I recently got a notice about an intriguing national seminar being held at Punjabi University (India). From a Dec. 12, 2014 notice,

The Department of English is pleased to invite you to the National Seminar on Literature in the Emerging Contexts of Technology and Culture being held on February 25 and 26, 2015.

There is an old, almost primal, bond between writing and technology. From the earliest tools of writing—probably a sharp-edged stone—to the stylus pen, from the clay tablet to the capacitive touch screen, this bond has proclaimed itself with all the force of technology’s materiality. However, the relatively rapid emergence and acceptance of the digital writing environment has foregrounded with unprecedented clarity how command and control are always already embedded in communication. Moreover, in the specific sphere of literary production, the opaqueness of creativity stands further complicated with the entry of the programmer, often in the very person of the writer. At the other end, reading struggles to break free from the constraints of both the verbal and the linear as it goes multimedia and hypertextual, making fresh demands upon the human sensorium. The result is that the received narratives of literary history face radical interruptions.

While cultures enfold and shape literatures and technologies, it must be admitted that they are also articulated and shaped by the latter. Technology in particular has advanced and proliferated so much in the last three decades that it has come to be regarded as a culture in its own right. It has come to acquire, particularly since the early decades of the twentieth century, a presence and authority it never really possessed before. With prosthetics, simulation and remote-sensing, for instance, it has brought within the horizon of realization the human aspiration for self-overcoming. Yet in spite of its numerous enabling, even liberating, tools, technology has also often tended to close off several modes of cognition and perception. While most of us would like to believe that we use technology, it is no less true that technology also uses us. Heidegger correctly warned of the potential, inherent in modern technology, to reduce the human beings to its resources and reserves. He also alerted us to its elusive ways, particularly the way it resists being thought and pre-empts any attempts to think beyond itself, thereby instituting itself as the exclusive horizon of thinking. Paradoxically, like a literary text or like thought itself, technology may have some chinks, certain gaps or spaces, through which it may be glimpsed against its larger, imposing tendencies.

The ostensible self-sufficiency and plenitude of the technological, as of the cultural, can be questioned and their nature examined probably most productively from a space which is structured self-reflexively, that is from the space of the literary. At the same time, the implications of the technological turn, especially in its digital avatar, for literature, as also for culture, demand thinking.

The proposed seminar will be an opportunity to reflect on these and related issues, with which a whole galaxy of thinkers have engaged — from Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Raymond Williams and Jean Baudrillard to Donna Haraway, George Landow, Lev Manovich, Bernard Steigler, Katherine Hayles, Henry Jenkins, Hubert Dreyfus, Mari-Laure Ryan, the Krokers, Manuel Castells, Fredrich Kittler, David J Bolter, Manuel De Landa, Nick Montfort, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and others. Among the areas on which papers/presentations for the seminar are expected are:

• The Work of Literature/Art in the Digital Age
• Cultures of Technology and Technologies of Culture
• Resistance and Appropriation Online: Strategies and Subterfuges
• Global Capitalism and Cyberspace
• Posthumanist Culture and Its Literatures
• Digital Humanities and the Literary Text
• Reconsidering Literature: Between Technology and Theory
• Virtuality and/as Fiction
• Plotting the Mutating Networks: The Logics of Contingency
• Writing Technologies and Literature
• Reading Literature in the Digital Age
• Literature and Gaming
• After the Death of the Author: The Posthuman Authority
• Cyberpunk Writing
• Teaching Literature in the Post-Gutenberg Classroom

Submission of abstracts: By 20 January 2015
Submission of papers: By 10 February 2015
Registration Fee: Rs. 1000/- (Rs. 500 for Research Scholars/Students)

All submissions must be made through email to sharajesh@gmail.com and/or pup.english@gmail.com.

Lodging and hospitality shall be provided by the University to all outstation resource persons and, subject to availability, to paper presenters. In view of financial constraints, it may not be possible to reimburse travel expenses to all paper presenters.

Rajesh Sharma
Seminar Director
Professor and Head
Department of English
783 796 0942
0175-304 6246

Jaspreet Mander
Associate Professor of English
Seminar Coordinator
941 792 3373

I couldn’t agree with the sentiments more, applaud the organizers’ ambitious scope, and wish them the best!

PS: There is a Canada/India/Southeast Asia project, Cosmopolitanism and the Local in Science and Nature: Creating an East/West Partnership, that’s starting up soon as per my Dec. 12, 2014 post and this seminar would seem like an opportunity for those academics to reach out. Finally, you can get more information about Punjabi University here.