Please forward: Bruno Schulz Conference Announcement

[Dieter De Bruyn]

International Conference "The World of Bruno Schulz / Bruno Schulz and the World: Influences, Similarities, Reception" (Leuven, May 25-26, 2007)


The Research Unit of Slavonic and East European Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), the Department of Slavonic and East European Studies at the Universiteit Gent (Belgium) and the Section of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) are pleased to announce the International Conference "The World of Bruno Schulz/Bruno Schulz and the World: Influences, Similarities, Reception". The Conference will take place on the Faculty of Arts campus in Leuven, Belgium, May 25-26, 2007.

As Stanislaw Eile (1996) has argued, the difficulty with Bruno Schulz's prose is that "the extensive use of figurative language renders the message rather confusing and consequently open to a variety of esoteric readings, which often demonstrate the inventiveness of critics rather than representing a convincing explication of the text". According to Krzysztof Stala (1993), too many critics limit themselves to "some fragmentary, marginal reading, being rather aware of the inexhaustibleness of Schulz's prose than trying to define this inexhaustibleness, domesticate it with some proposal richer than 'expression of the inexpressible'". Because of the difficulty to find a stable interpretative horizon in Schulz's texts themselves, it has been a popular critical strategy to compare his confusing literary output to an ever increasing number of well- and less-known writers and literary trends. It remains unclear, however, to which extent this profusion of comparisons has lead to a better understanding of Schulz's literary world. If Schulz is comparable to almost any modern writer, what is then still so special about his writings?

The aim of the conference is to explore the limits of the comparability of Schulz's literary and graphic works. Participants will link Schulz with such writers, artists, trends and traditions as Djuna Barnes, Miron Bialoszewski, Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, Hasidism/Judaism, Tadeusz Kantor, Danilo Kis, Boleslaw Lesmian, Magical Realism, Thomas Mann, Gabriel García Márquez, Masochism, Modernism/Avant-Garde, Friedrich Nietzsche, Quay Brothers, Rainer Maria Rilke, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Arthur Schopenhauer, Skamander, Piotr Szewc, Magdalena Tulli, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta.

For details or questions, please contact the members of the Organizing Committee: Kris Van Heuckelom (kris.vanheuckelom at arts.kuleuven.be) or Dieter De Bruyn (dieter.debruyn at ugent.be). For complete conference program, registration and all practical information, please check the conference pages at http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/slavic/schulz/.

The conference is sponsored by The Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), The Faculty of Arts and Philosophy (UGent), The Faculty of Arts (K.U.Leuven) and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Brussels.