The Essay: Forms and Transformations (deadline for abstract: March 1 2014)
The Essay has constituted an important prose form from the sixteenth century until the present and constitutes an intriguing field for interdisciplinary study. Applied to such a heterogeneous range of writings as maxims, aphorisms and proverbs, letters, treatises in philosophy and the sciences, as well as criticism and journalism of different kinds, it has eluded clear definition. Not surprisingly, literary and cultural studies have been reluctant to tackle what appears to be a random array of prose texts straddling the boundaries between literature, philosophy and scientific writing, criticism and journalism.