Bryn Mawr College, April 16–17, 2027
Co-organizers: Asya Sigelman (Classics) and Margaret Strair (German Studies)
Keynote speaker: Barbara Graziosi (Princeton University)
The rapid integration of generative AI in everyday life brings renewed urgency to fundamental questions about human creativity: what constitutes the human act of writing, and how does human literary production differ from that of large language models (LLMs) — algorithms trained on vast textual corpora to predict and generate language?
The field of literary reception studies offers one way to engage with these questions. All literature draws on its predecessors: in the words of T. S. Eliot, “not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” On the surface, this dynamic resembles what LLMs do when they generate new texts by drawing on vast repositories of pre-existing texts. But while LLMs recombine existing patterns, human authors transform inherited forms and meanings in ways that open new imaginative possibilities. In her seminal article which introduced the concept of intertextuality, Julia Kristeva argued that the “literary word” is “an intersection of textual surfaces,” a “dialogue among several writings.” While reception studies have largely decentered intentionality, it is worth attending to those moments when an author is fully conscious that she is entering such a magical intersection, where the past is “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot). It is just such a moment that Zora Neale Hurston captures when she reminisces on the first encounter between herself, an African American girl growing up in the Jim Crow South, and the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton: “So I read Paradise Lost and luxuriated in Milton’s syllables and rhythms without ever having heard that Milton was one of the greatest poets of the world. I read it because I liked it” (Dust Tracks on a Road).
This conference invites scholars working across ancient and modern literatures to examine what is distinctively human about such encounters—what writers do with the voices they inherit that resists algorithmic replication. We invite paper proposals that bring together literary works from different historical, cultural, and/or linguistic backgrounds and that explore the role that dialogue with literary contemporaries and predecessors plays in the choices that a text makes on the levels of language, imagery, plot, and themes. As artificial intelligence is poised to change notions of authorship and the act of writing, what can a human writer’s reception of her predecessors tell us about what it means to birth a vision of the future?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Dialogue between literary creations as a catalyst for the development of a literary movement (e.g., New Sophistic, Classicism, Romanticism).
- Literary adaptations of ancient mythical and Biblical prototypes (e.g., Daedalus, Oedipus, Book of Job).
- A work’s positioning of itself within or against an established generic tradition.
- A poet’s/writer’s self-identification with a poetic voice of the past (e.g., Horace’s identification with Pindar; Brodsky’s with Horace; Virginia Woolf’s with Sappho; Derek Walcott’s with Homer).
- One genre’s absorption of another (e.g., Greek tragedy’s absorption of Homeric epic; Goethe’s adaptation of Euripidean tragedy in Faust; Dostoyevsky’s novelistic absorption of the plays of Shakespeare and Schiller).
- The dialoguing of 17th-21st century playwrights with ancient and/or Elizabethan theatre.
The conference will be held April 16–17, 2027, on the campus of Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. We anticipate being able to subsidize accommodations.
Abstracts (300-500 words) should be sent to Asya Sigelman (asigelman@brynmawr.edu) by October 1, 2026. The committee will send notifications of acceptances by November 15, 2026.