The papers in the conference can address some of the pressing concepts related to the event directly, such as irregularity, chance, accident, hospitality and non-event, that have occupied literary studies, political theory and philosophy in the recent past. Addressing the literary fold specifically, the conference will be able to build on more recent research by scholars such as Derek Attridge, whose The Work of Literature(2015) understands events as having a singular, disruptive and yet formative presence in literary work, Ilai Rowner, who provides the event with a conceptual and literary history with his The Event: Literature and Theory (2015) and, written in a very different vein, Terry Eagleton’s The Event of Literature (2012).

2. Testimony

The question of testimony, or its lack, looms large when discussing literature’s response to event. The conference invites scholars to re-think literature’s response to the event and entropy that surrounds us, on the lines that it has been thought about in the last decade. If literature testifies, or tries to testify, to events of insurrections, it also testifies to sexual awakenings, to natural disasters, personal trauma and pain. These testimonies do not find an easy utterance, and despite finding a medium they can be a source of embarrassment, discontent and shame, as argued in Timothy Bewes’ The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2010). The papers in this conference could look at all such events and their importance for literary work, they could also simultaneously expose the impossibility of testimony itself, if not its need in the first place. Taking a cue from Heidegger’s use of the word Ereignis (event)—an event is as much a moment of revelation (Eräugnis) for the literary work as a site of appropriation (Eriegnung) and ultimately loss, which is how this conference wishes to broach the question of testimony too.

3. Literature as Event

Provocations of ideas such as plasticity and contingency, strongly forwarded by the philosophers Catherine Malabou and Quentin Meillassoux, are exciting new responses to the event and what it means for literature. While plasticity destabilizes our understanding of form, and thereby what constitutes as an event, contingency revokes the claims of reason and causal necessity that is often attached to events. In this segment of the conference, the experience of literature—as an act of both writing and reading—will be understood as an event in its own right. Despite the struggle to capture the intensity of the event, or remain faithful to it, literature can, and often does, become the site of change and alterity itself. Papers will be able to take forward the imaginings of a literary event put forward by influential thinkers like Derrida (on Celan) and Deleuze (on Proust), whereby literature is appraised for the transformative encounter it allows in the shape of an event.

• Theories of Event and Literary Event 
• Questions of Testimony and Writing
• Literature and Change
• Plasticity, Contingency and Speculation
• Practices of Reading
• Fragility and Literature
• Biopolitical Events
• Climate‘change’asanundoingofallevents
• Theories of Non-Event
• Postcolonialiality and Event
• Re-definition of event from a world-literature perspective