The seminar explores what it means for literature to act as its own agent in modernity, to essentially have its own agency in modernity. Consequently, it freights techne as a drive that exceeds technology, and suggests literature to be more than a cultural instrument, more than a reflection of "lived experience." The question becomes then whether modernity has transformed literature into a peculiar phenomenon, one whose fulfillment is no longer found in an object. Can we speak of literature as a techne that no longer reveals itself in objects? Perhaps the question should be, has technology in a modern world produced a writing, a literary drive, that extends the aesthetic to encompass another kind of materiality, or perhaps no materiality at all. Sponsored by the ICLA Research Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature, the seminar invites presentations on • literature as an extra-material drive, • the literary as a phenomenological experience • technology as an expansion of literary codes • the written as cryptological object • the ethics of the literary in modernity • religion as a literary code • the transformation of religion, ethics, and literature in modernity • translation as a literary language