Contributions are invited from researchers in literary and cultural studies to a panel on literary anthropology at ISSEI 2010.

The term ‘literary anthropology’ seems to have been on the agenda of literary and cultural studies since the late 1980s: Helmut Pfotenhauer’s 'Literarische Anthropologie' (1987), and Fernando Poyatos’s anthology ‘Literary Anthropology’ (1988) are two of the most influential publications. These two books mark a divergence in the way researchers working in the German and Anglo-American traditions conceive of literary anthropology, a distinction noted by Wolfgang Riedel in 1994. English-speaking researchers take literary anthropology to mean ethnographic methods like Geertz’s ‘thick description’ applied to the reading of literature, or ‘literature as ethnography’. For researchers working in the German tradition, literary anthropology is primarily understood as ‘literature and the science of the body’.
Papers of approximately 15 minutes in length are invited on the subject of literary anthropology. Among the aspects that contributors may wish to address are the following:

- Which of these two perspectives has been the more productive in the last two decades?

- What landmarks in literary anthropology have there been since the 1980s?

- What are the interpretive methods of literary anthropology?

- What is understood by literary anthropology by critics working outside the German and Anglo-American contexts?

- Can the ‘German’ and ‘Anglo-American’ perspectives on literary anthropology be reconciled?

Abstracts of ca. 300 words should be forwarded to Andrew Cusack by 15 March 2010.

Further information about ISSEI 2010 ‘Thought in Science and Fiction’, follow the link to http://issei2010.haifa.ac.il/