The International Seminar on Liminality and Text began as a modest forum designed to publicize and put to the test a number of ideas and lines of research which had in common little more than broad concerns with margins, with things ‘on the edge’, with the non-canonical or the ignored, with the ‘unstructured’ or the unclassifiable. Probably the one concept most of us swore by was the rite-of- passage structure outlined by anthropologists Van Gennep and Turner. But were we all speaking of the same things in the same way? Could the anthropological concept of ‘the liminal’ be simply transplanted to literature studies? In what way were notions like “margin”, “threshold”, “border” and so on being actually used by scholars from different disciplines? How many fields of enquiry lent themselves to liminalist analysis? What ‘theory’ of the limen (if any) could be invoked in support of our research? The 13-year history of the ISLT is the history of a growing awareness that a theory of thresholds that would implicate not only passages but also texts was both a convenient and a necessary tool. It was here that the notion of a poetics of the literary threshold began to take shape. Paradoxically, as we delved into this concept we found ourselves opening up our enquiry to fields that have eventually included musicology, painting, folklore, semiotics, virtual reality or the non-linguistic.

 

ISLT 1: A Place That Is Not a Place (15-16 Marzo de 1999)
ISLT 2: Betwixt-And-Between  (2-3 Abril de 2001)
ISLT 3: Mapping the Threshold (24-25 de Marzo de 2003)
ISLT 4: The Dynamics of the Threshold (14-15 de Marzo de 2005)
ISLT 5: Liminal Poetics (26-27 de Marzo de 2007)
ISLT 6: The Subject on the Threshold (16-18 Abril 2012)