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| - | 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: '''Female authors and the literary field: Quantitative approaches'''. It will continue discussions recently undertaken (in Dutch) at the Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in a symposium entitled: [http://www.knaw.nl/cfdata/agenda/agenda_detail.cfm?agenda__id=1305 "Innovation in the Humanities: Technics or Theory?"]. <br><br> | + | 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: '''Female authors and the literary field: '''Quantitative methods in cultural history'''. It will continue discussions recently undertaken (in Dutch) at the Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in a symposium entitled: [http://www.knaw.nl/cfdata/agenda/agenda_detail.cfm?agenda__id=1305 "Innovation in the Humanities: Technics or Theory?"]. <br><br> |
| It will be the third of a long term series that allows researchers and graduate students to discuss their work, together and with invited experts. <br> | It will be the third of a long term series that allows researchers and graduate students to discuss their work, together and with invited experts. <br> | ||
Revision as of 15:14, 19 June 2009
Third NEWW November meeting
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: Female authors and the literary field: Quantitative methods in cultural history. It will continue discussions recently undertaken (in Dutch) at the Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in a symposium entitled: "Innovation in the Humanities: Technics or Theory?".
It will be the third of a long term series that allows researchers and graduate students to discuss their work, together and with invited experts.
Keynote speaker will be: Franco Moretti (Stanford University).
Other speakers include: Madeleine Jeay (McMaster University Hamilton Canada), Joris van Zundert (Huygens Institute) and other researchers involved in the NEWW project.
Proposals for papers are welcome and can be sent to Suzan van Dijk.
Meeting place:
Huygens Institute, The Hague
About the subject 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 (London/New York 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. <br.
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 (cf. Ezell 1993). 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 (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 (p. 73, 75). Presence or absence of clues in detective fiction resembles what he names narrative “turning points” in the article entitled “Serious century” (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 discussed during this 3rd NEWW November Meeting. The idea is to engage a fruitful discussion including in particular also young researchers and PhD-students.
SvD, June 2009
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