27/05/2025
Call for Conference Presentations
"Tracing Topoi"
Scholars in different branches of literary studies often come across clusters of motifs or specific narrative plots that recur across the borders of genres, periods, and national literatures. Such recurrences, termed topoi after the Greek topos (place), do not merely function as stable locations or commonplaces to which authors may have recourse but undergo permutations and revisions. A topos (e.g., “star-crossed lovers,” “the last words of the dying,” “seduction,” “self-sacrifice for a loved one”) may be patterned on human conduct or, in turn, inspire people to reproduce or mimic it.
The international conference “Tracing Topoi,” to be held in the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities on May 18-20, 2026, will focus on the history of topoi in narrative genres, possibly taking into account drama, film, and the visual arts.
The academic committee invites proposals on specific topoi, discussing their meanings and tracing their emergence, dissemination, waning, subversion, and possible comebacks. The issues to be raised may include
cultural shifts that account for the rise and fall of a specific topos,
the inner dynamics of innovation in the history of a topos,
topos and structural variations of literary imagination,
networks of topoi (with variations in core motifs),
the function of parody in the reworking of topoi,
the movement of topoi between “high” and popular culture,
ways in which the study of topoi can supplement literary historiography,
the place of literary topoi in the history of ideas.
Selected papers from the conference will appear in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press (see https://partialanswers.huji.ac.il ), to mark the 25th anniversary of the journal.
Please send paper proposals (200 to 500 words) to Sima Daniel [email protected] and Leona Toker [email protected] by September 8, 2025.
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