For centuries, different concepts of home are and have been negotiated in diverse art forms (such as literature, music, theater, visual arts, performance arts, and film). The organizers of the interdisciplinary conference “Versions of Home: Adapting – Rewriting – Referencing in the Arts” invite researchers from various fields who investigate how multiple versions of home have developed and changed across the arts. The idea for this conference is derived from a 2023 workshop on “Writing Home(s): Aesthetic Strategies from Antiquity to the Present Day.” In this workshop, members of the research cluster “European Literatures and Their Interactions,” which is part of the field of excellence “Dimensions of Europe” at the University of Graz (Austria), discussed approaches and research trajectories of their fields. Broadly put, cluster members and visiting fellows from various disciplines explore the manifold intricate relations between literature and the arts from diachronic and comparative perspectives (https://dimensions-of-europe.unigraz.at/en/clusters/cluster-europaeische-literaturen-und-ihre-wechselbeziehungen/ ). As the research group includes members working in literary studies (Slavic, German, American, Ancient Greek, Latin), Jewish studies, musicology, digital humanities, intermediality studies, the possibilities inherent in cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary concerns were a common theme of the workshop.
For the 2025 conference, we are particularly interested in papers that address topics such as:
• Competing conceptualizations of home: Which terms are used in which language? What are the implications of each term? Why do some languages and cultures have a bouquet of terms that cover different segments of the concept? How is this multiplicity of terms embedded in sociohistorical events?
• Recurring topoi of home and how they are expressed in different art forms and media
• The transposition of concepts of home between different genres (e.g., epic, historiography, lyrical poetry, epigram) that are associated with different aesthetic, generic, formal, and other prerequisites, affordances, and generic practices
• Processes of aesthetic change and of reception in different art forms and across different art forms
• Strategic uses of intertextuality in representations of home
• Processes and results of adapting, rewriting, varying, versioning the canonized versions of myths or other grand narratives concerning home, home-coming, nostos, return-stories, and the like. How are these well-known narratives adapted to the needs and requirements of a different timeframe, location, and of innovative discursive formations? Examples might be: literary conceptualizations of home in different literary traditions and genres, film versions in different time periods, adaptations of novels into spoken drama, music theatre, graphic novel, video, or film as well as evocations of home through music and other sonic features
• Transmedial inquiries into a poetics of home across arts and/or media