0100,0100,0100Dear colleagues,
We thought the enclosed might be of interest.
Times New RomanCall for Papers
Reconciling "Anglistik": Didactic Strategies
for an Interdisciplinary Approach to Literature,
Linguistics and Cultural Studies
Universität Trier, Germany, 2-4 Oct 2003
The German university system, like academia worldwide, is
facing a serious identity-crisis. Changing intellectual fashions, a
transforming student population with new interests and needs
and an unfavourable economic climate have called into question
the traditional role and structure of the institution. This crisis
weighs most heavily on the humanities which, to a greater extent
than more lucrative fields, must reconsider their goals and scope.
The humanistic educational ideals that have traditionally informed
language departments like Anglistik (English Language and
Literature) seem less relevant and applicable in the first decade
of the twenty-first century. The humanities have reacted to their
loss of appeal by revamping their curricula and approaches to
teaching: "culture," "interdisciplinarity" and "didactics" are among
the keywords invoked as a response to the current challenges.
This two-day international conference at the University of Trier
aims to evaluate these developments and explore their potential
in English Studies from a critical perspective. We seek the
middle-ground between the innovators, who have
enthusiastically embraced new trends as remedies for institutional
malaise, and the cultural pessimists, who critique the same
tendencies as symptomatic of a social dumbing down. The
conference aims to provide a platform for a critical assessment
of those academic trends and a differentiated discussion of the
future of the humanities. It hopes to initiate a vibrant debate
centred around "culture," while remaining critical of jargonistic
applications of the term. Above all, we take culture as a crucial
point of contact between linguistics and literature, a catalyst for
developing new didactic strategies and a promising avenue for
an integrative reconceptualisations of the study of English.
The conference organisers are looking for original contributions
(30 min. presentation plus discussion) on thematic and
methodological aspects of cultural studies, questions of
interdisciplinarity (especially regarding the conjunction of
linguistics and literature) and the didactic realisation of such
projects, whether from a purely theoretical or more concrete
perspective. Please submit a 300-word abstract (by e-mail -
word, RTF or plain text format - or in hard copy) to either of the
conveners by 31 Dec 2002.
For further information, please contact:
Dr. Andrea Gerbig, { HYPERLINK "mailto:gerbig@uni-trier.de" }0000,0000,FF00gerbig@uni-trier.de0100,0100,0100
Dr. Anja Müller-Wood, { HYPERLINK "mailto:muellean@uni-trier" }0000,0000,FF00muellean@uni-trier0100,0100,0100
Universität Trier
FB II-Anglistik
D-54286 Trier
Germany
Dr. Andrea Gerbig
Wissenschaftliche Assistentin
Fachbereich 2, Anglistik
Universität Trier, D-54286 Trier
Tel.: +49 651 201 2283
e-mail: Gerbig@uni-trier.de