Cultural Literacy in Contemporary Europe

The proposed ESF-COST synergy initiative is to identify, to highlight and to advance the contribution made to European society and intellectual culture by the body of contemporary research grouped around ‘literary studies’. The focus of the project centres on the policy and broader social relevance of this research. In the past 40 years, the research pursued by academics trained in philological, literary-historical and allied fields has broadened out to include a wide range of interdisciplinary domains. It is proposed to refer to this field of research as ‘literary-and-cultural studies’ or LCS.

LCS research has a new range of objects of study. No longer restricted to the study of printed books or other fictional genres, LCS researchers focus on cultural objects or ‘text-like structured artefacts’ which have one or more of the following elements in common:

  • TEXTUALITY: in both the philological and the metaphorical sense of the term. When Clifford Geertz used the term metaphorically to describe the intricate structures which constitute culture(s), the operational content of this term derived much of its weight from the philological techniques used by both linguists and literary scholars to describe, explain and contextualise the structures constituting a written artefact as a text;

  • RHETORICITY: the usage of conventions like topoi, metaphors etc., the notion of aesthetics having been developed from the ancient Greek concept of rhetoric and still deriving much of its meaning and functions from the uses of language and other forms of communication prescribed by it;

  • FICTIONALITY: the issue of the relation between art and ‘the real’ in view of the fact that fictionality is part of every form of communication, so that the relationship between art and ‘the real’ is not organized by a categorical difference between truth and untruth but by a varying mixture of the two, eg when historiography imposes order on real events by narrating them in a certain sequence;

  • HISTORICITY: the fact that texts and text-like structured artefacts derive their meaning both from their synchronous historical contexts and from their position in the diachronous process of epistemological change of which they are a part.

LCS researchers use a variety of research methodologies. These include traditional philological research focused on analytical close reading and/or archival research seeking in-depth contextual knowledge of the production, dissemination or consumption of historical or contemporary cultural objects.

LCS researchers ask a range of research questions of interest beyond the philological or textimmanent level. They represent a status quo in literary and cultural theory according to which cultural existence as such, independent of the disciplinary domain or domains an individual is active in professionally, requires what our project has termed 'cultural literacy', i.e. the ability to recognize, reflect on, use and potentially modify the complex and manifold set of interacting cultural artefacts - including texts and other media - which enables and embeds cultural existence. These questions are the focus of this proposal and are grouped into the four areas of interest listed below which are the main fields of research that this ESF-COST synergy will explore. These topics have been selected in order to enhance the policy contribution of LCS.

2009-2011 Workshops:

14-16 December 2009, London, UK - "Remembering and forgetting"
13-14 May 2010, Dublin, Ireland - "Cultural migration"
15-16 June 2010, Istanbul, Turkey - "Electronic textuality (‘Texting’)"
30-31 August 2010, St Gallen, Switzerland - "Biopolitics, biosociality and the body"
11 February 2011, Brussels, Belgium - "Synthesis workshop"