CALL FOR PAPERS
Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Literature
University College Dublin, Ireland
17-20 June 2025
Keynote Speakers – Prof. Sarah Brouillette (Carleton University)
Prof. Christopher Newfield (Independent Social Research Foundation)
For at least the last two decades, literary studies has seen a flourishing interest in institutions of various kinds that represent a “middle-zone of cultural space” (English 2005), mediating the relationship of readers to literary texts and to the “institution” of literature itself. This scholarly development, which has adopted many methods from the discipline of sociology, has been characterised as a move away from a “Foucauldian suspicion of institutions” (Rosen 2019), in favour of an orientation that seeks to understand the roles, functions, and values of literary institutions including the creative writing program, the book club, the literary prize, and the publishing house.
Against this backdrop, our conference aims to evaluate the current state of the field and to reflect on the cumulative effects of this disciplinary shift concerning institutions. We would like to host a conversation that includes scholars who are producing exciting new work using sociological methods – across subdisciplines and national cultures – alongside scholars interested in reflecting on the broader implications of these methods for literary studies.
In order to promote this dual focus, we have chosen to frame our inquiry around the theme of “dis/trust.” While the initial Bourdieusian influence on the field emphasised a neutral or objective orientation towards literary institutions alongside exploring their role in “the production of belief” (Bourdieu 1980, Guillory 1993, Casanova 1999), much subsequent scholarship has professed “an ethos of institutional conservation” (McGurl 2010). More recent critiques have pointed towards reasons to distrust literary institutions, whether from the point of view of political economy, labor conditions, structural inequality, and/or social inclusion (Brouillette 2019, Mulhall 2020, Saha & Van Lente 2022). Quantitative methods have played an important role in this more activist scholarship (Spahr & Young 2015, So 2021, Manshel 2023), while some voices have expressed distrust of the sociological turn itself (n+1 editors 2013, Lahire 2015, Lorentzen 2024).
The translation into multiple languages of Gisèle Sapiro’s primer La sociologie de la littérature (2014) demonstrates the international character and cross-pollination of this set of scholarly concerns (Krishnan 2018, Driscoll & Squires 2020, Amlinger 2021). Responding to the call “to establish common ground with scholars doing versions of sociology of literature and publishing studies in varied contexts” (Brouillette 2024), we would like the conference to bring together work being undertaken in Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts. We also invite participants to think self-reflexively about the academic institutions in which this scholarly turn has taken place, to consider the version of literary studies that has emerged from this turn, and to speculate about “the social demand for our knowledge” (Newfield 2023).
Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to, the following:
Abstracts of 200-300 words for 20-minute papers and an author bio of max 100 words should be submitted by e-mail attachment to trust.ucd@gmail.com by 3rd February 2025. We also welcome joint proposals for panels of three papers, or panels with innovative formats.
We welcome paper proposals from researchers who are based at institutions around the world, whose research stems from a variety of disciplines and languages, and who are at any career stage. Applicants will be informed by early March as to their inclusion in the conference programme. Please also note that we intend to pursue publication avenues stemming from the conference theme.
This conference is co-sponsored by two research projects, “Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025” (www.trustlit.org), funded by the Irish Research Council, and “The Publishing Infrastructures of Contemporary Anglophone Literature,” co-funded by Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council.
Dr Tim Groenland & Dr Adam Kelly
(UCD School of English, Drama and Film)
References
Amlinger, Carolin. 2021. Schreiben: Eine Soziologie literarischer Arbeit. Suhrkamp.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods.” Trans. Richard Nice. Media, Culture and Society 2: 261-93.
Brouillette, Sarah. 2024. “The Author as Social Production.” Studies in the Novel 56.1: 99-105.
—. 2019. UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford University Press.
Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La republique mondiale des lettres. Editions de Seuil.
Driscoll, Beth, and Claire Squires. 2020. The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business. Cambridge University Press.
English, James F. 2005. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press.
Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press.
Krishnan, Madhu. 2018. Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location. Cambridge University Press.
Lahire, Bernard. 2015. “Literature is Not Just a Battlefield.” Trans. Marlon Jones. New Literary History 46.3: 387-407.
Lorentzen, Christian. 2024. “Literature Without Literature.” Granta (18 July).
Manshel, Alexander. 2023. Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon. Columbia University Press.
McGurl, Mark. 2010. “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present.” New Literary History 41.2: 329-49.
Mulhall, Anne. 2020. “The Ends of Irish Studies? On Whiteness, Academia, and Activism.” Irish University Review 50.1: 94-111.
Murray, Simone. 2018. The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Newfield, Christopher. 2023. “Criticism After This Crisis: Toward a National Strategy for Literary and Cultural Study.” Representations 164.1: 1-22.
n+1 editors. 2013. “Too Much Sociology.” n+1 16: 1-6.
Rosen, Jeremy. 2019. “The Institutional Turn.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.
Saha & Van Lente. 2022. “The Limits of Diversity: How Publishing Industries Make Race.” International Journal of Communication 16: 1804–1822.
Sapiro, Gisèle. 2014. La sociologie de la littérature. Éditions La Découverte.
So, Richard Jean. 2021. Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction. Columbia University Press.
Spahr, Juliana, and Stephanie Young. 2015. “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room.” Los Angeles Review of Books (20 September).
