CONVERSATIONS

Valuation in Literary Infrastructures

The career paths of literary authors are imbued with processes of valuation; so are the paths that literary works travel on the literary market. The funding of literary projects and persons, the shaping of literary careers through stipends and residencies, the gatekeeping of publishers, the negotiation of authorial rights, the decision-making in the process of editing, literary awards and prizes—these are just some practices of today’s literary field that are based on explicit and implicit criteria of literary value. This section examined these practices with view to how they construct certain ideas of literature and hierarchies of literary values, focusing specifically on the distribution of power in the practices of valuation and in the resulting relations within the literary field. CONVERSATIONS explored how race, class, gender, and other factors come into play in all infrastructures that attribute symbolic and economic value to literary works.

CONVERSATIONS is an experimental format that brings together two experts in an unmoderated discussion. The participants are invited to start with an opening statement that reacts to the question formulated in the title of the CONVERSATION. The format is inspired by the conversations during conference coffee breaks as a type of exchange that we find as productive as it is informal. In accordance with this framework, the format forgoes the Q&A, offering the audience the possibility to pose questions during the subsequent ROUNDTABLE AND AUDIENCE DISCUSSION instead.

CONVERSATION #1

Madhu Krishnan and Caroline Kögler
Image Credit: Tobias Bohm 2024 for EXC 2020

Caroline Kögler and Madhu Krishnan talked about:

Writing and Publishing Postcolonial Literatures: Marginalised Aesthetics?

Caroline Kögler is Junior-Professor for English Philology and Global Literature and Its Media with a focus on Gender Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is the author of Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market (Routledge, 2018 and 2023) and the co-author of Are Books Still 'Different'? Literature as Culture and Commodity in a Digital Age (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In addition to her research on postcolonial studies and on the intersections of literature and economics, she has published widely on Queer and Gender Studies, Citizenship and Migration Studies, Black British Literature, Victorianism and Neo-Victorianism, and digital literature.

Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. She is the author of three books: Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (2018, James Currey), and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018, Cambridge University Press). She is the PI on the project funded by an ERC starting grant, "Literary Activism in sub-Saharan Africa: Commons, Publics and Networks of Practice."

CONVERSATON #2

Sabine Erbrich and Chris Möller talked about:

Nothing but Trouble? Gender in Literary Production and Publishing

Sabine Erbrich has worked for the Suhrkamp Verlag in various capacities for over ten years, most of this time as the editor for international fiction with a focus on French, Spanish, and Portuguese literatures. She is also a literary translator and has translated novels, graphic novels, and children’s literature from Spanish, English, and French. She occasionally teaches at the Freie Universität Berlin and is completing her PhD in comparative literature with a project on disgust in contemporary women’s writing. Just prior to the conference, she was on sabbatical at the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, where she was undertaking research for her dissertation.

Chris Möller has been curating and organising literary events for over ten years. She is the co-founder of the literary events label KASCH, formerly known as Kabeljau und Dorsch. She is also the co-editor of the digital magazine for contemporary literature &SHY. Chris has written for a variety of media, including Die Epilog, the magazine for contemporary cultural theory and practice. Having produced and hosted a number of podcasts with KASCH, Chris released her own podcast about curating literary events called Zwischen last year. She has also co-directed the Independent Reading Series Festival ULF, and she was on the jury for the German Book Prize in 2020.

ROUNDTABLE AND AUDIENCE DISCUSSION

Roundtable "Diversity and Literary Infrastructures"
Image Credit: Tobias Bohm 2024 for EXC 2020

With Sabine Erbrich, Lea Hopp, Caroline Kögler, Madhu Krishnan and Chris Möller. Chair: Alexandra Ksenofontova.

Diversity and Literary Infrastructures: New Voices, New Values?

ROUNDTABLE AND AUDIENCE DISCUSSION brought together the participants of two prior CONVERSATIONS, Sabine Erbrich, Caroline Kögler, Madhu Krishnan, and Chris Möller, who were further joined by the artist Lea Hopp. Together, they explored how race, class, gender, and other factors come into play in all infrastructures that attribute symbolic and economic value to literary works.

Lea Hopp is a visual artist working with film, photography, performance, and other media. She is also a co-founder of the queerfeminist label FAM_; with FAM_, she has curated events in Berlin, Essen, Dortmund, and Munich. She has recently worked as a videographer at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and taught at the Bauhaus University Weimar. In May 2024 Lea was Artist in Residence at EXC 2020. Her works deal with the provisional, the everyday, and with the structures of play; they investigate social dynamics and the oppressive character of sign systems.

Leas video installation "The Jury" has been exhibited at the conference. Read more about the installation here.