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THE GLOBAL LITERARY ECONOMY

19-20 May 2005

Venue: Foster Court 101, UCL

Project Leaders: Prof Michel Hockx (Chinese, SOAS)
Dr George Paizis (French, UCL)
Research Assistant: Dr Anna Guttman

(full programme below)

In the field of literary production, globalisation has a twofold effect. On the one hand, it provides greater greater accessibility and acceleration of communication, allowing people contact with ideas, trends and literary activities that would previously have taken years to spread. On the other hand, globalisation is also the free circulation of capital and investment that affects and shapes these possibilities. It may facilitate literary production and restrict it through copyrights or by suppressing the circulation of other potential works. Furthermore, it may give renewed vigour to some form of literary expression that could, perhaps, have otherwise become moribund or extinct. Globalisation of literary practice also involves border-crossing individuals and activities, such as international book fairs, brokers and translators.
Globalisation also affects readers of literature and their relationship to local texts.

This workshop seeks to examine how literary production and consumption are affected by the workings of the international market, and how a global literary field is taking shape.

Research Questions

• Is the internationalisation of publishing simply the concentration of ownership and capital or does it also mean the internationalisation and/or standardisation of content?
• Does globalisation accelerate the stratification of culture?
• Does globalisation accelerate the commodification of literature?
• If there is such a thing as a global literary field, what are its institutions, its agents and its practices?
• Does globalisation of the literary field increase or diminish the incidence of state censorship?
• What is the effect of the exercise of copyright and to what extent is it circumvented?
• What is the main material that is being translated?
• Does the value and effect of texts change in meaning as they travel cross culturally?
• How is the avant-garde affected by this globalised context? Is it the source of social critique or of new products for the international market?

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CLICK HERE to view the abstracts (WORD)

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