|
The Harvard Humanities Center Proudly Presents
Alphabetics: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Saturday and Sunday, April 26-27, 2003
Letters are ubiquitous, multifunctional, and largely ignored. While each discipline must to some degree acknowledge the contribution of alphabets to knowledge production, transmission, and organization, rarely do alphabetics take the center stage of scholarly attention across the disciplines. This conference aims to expose participants from various fields and the general academic community to the wide range of uses and interpretations -literary, political, mystical, artistic, linguistic, etc.- for which alphabets and their component letters have been marshaled. Do letters constitute a universal repository of meaning? Is there a “the Alphabet”?
All proposals treating letters, alphabets, or alternate writing system are welcome, but special consideration will be given to topics that fall into one or more of the following areas:
- Writing Systems (History, development, and nature of various writing systems; transliteration and meaning; typography; paleography; printing)
- Letter as Symbol (Letters in math or scientific notation, alphabet as code, semiotics,mystical alphabets, music, alphabet as organizational concept)
- Letter in Visual Arts, Letter as Visual Art (Alphabet and architecture, textuality of art, visual literacy, letter in film, calligraphy, human alphabets, digital effects, watermarks)
- Literary Effects of the Alphabet(Combinatorial literature, letter play [e.g. figured poetry, alphabet rhymes, letter games, puns, rebuses, acrostics, palindromes, anagrams, lipograms, univocalics, spoonerisms], chirography, children's literature, primers)
- Alphabets and Society (History of the book, orthographic reforms, nation and alphabet, religion and alphabet, literacy, the teaching of alphabets, the signature, alphabet in psychoanalysis)
Special Conference Events:
- A Concert of Baroque Alphabetic Music
- Printing Press Demonstration (tentative)
- Keynote Address (Speaker TBA)
- Houghton Library Exhibition: 16 March-30 April
Please submit e-mail abstracts of up to 500 words via email by January 31, 2003. Include your name, university, department, area of specialization, and suggestions you may have for the Houghton exhibit!
Erika Boeckeler (Comparative Literature) and Daniel Kokin (History)
Conference Organizers
|
