Normativity and Subversion in Cultures of Writing
Designed to foster transdisciplinary cooperation and exchange within the Austrian Academy of Sciences, this workshop tackles questions of normativity and subversion in cultures of writing across Europe and Asia, and across different time periods. Producers and audiences of historical texts and documents – as well as contemporary scholars involved in their study – employ these to communicate, establish or subvert normative understandings in such diverse fields as religion, administration or historiography. How do different media utilized in written cultures function in these processes, and what is the significance of media change for them?
This overall question is pursued with three distinct foci: textual production and paratexts, media change (including, but not limited to, orality and different forms of writing), as well as genealogies as perhaps the most basic and universal form of history, which for this reason merit being considered as a kind of test case.