Introduction
The most common activity pertaining to literature—being read by real people in everyday settings—has been the least researched when considering its sheer volume, spread and diversity of practices. This is true despite the fact that literary reading and its subjects have sporadically been brought into modern academic focus from various perspectives for almost a full century now (with pioneers such as Richards, Rosenblatt, and Bartlett), with significant bursts of reader-response criticism activity in the 1960s and 1970s. Having that in mind, it was still possible to conclude at the beginning of the 1980s that due to its ubiquity “nothing is more unknown” than the reading experience (Todorov), as well as just a few years ago that readers are “the dark matter of the literary universe” (Andersen, Kjerkegaard & Pedersen).
While the vastness of what may be considered under the aegis of literary reading in everyday life is certainly one of the major reasons why this common activity has still not received sufficient attention, two other reasons are a lack of precision and a lack of methodology. Unlike in dealing with authors or texts (especially if they are single and dead, literary and literally), there is preciously little that may be claimed with any great precision about readers going about their everyday business, where sometimes it is even difficult to define reading as separate from another activity (say, listening to an audio-book while jogging or driving a car). There is also no single methodology to approach this phenomenon, but rather different jabs at it from various disciplines such as literary studies, sociology, psychology, communication studies, ethnology, and so on, ranging from the use of modern machinery (e.g., to track eye movements during reading), to population studies, and close reading.
This symposium would therefore offer researchers the opportunity to share their knowledge of, and inquiries about, everyday reading regardless of the scope and methods which they may employ, especially as they are dealing with readers of literature who do not read it as part of their profession. There are two reasons for this, and the main one is that professional reading, be it by writers, critics, professors, editors, teachers, or others who eschew “lay reading” (Guillory), has dominated our common professional knowledge about reading. This brings about underrepresentation, whereby at least 99% of readers and their activities are considered through the lens of opinions and activities of an unrepresentative 1% (and less) of professional readers. This in turn often results in qualifying lay readers as “bad” (Emre) and “uncritical” (Warner), or subsuming them under one of the dozens of models such as “imagined,” “ideal,” “inscribed,” “informed,” “implied,” “identifying,” and so on (just to stay with the initial “I”).
The other reason the symposium will deal mainly with non-professional, lay or nonacademic readers is that it stems from the work of the ReLEL research project, which aims to research the literary memories of contemporary readers in Croatia. Building on qualitative semi-structured interviews with a thousand volunteer readers, it offers one potential model and methodology of reaching into the great unknown of contemporary readers, which is of course only one layer atop the rich, but poorly tapped history of common readers and their reading. The project and the symposium therefore welcome any contribution which would make this great unknown a little more known, thus also contributing to the overarching goal of humanities (and any decent symposium): to get us all to know each other a little better.
Call for Papers (PDF)
As indicated in the introduction, our symposium is inviting submissions for presentations dealing with any aspect of reading literature performed by or involving readers in their everyday setting. This includes work settings, meaning that both professional and non-professional readers may be studied, if the presentation focuses on their interaction with everyday realities.
The operative term “everyday reading” here relates to any instance of physically handling and mentally processing literature by individuals or groups. Those readers could historically be presumed to be members of the literate and literary cultural elite, who have been dwarfed within the past century or so by the much larger popular audience. The contributions may therefore concentrate on both non-professional and professional readers, so long as their reading is presented in interaction with their own everyday realities.
Due to the wide-spread phenomenon under consideration, the range of topics is also quite broad, but it may be usefully narrowed down to the following dozen, divided into two subgroups according to whether they are dominantly manifested in the mind (1st grouping) or in the world (2nd grouping):
– application of reading in everyday thoughts and situations
– collective, cultural, and individual memories (and forgetting) of literary texts
– emotions provoked by literature
– negative aspects of literature in everyday life (e.g., bibliotrauma)
– positive aspects of literature in everyday life (e.g., eudaimonia)
– reading notes and markings (in diaries, books, school reports, etc.).
– cultural particularities of reading practices
– historical changes and aspects of everyday reading circumstances
– locations and times of everyday reading
– multimodality of everyday reading
– personal libraries and book collections
– recommended and mandatory reading (e.g., role of teachers and librarians)
We will also consider presentations about topics not listed here, especially if they report on aspects of everyday reading previously unconsidered in relevant writings, and/or if they involve original methodology. Apart from literary scholars, we welcome contributions from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to Anthropology, Gender Studies, History, Memory Studies, Psychology, and Sociology.
Applicants are required to provide a title and short summary of their presentation (300-500 words), as well as a bibliography (5-15 references). All summaries and presentations need to be written and delivered to the symposium e-mail address (pokus@m.ffzg.hr) in English, and the ones presented at the symposium may be included into the proceedings volume. The written presentation should not exceed 8.000 words, and the spoken one should not exceed 20 minutes.
Keynote speakers
Astrid Erll is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany, and the founder of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform. Her research connects literary, cultural, and media studies with questions of collective memory. Her newest book is Travels in Time. Essay on Collective Memory in Motion (Oxford UP, 2025).
Rita Felski is John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia, USA. Her current research centers on aesthetics, method, and interpretation, and she is writing a book on the contemporary Frankfurt School and its relevance for literary studies. She also has longstanding interests in feminist theory, modernity and postmodernity, genre (especially tragedy), comparative literature, and cultural studies.
Important Dates
September 1, 2024, First Call for Papers
November 1, 2024, Second Call for Papers
February 1, 2025, Third Call for Papers
March 1, 2025, Application Deadline
May 1, 2025, Presentation Acceptance Notification
September 1-2, 2025, Symposium
February 2026, Proceedings publication
Participation and fees
Presenters are required to participate in situ, with online presentations possible only in exceptional circumstances, while others may also attend online. There are no participation fees, and anyone can freely join the proceedings at the venue.
Venue
The symposium will be held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, which is a part of the University of Zagreb, Croatia.
English 
Croatian