On 5–6 June 2015, an international seminar entitled "Literature and Arts. Copyrighted" was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków. The meeting was organised by the JU Chair in Literary Anthropology and Cultural Studies and the JU Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities within the framework Maciej Jakubowiak's research grant, funded by the National Science Centre.
The seminar was attended by specialists in the fields of literary studies, art history, cultural studies, sociologists, and lawyers from Poland (Kraków, Warsaw, Poznań, Katowice) and abroad (Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Francisco, Osnabrück).
Copyright law is usually considered to deal with artistic production and to regulate by whom and how cultural works can be used. Rising importance of intellectual property in developed economies leads, however, to the widening of the law's importance in many areas of life. Even today discussions are held whether copyright is applicable to genetic code and if genetically modified organisms may be treated as intellectual property. The law itself proves to be closely tied to our understanding of life and ways of controlling it.
The special guest of the seminar was Paul K. Saint-Amour – associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Satin-Amour specialises in Victorian and Modernist literature, with special focus on novel, law, trauma, and visual culture studies. Saint-Amour's The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Cornell UP, 2003) won the MLA Prize for a First Book. His articles have appeared in such journals as Comparative Literature Studies, Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, Modernism/Modernity, Nineteenth-Century Studies, Novel, Post 45, Public Books, Theory, Culture, and Society, and Representations. A few years ago, Paul K. Saint-Amour chaired a fact-finding panel initiated by the International James Joyce Foundation (IJJF) to study the permissions history and criteria of the Estate of James Joyce and the general problem of scholarly fair use. Saint-Amour sits on the editorial board of the open-access journal Authorship. From 2012-13 he served as President of the Modernist Studies Association, whose fair use task force he co-chairs with Robert Spoo. He edited the volume Modernism and Copyright (2011) for Oxford UP's Modernist Literature and Culture series and has just completed a book entitled Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form.
Project is organised as a part of the research grant "Modern literature and copyright law", financed by Polish National Science Centre upon a decision number DEC-2012/05/N/HS2/02796.
Photo: Nomi Stolzenberg
