The Liberlit Conference

June 14, 2025 at Nihon University, College of Humanities and Sciences

Theme: Core Concepts, Key Ideas: What Really Matters in Literary Studies?

Among academic disciplines, literary studies stands out for its lack of clearly articulated content, objectives, and methods. While a biology major must acquire basic knowledge about the structure of living organisms, and an economics major must study the fundamentals of supply and demand, a literature major studies what the instructor likes and/or believes worthy of attention. What really matters, it seems, can change from one instructor to the next.Does this mutability affect how the broader public sees – or does not see – literary studies? Is the increasingly precarious state of literary studies (and the humanities in general) related to our inability (or refusal?) to discipline our discipline?As higher education becomes more corporatized, student populations shrink, social media overshadows serious reading, and AI takes over the jobs of knowledge workers, will there be any place for an educational enterprise that cannot plainly define itself? And how can we account for literary studies’ wavering prominence in a way that makes sense to those outside literary studies?The Liberlit series of conferences have since their inception been a forum for rethinking literary studies. In keeping with Liberlit’s pedagogical focus, we want to emphasize for our students and for the powers that be what it is that really matters.This year’s conference features 12 panels with 35 speakers. We are also delighted to feature a keynote address by Professor Allan Punzalan Isaac of Rutgers University, “Reading After the Cold War: Resisting the Paranoid Style in Global Politics”.

The liberlit manifesto

established 2010

We believe literature to be an essential element of the English curriculum in Japan, and its vital future presence must be ensured and defended. By ‘literature’, we mean authentic texts that use language in creative and careful ways to tell stories, convey impressions, express original opinions, pose critical questions and demand more than simplistic, pragmatic responses. Those texts could include poetry, novels, plays, movies, songs, TV series, or thoughtful authentic writings on culture, society, or history. Teaching literature always means teaching much more than just language. This conference will address attitudes and approaches to ‘literary’ texts in English.We lament the ongoing ‘dumbing down’ and ‘infantilisation’ of English education in Japan and the consequent marginalization of literature in the curriculum at all levels. Our conviction is that literature offers learners access to the kinds of creative, critical, and non-complacent views of the world that Japanese students sorely need and indeed, in many cases, crave. Literature has the power to engage and motivate second-language learners; its potential for multiple interpretations develops the minds of students who often believe that every question has but one answer, and the authenticity of literary texts respects them as intellectually maturing adults. Eye-opening materials and mind-widening methods should be an integral part of the education process at all levels, but are essential at university level before students go forth to live among the complexities of the ‘real’ world.The conference will explore the idea that it is unkind and disingenuous to deprive students of the marvelously varied, meaningful, and challenging content that only great works of literature and thoughtful authentic writings on culture can offer. It will also explore techniques, methods, and ways that literary texts can foreground the roots of education, liberate English language into maturely creative uses and instigate a freer, bolder expression of original opinions. With your participation, we hope this conference will open up an active and collaborative community of thought, reflection, inquiry and discussion. We hope to make this conference the first step in an ongoing forum in which we can establish how, where, and why literature should rightly figure in Japan’s English curriculum.

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