Past Events

SAUTE Biennial Conference & CUSO Doctoral Workshop - 24-26 April 2015

The SAUTE Biennial Conference 2015 on Economies of English took place on 24-25 April 2015 at the University of Geneva.  This conference was combined with the CUSO Doctoral Workshop: The Changing Value of English Studies (26 April 2015).

As the world still reels from the financial crisis of 2007-8, it seems timely to reflect on the connections between money and value embedded in all our discourses about economy, language and literature. Marxists and neoliberals have classically theorized this as reflecting the mechanisms of capitalism and the market. More recently, however, the literary theorist Marc Shell has seen the invention of coinage as underlying the whole of Western philosophy, while the anthropologist David Graeber has proposed that all of the great religions and political ideologies are responses to the moral confusion of money. These are concerns that go to the heart of English studies, both because English is the global language of money, and because the discipline and its language rest on a goldmine of unexamined economic metaphors: from literary debts to loanwords, from redemption to counterfeit and queer, from currency to exchange, from the economy of syntax to the economy of poetic expression.

For full details please visit the Conference website.

 

12 Dec 2014

2015