Scheda

Dettaglio

• Titolo:
  CFP - Broken Continuity: Anti-Jewish Motifs in Literature from Antiquity to the Present
• Paese:
  France
• Scadenza:
  10-09-2026 - Ore 23:59
• Descrizione:
  
  

  Dear colleagues,
  We are writing to share a first call for presentations for Broken Continuity: Anti-Jewish Motifs in Literature from Antiquity to the Present. We are working toward organizing a major conference on this subject, tentatively scheduled for the last week of June 2027, in Paris. We are seeking funding for the event, and to that end we need to establish a provisional list of participants together with the titles of their proposed presentations.
  
  Colleagues interested in contributing are warmly invited to send us, before 10 September 2026 (stephanie.e.binder@gmail.com or agnes.goeppinger@uni-wuerzburg.de )
  Broken Continuity: Anti-Jewish Motifs in Literature from Antiquity to the Present
  
  Conference Concept and Rationale
  
  How do literary motifs survive for more than two millennia? Can the same narrative patterns, images, and accusations remain recognizable while serving entirely different purposes? These questions lie at the heart of Broken Continuity.
  
  Rather than treating anti-Jewish discourse as a single, uninterrupted historical phenomenon, this conference investigates the life of literary motifs: their (local and temporal) emergence, transmission, transformation, disappearance, and reappearance across cultures, religions, geographical areas, and historical periods. The aim is not to reconstruct a linear genealogy of hostile representations of Jews, but to examine how a repertoire of recurring literary forms and narrative strategies survives, is transmitted, or is reconfigured over time. These forms are continually reinterpreted according to the intellectual, religious, social, and political needs of successive societies. Through processes of inheritance, transmission, adaptation, translation, cultural memory, self-identification, and recombination, motifs may persist across centuries while their meanings, functions, and ideological purposes may undergo profound transformations.
  
  Scope and Research Questions
  Understanding how these motifs have been transmitted and transformed across centuries is not only a matter of historical interest: it equips scholars, educators, and cultural observers with the critical tools needed to recognize how inherited literary forms may resurface, consciously or not, in later discourse. By clarifying what is genuinely continuous and what is historically specific, this research contributes to a more precise and less anachronistic understanding of anti-Jewish representations across time.
  
  We welcome contributions from scholars working on any historical period, culture, religion, language, or geographical region. Gathering scholars from different backgrounds and various scholarly traditions is essential to tackle the topic from as many points of view as possible and to reach an exhaustive analysis of the phenomenon. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary approaches including philological analysis, reception history, and digital humanities methodologies applied to the following areas:
  - Antiquity and Late Antiquity: Hellenistic and Roman literature; ethnography and the construction of alterity; early Christian reinterpretations of “pagan” traditions.
  Which motifs emerge in this period, and how do literary genres shape their earliest transformations?
  - Eastern and Western Monastic/Literary Networks: Anti-Jewish motifs in Byzantine, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, and Ethiopian literatures.
  How do motifs travel across linguistic and confessional boundaries, and what mechanisms of cultural memory allow certain images to persist while others vanish?
  - Medieval and Early Modern Reconfigurations: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant cultures; Islamic literary traditions; the emergence of recurring motifs (ritual murder, blood libel, conspiracy, etc.).
  Which motifs are repeatedly revived in this period, and to what extent do authors consciously inherit earlier traditions versus independently recombining existing cultural patterns?
  - The Modern and Contemporary Eras: Enlightenment literature; modern racial antisemitism; contemporary literature, media, and digital cultures.
  What changes when inherited motifs move into (seemingly) secular, nationalist, or racial contexts, and how might computational text analysis help map their replication and mutation across large corpora?
  - Comparative Methodology: Theoretical approaches to literary stereotypes, cultural memory, and the longue durée of anti-Jewish representation.
  How can a comparative framework account for both continuity and genuine historical rupture across these different contexts?
  
  More broadly, Broken Continuity aims to contribute to the study of how literary traditions preserve, reshape, and reactivate inherited representations across extended historical time. By treating anti-Jewish motifs as dynamic cultural forms rather than static historical constants, the conference seeks to offer scholars a comparative model – applicable well beyond its immediate object – for understanding how literary prejudice is transmitted, transformed, and, at times, discontinued across cultures, religions, and historical periods.
  Kontakt
  
  stephanie.e.binder@gmail.com
  agnes.goeppinger@uni-wuerzburg.de