Call For Papers and Seminars

ACLA Annual Meeting

February 25-27, 2000
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Comparative Literature has increasingly been offering an intellectual and institutional space where students and scholars can feel free to explore the possibilities--and limits--of interdisciplinary work. The organizing committee of the 2000 ACLA Conference seeks proposals dealing with specific manifestations of this particular development and with their theoretical basis.

We are especially interested in topics with a broad historical and geographical emphasis and extend a particular invitation to scholars studying connections between literary studies and the social and natural sciences, including, in no particular order, physics, economics, politics, law, anthropology, medicine, history, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

Proposals focusing on cross-fertilization with archeology, music, and the visual arts (including architecture, film, cartoons, and comic strips) are also welcome.

We expect that the majority of sessions will take the form of 12-person seminars, meeting two hours a day for the three mornings of the conference, with four papers presented each day. There will also be a number of 8-person seminars, meeting two hours a day for the two afternoons of the conference. Each participant will have the opportunity to take full part in one seminar and then float freely among individual sessions in other seminars.

In order to finalize the program in a timely fashion, we invite proposals for either an individual paper or a fully or partially formed seminar. You can join with a number of other people to present a fully-formed seminar; alternatively, you can propose a topic you would like to see included, with one or more abstracts already attached to it, and the conference committee will try to fill out the seminar as appropriate. (Should this prove impossible, the committee will make every effort to find other seminar homes for the submitted abstracts.)

We expect that the majority of abstracts we receive will be individual submissions. Organizers of past conferences have had good success in creating interesting conjunctions of individual papers and we expect that most sessions will continue to be formed in this way.

Proposals must be sent by surface or air mail only to:

For postal delivery:
ACLA 2000 Program Committee
Dept. of Comparative Literature
Yale University
P.O. Box 208299
USA - New Haven, CT 06520-8299

Or

For Fedex, UPS, etc.:
ACLA 2000 Program Committee
Dept. of Comparative Literature
Yale University
344 College Street
105 Connecticut Hall
USA - New Haven, CT 06511

Deadline for the reception of seminar and independent paper proposals by the Program Committee at Yale University: SEPTEMBER 30, 1999

Individual paper proposals must include a one-page abstract along with Your name, departmental and institutional affiliation, postal address, and email address.

Seminar proposals must include, on separate sheets, a brief overall description of the seminar and a one-page abstract for each presenter, as well as the names, departmental and institutional affiliations, postal addresses, and e-mail addresses of all participants.

Do not send individual proposals or finalized seminar proposals to the ACLA. The Yale Program Committee, not the secretariat, will be making all decisions concerning proposals.

Be sure to include a deadline that will give persons whose proposals you will not be able to accommodate ample time to submit their proposal independently to the Program Committee.

Also, please be sure to put your request in the main body of your electronic message; do not put it in an attached file.

If you wish to submit a paper to one of the seminars advertised on the web-page of the conference, send it to the organizer(s) of the seminar by the deadline they have listed. If they are unable to accommodate your paper, they will inform you so that you can still submit it independently to the Program Committee by September 30, 1999.

Interdisciplinarity

• What's in a discipline?
• To what extent have disciplines been sites of learning as well as "punishment"?
• "Between" disciplines: an empty space?

The Organization of Knowledge

• Redefining the Classics
• Universities in the Islamic and other traditions
• From almanacs to the Web by way of encyclopedias
• Trivium - quadrivium
• Area studies vs. traditional departmental organization
• A home for film studies
• Polyphonies ("global English," national and comparative perspectives in anglophone, hispanophone, and francophone studies among others)

Disciplinary Hierarchies, Conflicts, and Cross-pollination

• Ancients and Moderns: a disciplinary quarrel
• Conflicts of the faculties
• Rhetoric and the social and natural sciences
• Narratives in and out of literature
• Recent developments in the study of literature and …
• Eastern and western hermeneutics: from theology to architecture
• Cross-disciplinary impostures and hoaxes
• Cultural recycling of "determinism", "Darwinism," relativism, chaos theory, etc.
• Literary diseases / literary cures
• Trials in and of literary texts
• Aesthetics and economics: ties that (don't) bind
• Illustrations as translations
• Literature and Buddhist meditative disciplines

Pedagogical Issues

• Team-teaching across the disciplines
• Writing across the curriculum
• Interdisciplinary teaching at the undergraduate level
• World literature courses
• "Lesser-taught" languages in comparative literature courses
• Literature in composition courses