Event date:

Re-Examining American Literature Student Symposium (REAL)

promotional banner: name and date of the event given as text on a dark-blue background

The Department of American Studies: Literature and Media at the Faculty of English proudly announces the 2025 Re-Examining American Literature Student Symposium (REAL).

This online event with the leading theme “Objects in American Literature and Culture” will take place on March 22, 2025 (Saturday).

promotional poster: details of the event as provided on the associated page, enriched with a photograph of prof. Kacper Bartczak

Things are no longer relegated to anthropological study of material culture, but “strike back” as agents, symbols, narrators, focal points of cultural activity, and by their sheer ubiquity, as the “stuff” that permeates individual and collective lives entirely. Things have become “vibrant matter,” they are “incorporeal,” they are alive. But how do they feature in culture and literature? What are the conventions of representation of objects and matter? Join the 5th Re-Examining American Literature Student Symposium to learn more!

Our Keynote speaker will be prof. Kacper Bartczak (The University of Łódź, Poland), a critic, poet, and translator of poetry; author of In Search of Community of Communication: The Poetry of John Ashbery (2006), Świat nie scalony (2009), and Materia i autokreacja: dociekania w poetyce wielościowej (2019).

We kindly invite BA, MA, and PhD students to submit your proposals by January 15, 2025.

Submit your abstract and join us and take part in engaging and inspiring discussions on the roles of objects and things in literary and cultural representation. If you want to join us as an audience member on MS Teams, please email us.

For more details, visit the Symposium website [external link].

REAL Organizing Committee:
dr hab. Paulina Ambroży, prof. UAM
dr Katarzyna Macedulska
dr Małgorzata Olsza

abbreviated version in Polish (skrócona wersja w języku polskim)