Timon Georg Boehm and Reinhard G. Mueller are organizing a seminar at the 2022 ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) conference that is taking place in Taipei on June 15-18, 2022.
In this seminar, entitled “Orientation in and through Texts,” we seek to explore, via the philosophy of orientation, how different forms of writing orient us in different ways and create different worlds of orientation.
Since the invention of writing, fundamental reorientations of thinking have often occurred hand in hand with innovative forms of writing. From Parmenides’s didactic poetry, via Plato’s dialogue, Aristotle’s treatise, Montaigne’s essay, Descartes’ meditation, Nietzsche’s performance of masks, Joyce’s experimental thoughtstream, Wittgenstein’s album, Derrida’s deconstruction, and all the way to the explosive differentiation of digital forms of writing in our contemporary world – new forms of communication can bring about radical reorientations, and foundational reorientations often require new forms of writing to communicate them.
The deadline to submit an abstract is November 31, 2021.