BEYOND POSITIVIST HISTORY, “STRUCTURE OF DEVELOPMENT”

AND “HORIZON OF EXPECTATION”

Meeting of the European Network for Reception Studies,

Department of English and American Studies, Charles University in Prague

7 October 2006

Focusing on philosophical, aesthetic, historical and other aspects of the concept of period and the methods of periodization in literary and cultural studies the meeting will reinterpret their traditional uses, such as the assimilation of otherness and construction of continuity, and the more recent ones, for instance, the Prague School’s (Vodička’s) notion of “concretization” or Konstanz school’s (Jauss’s) “intersections of synchrony and diachrony” in the process of aesthetic experience. Confronting them with selected themes in the late twentieth-century philosophy (e.g., Foucault’s “episteme”, “discursive formation”, “archive”; Deleuze’s “event”, “repetition of difference”, “complication”, “fold”) and cultural history (e.g., Greenblatt’s “self-fashioning”, “negotiation”, “circulation”; Pratt’s “contact zones”), the meeting will consider the possibilities of periodization in contemporary theoretical and historical discourses and its functions in the process of shaping of individual and cultural memories.

The European Network for Reception Studies is funded by The British Academy and coordinated by

Dr. Elinor Shaffer, Director, Research Project Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London,and

Professor Annick Duperray, Universtité de Provence, Aix-en-Provence and Marseille.

PROGRAMME

The keynote public lecture

“HISTORY WITHOUT PERIODS: DILEMMA OR DELIVERANCE?”

will be delivered by

PROFESSOR RANDOLPH STARN

Department of History, University of California at Berkeley

on Saturday, 7 October 2006, from 11 am,

ATTENTION! CHANGE OF THE VENUE!

Due to the construction works in the Main Building of the Faculty of Arts, the Meeting will take place in Room 138 (first floor), Celetna 20, Prague 1 (close to the Old Town Square - Staromestske namesti). There will be signs pointing to that room. The starting time remains the same.

Discussion after the lecture

will be opened by the responses of

Professor Thomas Glick (Department of History, Boston University)

Professor Robert Weninger (Department of German, King’s College, University of London)

Professor Martin Procházka (Department of English and American Studies,

Charles University, Prague).

The meeting will continue after lunch by a closed seminar session.