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From Letterform to Literary Site: The Material Lives of Korean Textual Objects
Princeton University, November 6-7, 2026
A conference co-organized by Olga Fedorenko (Seoul National University) and Ksenia Chizhova (Princeton) in partnership with the Korean Literature Association
*Accommodation (2 nights in Princeton) and airfare are fully covered by the organizers.
We invite papers that trace the life of the text from the letterform to diverse literary sites—from the smallest gestures of inscription, impression, or typographic mark to the vast architectures of preservation, circulation, and analog and digital display that materialize textual meanings and engagements. How can we read the material aspects of textual production—engraving, typesetting, coding, layout design—as semiotic systems in their own right? How do material lives of texts become entangled with the local and global systems, platforms, and environments that authorize, distribute, and monumentalize literature? How do words travel from literature to other expressive forms (painting, poster design, graphic art)? What is the relationship between the “inside” and “outside” of the text? When does a text begin or stop being literary? We aim to move beyond the disciplinary boundaries of “literature” to consider the broader field of textual production in its material dimension—a field where writing meets fabrication, design, and the infrastructures that shape how texts are made, move, and matter.
• The limits of text: textual opacity, nontransparency, and fragmentation
• Micro-mechanics of publishing: layout, spacing, punctuation
• Codes as nonlinguistic signification
• The archaeology of textual form: materials, binding, inscription, and production methods as historical and cultural markers
• Calligraphics, typographics, ideographics in textual production
• Text and texture in poster design, signage, advertising
• Artistic, decorative, and commercial repurposing of literary texts
• Text as sculptural object: three-dimensional textuality, artistic and formal manipulations, display, arrangement, and architectural integration as spatial and material choreography
• Literary sites, memorial spaces, and themed environments where texts migrate from written form
into physical spaces
• Walking, dwelling, and encountering literature: embodied engagement with texts
• The monumentalization of literature: how texts are preserved, displayed, and transformed into cultural landscape
• The transformation and repurposing of textual forms across analog and digital media
• Digitalized textual objects and materiality
• Cross-cultural translation and material transformation of textual objects
Please send paper title, a 250-word abstract, five keywords, and a CV, to Ksenia Chizhova (kchizhova@princeton.edu) and Olga Fedorenko (fed0renk0@snu.ac.kr), cc-ing korlitorg@gmail.com, under the subject heading “KLA 2026” by June 15, 2026.
Presenters will be expected to join the KLA membership program (https://koreanlit.org/membership/).
