From Literature to Cultural Literacy

In current contexts one can be a literary scholar and yet be working on objects other than poems, dramas or fiction. Something has happened to both the researchers and the discipline that has transformed this humanities domain, bringing it into a sharper focus and investigating the readability of contemporary global social issues. The essays in this book, written by scholars from ten countries, range across this research domain, renamed 'literary-and-cultural studies', or LCS. LCS depends on four key concepts – textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity and historicity – which characterize both the material and the methods of their research. The seventeen essays look at four broad fields: cultural memory; migration and translation; electronic textuality; and biopolitics, biosociality and the body. The aim of the collection is to deploy and enhance cultural literacy, a way of looking at social and cultural issues – especially issues of change and mobility – through the lens of literary thinking.

Naomi Segal is Professorial Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Her books include Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch; Andre Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy; The Adulteress's Child; Narcissus and Echo; The Unintended Reader; and The Banal Object. She is a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des palmes academiques and a member of the Academia Europaea.
Daniela Koleva is Associate Professor at Sofia University, Bulgaria. She has edited a number of books, including Negotiating Normality: Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions (2012), Stories of Historians: Biographical Narratives of the 1981 Graduates of Sofia University (with Vanya Elenkova, 2012) and 20 Years after the Collapse of Communism: Expectations, Achievements and Disillusions of 1989 (with Nicolas Hayoz and Leszek).