For full Call for Papers, see attached pdf:  CfP A Reading Crisis (279 Kb)

The Programme as a pdf:  A Reading Crisis Final Programme 10-11 Oct 2024 (596 Kb)

All events, if not stated otherwise, take place in Aula Magna, Stockholm University, Frescativägen 6, 114 18 Stockholm, Sweden.

Thursday, 10 October 2024

09:30-09:45  Words of Welcome: Prof Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University), Prof. Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre (Stockholm University), Dr. Deborah de Muijnck (Justus Liebig University Giessen)

09:45-10:45  Keynote Lecture “Reading Minds and Enacted Environments” 
Dr. Merja Polvinen (University of Helsinki)
Room: Bergsmannen
Chair: Dr. Deborah de Muijnck

10:45-11:00  Coffee Break

11:00-12:30  Parallel Panels 1 & 2

Panel 1) The Challenging Role of Reading in the (Digital) Environment of Secondary Education
Room: Bergsmannen
Chair: Prof. Kirsten von Hagen (Justus Liebig University Giessen)

A) Alexandra Cheira (CEAUL/ ULICES, University of Lisbon): “There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book”: On Helping Portuguese Lower Secondary-School Students Find the Right Book.

B) Semmy Claassen (Utrecht University): Understanding Digital Bookish Platforms before Intervening in Secondary Literary Education: Conceptions of Reading on BookTok, BookTube and BookStagram.

C) Olli Löytty (University of Turku): Finnish upper Secondary School Students Reading a Dystopian Novel: Attitudes towards Emmi Itäranta’s Teemestarin Kirja (2012, Memory of Water 2014).

Panel 2) Exploring the Dynamics of Reading: From Individual Motivation to Cultural Practices
Room: Polstjärnan
Chair: Prof. Joakim Wrethed (Stockholm University)

A) Elise Nykänen & Sarianna Kankkunen (University of Helsinki): Why Do We Read Fiction? From Hypotheses to Empirical Findings.

B) Roosa Suomalainen (University of Helsinki): Readers’ Voice and Identity Work in the 2020s Finnish Reading Culture.

C) Kari Spjeldnæs (Kristiania University College, Oslo): Parenting of Readers. An Exploration of the Reading Habitus.

12:30-14:00  Lunch

14:00-15:30  Parallel Panels 3 & 4

Panel 3) Consequences of (Post-)Digital Reading and Writing on Media Literacy and Educational Design
Room: Bergsmannen
Chair: Dr. Christine Becker (Stockholm University)

A) Inge van de Ven & Sonali Kulkarni (Tilburg University): Goodreads and the Rereading Paradox: Affect, Attention, Affordances.

B) Siebe Bluijs & Emmy Stevens (Tilburg University): The Effects of GenAI on L1 Language and Literature Education.

C) Sander Bax & Eline Peeters (Tilburg University): What We Can Learn from Intermedial Public Authorship.

Panel 4) Fostering Engaged Reading through Fiction
Room: Polstjärnan
Chair: Prof. Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre (Stockholm University)

A) Fabienne Viala (University of Warwick): Latin American and Caribbean Cli-fi: Reading to Imagine the Possibility of Hope beyond Multiple Collapses.

B) Louise Louw (GCSC, Justus Liebig University Giessen): Reading Truth in Fiction: The Representational Value of Historical Fiction in Conveying Collective Trauma.

C) Pedram Dibazar (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam): Slow, Engaged, and Creative Reading: Reviving an Immersive Experience of Education.

15:30-16:00  Coffee Break

16:00-17:30  Parallel Panels 5 & 6

Panel 5) Mechanisms of Coping with the Reading Crisis in the Digital Age
Room: Bergsmannen
Chair: Dr. Deborah de Muijnck (Justus Liebig University)

A) Helena Como (University of Bergamo): How Much Can We Afford (Not) to Read? Developing New Reading Practices against the Times.

B) Sara Tanderup Linkis & Julia Pennlert (Lund University): Sound Texts. How Audiobooks Transform Writing, Production and Uses of Literature.

C) Corina Löwe & Angela Marx Åberg (Linnaeus University): What Literary Texts Do to their Readers.

Panel 6) The Power of Long-Form Reading
Room: Polstjärnan
Chair: Prof. Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre (Stockholm University)

A) Luca Siniscalco (University of Bergamo): The Age of Hyperaesthetics and Dromocracy: Long-Form Reading as an Act of Rebellion.

B) Bengt Novén (Stockholm University): Proust and Reading.

C) Kirsten von Hagen (Justus Liebig University Giessen): Don Quixote, Emma Bovary and a Self-Experiment: How Reading Changes our Lives.

18:30  Conference Dinner

Friday, 11 October 2024

09:00-10:15  Keynote Lecture “Love Language: Media History, the Reading Crisis, and the Alien Loops of Poetry”
Prof. Jesper Olsson (Uppsala University)
Room: Bergsmannen
Chair: Prof. Joakim Wrethed (Stockholm University)

10:15-11:45  Parallel Panels 7 & 8

Panel 7) Revitalizing Literary Engagement: Challenging the Passive Reader
Room: Bergsmannen
Chair: Prof. Bengt Novén (Stockholm University)

A) Matteo Gallo Stampino (University of Bergamo): Wenderomane and Narrator’s Unreliability as Antidote to “Fast-Food for the Brain”: the Case of Benjamin Stein, Yoko Tawada and Shida Bazyar.

B) Andrew Elfenbein (University of Minnesota): Neil Gaiman and the Future of Literary Reading.

C) Olga Husch (UCP Lisbon): Minor Feelings. Essayistic Interventions with the Crisis of a Tired Reader.

Panel 8) Providing Solutions for the Crisis of Reading in the Sphere of Education
Room: Polstjärnan
Chair: Dr. Christine Becker (Stockholm University)

A) Maria Freij & Lena Ahlin (Kristianstad University): Reading in a Time of Crisis—or—Long Reading, Short Reading, or No Reading?

B) Damianos Tzoupis (University of Edinburgh): The Uniqueness of Reading a Classic - Active Reading, Uses of a Classical text, and the Reading Diary.

C)  Annalina Benner (GCSC, Justus Liebig University Giessen): “Workshopping the Canon”. Reading Fiction across the Curriculum.

11:45-12:30  Brown bag lunch

12:30-13:30  Parallel Panels 9 & 10

Panel 9) Community and Networking in the Times of Reading Crisis
Room: Bergsmannen
Chair: Dr. Deborah de Muijnck (Justus Liebig University Giessen)

A) Lucía Camargo-Rojas (Deusto University, Bilbao): Book Clubs in Academic Libraries as a Place Where Participants Experience Literature Leisure Reading.

B) Maaria Linko (University of Helsinki): Readers' Book Recommendations in the Networked Reading Culture.

Panel 10) Revisiting the Past of and Looking into the Future of Reading
Room: Polstjärnan
Chair: Prof. Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre (Stockholm University)

A) Marco Presago (GCSC, Justus Liebig University Giessen): Reading the Contemporary Reading Crisis through Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies (1994): Arguments and Perspectives 30 Years Later.

B) Massimo Salgaro (University of Verona): The Digital as a Remedy for the Crisis of Literature.

13:30-14:00  Summary
Prof. Joakim Wrethed (Stockholm University), Dr. Deborah de Muijnck (Justus Liebig University Giessen)

Dr. Merja Polvinen (University of Helsinki): “Reading Minds and Enacted Environments”

Keynote Lecture on Thursday, October 10th, 9:45-10:45

Recent cognitive approaches to literature have deepened our understanding of readers’ experiences of immersion, transport, and absorption in fictional worlds during reading, and have empirically shown the intuitive power of these spatial metaphors underlying readers’ experiences. On the other hand, it has been more difficult to fit the current embodied theories of cognition together with the fact that literary works are semiotic artefacts rather than physical environments. This talk will engage the debate around literary worlds from the joint perspective of narratology and enactive cognition – one of the so-called 4E-theories of human minds. Enactive theories present perception as skilled, embodied access to the world, and literary scholars have used them to describe how readers experience characters, narrators, and fictional spaces as present to them. However, enactive cognition can also help us understand the perception of narratives as artefacts. What the enactive perspective offers, I suggest, is a model where embodied imaginings of both the world and the words happen in one and the same cognitive environment. On this basis, enactive readings aim to describe how fictions can actively unground their worlds, yet be earnest in generating immersion effects and real-world relevance.

More information on Dr. Merja Polvinen's reseach on University of Helsinki's website

Prof. Jesper Olsson (Uppsala University): “Love Language: Media History, the Reading Crisis, and the Alien Loops of Poetry”

Keynote Lecture on Friday, October 11th, 9:00-10:15

In this lecture I will approach the current diagnosis of a reading crisis in order to frame and discuss it from a media historical – or rather, media archaeological and media ecological – point of view. Media historical transformations always entail changes in the practices of writing and reading, and these changes will, inescapably, engender questions and worries about knowledge, value, and subjectivity. However, they also create opportunities for fiction and poetry, not least, to explore these practices and, thus, also to negotiate and rearticulate the hopes and values attached to them. If a contemporary (post-) digital situation has resulted in heated debates of deep versus surface readings, of how attentive and focused modes of reception are undermined by screen-based operations – to the detriment of concentration, memory, and so on – I will discuss experimental poetry from the last decades that investigate the shifting interfaces of reading in order to create what Yves Citton has called “alien loops”. Poetry and its excessive love of language can, perhaps, be used as a probe for expanding and differentiating the debate of a crisis and paving the way for both a concern and a reconsideration of reading and its aesthetic, epistemic, ethical, and political significance.

More information on Prof. Jesper Olsson's research on Uppsala University's website

Travel information as a pdf:  A Reading Crisis Travel information and maps (567 Kb)

Arlanda Express—high-speed train to and from Stockholm

The Arlanda Express runs non stop between Stockholm and Arlanda in 20 minutes. If you are travelling from Arlanda to Stockholm, you can buy your ticket at the airport’s information desks or in the Arlanda Express self-service machines located next to the escalators/lifts leading down. You can also purchase your tickets online in advance. For information and tickets, please visit www.arlandaexpress.com 

Taxi

Taxis are available directly outside of all terminals at Arlanda airport. Always ask the driver for a fixed price beforehand. The taxi ride from the airport to Stockholm City, cost approx. 700 SEK (720 SEK as per August 9, 2023 with Taxi Stockholm). We recommend the following companies: Taxi Stockholm, Taxi Kurir, or Sverigetaxi.

To pre-book your taxi for your arrival, please visit: www.taxistockholm.se/en 

Metro/underground

Website for local travel is www.sl.se Local name for metro/underground is “Tunnelbana”, and the letter T in blue font marks the stations.

Please note that all local travel is cash free. You can purchase tickets in the SL App or on-board by using a contactless card. We strongly recommend you to download the SL App in advance of your trip to Stockholm. Using the app, you check time tables and buy tickets for the metro and buses within Stockholm. For information and tickets, please visit https://sl.se/en/in-english/fares--tickets/

How to get to Aula Magna at Stockholm University

Aula Magna is located in Stockholm University campus Frescati and it takes about 15 minutes to get there with public transportation from Stockholm’s central areas. The metro station is called Universitetet. Aula Magna is located about 5 minutes walk from the metro exit, the bus stop and the local train Roslagsbanan.

The street address of Aula Magna is Frescativägen 6, 114 18 Stockholm.

You can open the link below and click ‘directions’ when you exit the metro: https://maps.app.goo.gl/B9dhhQ4VKWBAM8Lh9 Or just follow the simple instructions in the Travel information pdf:  A Reading Crisis Travel information and maps (567 Kb)

Hotel Recommendation, Elite Hotel Arcadia

For more information on Elite Hotel Arcadia, please visit their website. For booking, please visit Elite Hotel Arcadias webpage.