Keynote-föreläsare

Erkki Sevänen

The Shift from the Modern to the Current Literary Society or Literary System. How Does this Shift Relate to Contingency Awareness and Societal Critique?

From the late 18th century on literature has been an area of fiction and imagination in modern Western culture. As such it has had a right to create other kind of worlds and to present critique towards society and prevailing worldviews – or, as Niklas Luhmann said, it has functioned as a maintainer of contingency awareness in society. Thus, it has described prevailing social arrangements as largely contingent states of affairs that could, in principle, be replaced with more meaningful and just arrangements. From this point of departure, it can have proceeded to a radical renunciation of the modern capitalist society, patriarchal social order and prevailing worldviews. This presentation asks if literature functions still in the current or neoliberal phase of modernity as a critical maintainer of contingency awareness. Formerly publishing houses and other literary institutions kept a certain distance from the capitalist profit-seeking economy, but today they function largely on the market-based ground and their ownership base has become transnational. At the same time writers are increasingly conscious of current ecological and political risks. To what extent does this situation leave room for many-sided contingency awareness and critique?

Erkki Sevänen was, until his retirement in 2021, Professor of Literature (in particular the sociology of literature) at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu. From 2010 onward he was also Docent of Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki. Sevänen holds both a PhD in literature and a DSS in sociology. His works include Towards a New Kind of System of Art. The Shift from the Modern to the Contemporary Sphere of Art from the Standpoint of System-Theoretical and Systemic Sociology (2008), Art and the Challenge of Markets. Volume One. National Cultural Politics and the Challenges of Marketization and Globalization (2018) and Art and the Challenge of Markets. Volume Two. From Commodification of Art to Artistic Critique of Capitalism (2018). He has been PI in the projects "To Ignore, to Adapt Oneself, to Utilize or to Resist? How the Art World Has Reacted to the Market-Based or Neo-Liberalist Turn in Social and Cultural Policy" (Academy of Finland 2011–2014) and "Towards a More Advanced Loaning and Reading Culture and its Information Service. A Study, Based on Digital Material, of Contemporary Finnish Loaning and Reading Habits" (Academy of Finland 2017–2021).

Sara Tanderup Linkis

Sound Changes. Transforming (Audio) Literature between Texts and Contexts

The sociology of literature focuses on the interplay between literary texts and their social, material or economic contexts. How do we study this interplay in a digital age, when it becomes (increasingly?) hard to distinguish where the text ends and the context(s) begins? The talk discusses this departing from the case of audiobooks and the notion of “audio literature.” The rise of audiobooks, especially in the Nordic countries, is related to significant changes in literary culture: the format leads not only to new forms of reading, but also new modes of producing, writing and thinking about literature. I discuss how a sociology of literature approach can be applied and developed to understand these changes by tracing connections between developments in aesthetic/textual content, new production conditions and new (or old) modes of reading (and using) literature in the age of audiobooks.

Sara Tanderup Linkis, PhD, is a Reader in Digital Cultures and Associate Professor in Publishing Studies at Lund University. Her research focuses on digital book cultures, audiobooks and media-oriented approaches to literature. She is PI in the project “Between Sound and Text: Production, Content and Experiences of Multimodal Audio Literature” (Swedish Research Council, 2024-2026).