Call 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 world wide, 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 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 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 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, gerbig@uni-trier.de
Dr. Anja Müller-Wood, muellean@uni-trier.de
Universität Trier
FB II-Anglistik
D-54286 Trier
Germany
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