Open Call
You can send your abstracts to the symposium, which will open up discussion on the ways in which the concept of the city and urban experiences are represented in literature, to the relevant form, until February 20, 2025. In case of any information or problems that may arise, you can reach the committee at kentsymposium@kent.edu.tr.
The symposium will be organized in a hybrid form (both online and physical) for participants from abroad.
The languages of the symposium, which will be organized within the SoFL, are Turkish and English. The papers presented at the symposium will be published later.
In the introduction to One Way, Walter Benjamin transforms himself as the author into a cartographer and constructs his text as a city that breathes with its streets, roads and porous buildings. We, on the other hand, follow the lines, contours and routes on the map that Benjamin points out, sometimes getting lost in the text/locality.
This symposium proposes to ‘read’ the city as a text, following the footsteps of Benjamin, who likens the text to a city. In this reading, certain questions come to the fore: How do cities, with their entangled and layered structures bearing traces of history and the present, their streets, stairs, rhythms, memories and contradictions, find a response in the literary imagination? How do the material imaginations and affects that establish and surround the city find a response in texts? How are cities, both as an open-ended experience and as a place of ‘cultural encounter’ and collision, narrated in literature? How do cities shape people, and people shape cities? How do the history and present of cities affect ‘urban policies’? Who is represented in cities and how? Is it possible to construct another city through writing and literature? What do the unseen tell us about cities, other than the ‘visible’? In the 1st International City Symposium, we will seek answers to these and similar questions. In order to trace the answers to these questions in literary texts, we expect your paper suggestions under the following and similar titles:
Cihangir Mahallesi, Sıraselviler Caddesi, No:71, 34433 Beyoğlu / İstanbul
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