Conferinta C.S. Lewis, The Re-Enchanted Academic

C.S. Lewis taught Literature at Oxford and Cambridge Universities for more than forty years. His prowess led Cambridge to create the Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature specifically for him. Yet studies of this renown author, apologist, scholar, and deeply invested teacher, too often overlook the specific vocation in which he not only delighted and excelled, but which infused his entire corpus. Lewis’ passion for the literature he taught gripped him from his teenage years (if not earlier!) right through to the end of his life. His final academic book, The Discarded Image, which drew together many of his lectures, was an invocation not to discard the riches of this past; then and now, it calls his readers to consider more closely their own chronological – and literary – snobbery. Within the literature of old Lewis saw much that was fundamental for the well-being of the future; as an intellectual historian he was prophetic. His calling as an academic – whatever genre his output – was to return his readers to the enchantment of literary transcendence.

Come join us in Iasi as we reclaim the image too easily discarded, as we explore Lewis the academic — both his own re-enchantment as such, and how he summoned others to the same, as we discuss how he interwove his calling as a teacher of literature — both in the classroom and on the page — with that of a challenger of contemporary culture; how with wit and intellect he enticed his students and readers into that which he found “so imaginable and so satisfying to the imagination.” In the current zeitgeist of inhospitable contention, of ideological (and physical) warfare, Lewis the academic proffers an engaging, intellectually satisfying, and carefully informed alternative.

On the 60th anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis, as well as the 10th year since our first Symposium, the sixth C. S. Lewis conference C. S. Lewis: the Re-enchanted Academic addresses topics related to the scholarship of C. S. Lewis and his kindred spirits as members of academia: biographical particulars; vocations as literary/cultural historians and critics; specific attention to the influence of Medieval and Renaissance ages in their writing — academic, theological, and otherwise; their perspectives on pedagogy and education (higher education in particular); their perspectives on the academic as tutor and mentor. We invite papers in the fields of literary history and criticism, cultural studies and arts studies, linguistics, aesthetics, theology, history, ethics, and education sciences, that will invite constructive dialogues between disciplines and generate constructive responses to contemporary dilemmas.

 For information and registration please access the link: http://simpozioncslewis.blogspot.com/