Text and Textuality, Durham University, July 16–17, 2020
Text and Textuality is a conference aiming to bring together researchers from across the humanities to stimulate broad debate around the concept of ‘text’, from its origins to its future. The conference will include panels of 20 minute papers with ample time for discussion, a round table, and an ‘interdisciplinarity’ workshop to draw together aspects of text and stimulate collaboration across disciplines.
Since Peisistratus’ editions of Homer, we have consistently developed new ways of remodelling and reinterpreting texts. From stemmatics to textual criticism, codicology to digital methods, the history of the book to the reception and afterlife of text, the word has consistently captured our imagination. Text is not a static entity or a solely physical object, but a dynamic representation of the human experience which exists both in and beyond our perceptions.
This conference seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary community of scholars to consider the relationship between new approaches and existing methodologies for engaging with texts. Under the broad umbrella of ‘text’, we aim to foster cross-discipline dialogue to explore the lives of texts from their conception, to their transmission, their reception and beyond.
We invite title and abstract submissions of 250-300 words on subjects such as, but not restricted to:
- Textual stemmatics and textual criticism
- Textual transmission
- Palaeography and codicology
- The afterlife of texts/their reception
- The roles of the author and reader
- Intermediality and the relationships between text forms
- Representations of text
- Oral v. written composition of text
- History of the Book
- The role of digitisation and the future of ‘text’