Call for papers: "Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities", conference, UiB, 27-28.10.2011

Interdisciplinary conference organized by the research group Literature and Science, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

Chemistry is the art of separating, weighing, and distinguishing: these are three useful exercises also for the person who sets out to describe events or give body to his own imagination. Moreover, there is an immense treasure of metaphors that the writer can take from the chemistry of today and yesterday, which those who have not frequented the laboratory and factory know only approximately. […] Even a layman knows what to filter, crystallize, and distil means, but he knows it only at second hand: he does not know “the passion infused by them”, he does not know the emotions that are tied to these gestures, has not perceived the symbolic shadow they
cast.
These are the words of the Italian novelist and essayist Primo Levi (1919-1987),
chemist and survivor of Auschwitz, who wrote extensively on chemistry.

Designated the UNESCO International Year of Chemistry, 2011 also commemorates the 100th anniversary of Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded for her ground-breaking studies in radium and polonium. The relationship between literature and chemistry has a long history, reaching back to the time before the existence of chemistry as a scientific discipline, to alchemy and natural philosophy, and to philosophers and poets like Epicurus and Lucretius….

Call for papers:
For this conference we welcome a range of approaches – historical, theoretical, ethical and aesthetical – to the encounters and affinities between literature and chemistry.

For more information, please see the above link.
Deadline for handling in your proposed topic and preliminary paper title: 30 June, followed by a 250-word abstract by 1 September, to the following address:
margareth.hagen@if.uib.no