Glocal Places of Literature

In times of global deterritorialisation and transnational cultural exchange, the prominence of local places of production and reception has become more, rather than less, significant: Writers’ museums, for example in Weimar and Stratford-upon-Avon, Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, chapbook presses across the globe, literary institutions such as Copenhagen’s LiteraturHaus, UNESCO Cities of Literature, for instance in Cracow and Prague, and slam events in many cities have emerged in the digital age. Local literary cultures partake in global communication practices and contribute to “a sense of place which . . . includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.” Accordingly, we intend to explore if the local and the global can still be perceived as conflicting concepts. Produced locally, but often distributed and read globally, are literary cultures characterized by the ways in which the global and the local interact and add to “glocal” practices?

This conference aims at investigating the shifting interconnection between literatures and place in the twenty-first century on three intersecting planes: literary production, distribution, and reception. We invite contributions that discuss the issue of the changing role of real and imagined, local and global, virtual and physical places of literature in an international context. We want to bring together scholars from all fields within literary and cultural studies, as well as from disciplines such as the sociology of literature, human geography, book studies, and museology.