
9.15 Short meeting of the Management Committee
10.00 Opening of the Working Groups meeting
10.15 Discussion of objectives, global working programmes and ways of collaborating: commenting the Memorandum of Understanding, and the abstract “for discussion” distributed 1-2 October.
11.00 Coffee break
11.15 Presentation [Suzan] and discussion of current version of database WomenWriters, which is the “virtual collaboratory” where the cooperation will be located; to be itself adapted and further developed during the course of the COST Action. After the case of the George Sand reception in the Netherlands, compared to those in other countries.
12.30 Lunch at Belle-van-Zuylen-plein
13.30 Separate meetings of the 4 Working Groups
WG 1 “Models and Theories” Theories and possible research models to be converted into electronic tools Dekenzaal
WG 2 “Tools and Interconnectivity” Using collaboratories and connecting databases Schurmanzaal
WG 3 “Selection and Use of Relevant Sources” What kind of information to be put into the database/collaboratory? Tesselschadezaal
WG 4 “Dissemination and Extension of the Research Network” Informing each other / others about objectives, project and outcome Wolffzaal
SvD, October 2009
- Conferences > NEWW November meetings > 2009