Rethinking Intimacy
in Women’s Reading and Writing at the Peripheries of Europe
- EXPLORATORY WORKSHOP -
1-2 October, 2020
The Department of literature, history of ideas and religion at Gothenburg University, Sweden is pleased to announce the international exploratory workshop Rethinking Intimacy in Women’s Reading and Writing at the Peripheries of Europe.
The workshop will be performed in collaboration with Dimitrie Cantemir University, Bucharest, and Turku University Finland. It strives to explore the issue of intimacy, its representations, scenes and scenarios in women’s reading and writing between the 1700s and the 1900s, starting from the evidence that extensive research has been done on the topic in Western and Central Europe but to a lesser extent in the peripheries of Southern, Eastern and Northern Europe.
The first initiative in this direction was the exploratory workshop Rethinking Intimacy in Women’s Reading and Writing (1700S-1900S) arranged at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Dimitrie Cantemir University, Bucharest in September 2016. One outcome of the concluding session of the Bucharest workshop was the development of the idea that the intimacy topos in women’s writing and in the strategies of reading in the 18th and 19th centuries can be incorporated in a cultural transformation of intimacy in the Europeripheries.
This second workshop would narrow the scope and focus on these peripheries of Europe. How was intimacy represented in women’s literature and what was its reception of it in these parts of Europe? How were influences from Western women writers negotiated? How did different social, cultural and religious backgrounds influence the expressions and discussions of the topos of intimacy?
The workshop aims at helping the research community identify possible areas of investigation of intimacy aspects related to women’s reading and writing practices, as well as modes of integrating the intimacy dimension into research content in the participants own research areas.
By inviting scholars within the former COST activity and current DARIAH activity "Women writers in history" as well as other scholars the second workshop would expand on the topic of the first workshop. By taking the point of departure in the transnational perspective a) new angles will be explored and b) the theoretical discussion will be further elaborated.
Workshop language: English
Organizing committee
Head of organizing committee:
Dr. Birgitta Johansson Lindh, Gothenburg University: birgitta.johansson.lindh@lir.gu.se
Organizing committee:
Dr. Carmen Dutu, Dimitrie Cantemir University, Romania: cb.dutu@gmail.com
Dr. Viola Parente-Čapková, Turku University, Finland; viocap@utu.fi
