Conference

“Tragic Form Across Europe and Beyond”

International Conference

Sibiu, Romania | 1-3.07. 2025

Lucian Blaga University is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for the upcoming international conference, “Tragic Form Across Europe and Beyond,” to be held between July 1-3 in Sibiu, Romania. The conference aims to explore tragedy as it is reflected in literature, theater, and other cultural forms from antiquity to the present day, with a focus on European (semi)peripheries and non-European cultural spaces.

It is common for both contemporary media and for the wider public to employ “tragedy” very generously, referring both to events that involve the loss of human life and to symbolic events that can hardly be described as more than sad or unfortunate. We therefore propose a return to the Aristotelian roots of the term in talking about tragedy as a literary genre that is still alive and kicking, in spite of George Steiner’s arguments regarding its demise, but which has simply changed its form or shifted its location.

Tragedy has been a fundamental genre not only in European literary tradition but across world literature as well, reflecting varying degrees of social tension, times of historical crisis, and the complexities of the human psyche. From the classical tragedies of ancient Greece to bourgeois German drama and the existential depths of 20th century absurdist theater, the tragic form has proven its potential for illustrating a broader shift in social, economic, and political conditions. This conference seeks to investigate the development, transformation, and enduring significance of tragedy across Europe and beyond, with an emphasis on literature. In addition to traditional interpretative methods, the conference welcomes an interdisciplinary approach in trying to establish a link between ideological readings of tragedy and newer methodologies pertaining to Digital Humanities.

We invite scholars from various disciplines, including literary criticism, theater studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy, and related fields to submit proposals that address the following themes:

  • The issue of defining tragic form (from the standpoint of recurring themes, topics, perspectives, etc.)
  • Classical Greek and Roman tragedy: the social, political, and philosophical implications of Greek tragedy and its reception and adaptations in later periods (Roman, Renaissance, modern, postmodern), including its influence on modern literature and film in the non-Western world.
  • Tragic form and Digital Humanities: how is tragic form approachable from the standpoint of Digital Humanities? What does the use of stylometry, sentiment analysis, or topic modelling reveal about European and non-European tragedy? 
  • What is the extent to which tragedy was adopted outside Europe? What is the form taken by tragedy in North America or postcolonial cultures?
  • To what extent is tragedy a European construct exported to non-European literatures, and can we identity tragedies outside Europe, e.g., Japan or China? What are the similarities and dissimilarities between European and non-European tragedy?
  • To what extent can one talk about modern tragedy and how can we establish modern definitions of the tragic? If tragedy is not dead, as many literary scholars have pointed out, what are the forms of its revival?
  • Tragic form and political unrest: how does classical tragedy reflect political and social turmoil in Europe and beyond?
  • Tragedy and literary history: what is the role of tragedy in national literary histories?

Please submit a 250-word abstract along with a brief bio (100 words) to andrei.terian@ulbsibiu.ro and ovio.olaru@ulbsibiu.ro by 28.02.2025. Proposals should include the title of the paper, the main arguments, and the methodologies employed. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 07.03.2025.

Confirmed keynote speakers:        

Franco Moretti (LBUS/Stanford University)

Juliane Vogel (University of Konstanz/ Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)

The “Tragic Form Across Europe and Beyond” conference is organised within the research grant “Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form” (METRA – https://grants.ulbsibiu.ro/metra/)