Translating, Publishing, and Teaching: Canadian Literature as World Literature
Description
This panel invites proposals that explore Canadian literature through the lens of world literature, attending to issues of multilingualism, diaspora, and the construction of literary canons. How can the frameworks and methodologies of world literature inform or reshape our understanding of Canadian literature - a body of writing that resists singular narratives and is inherently multilingual and diasporic? In what ways do practices of teaching, publishing, and translating world literature within Canada - particularly in educational institutions, small presses, and literary communities - participate in the reimagining of Canadian literary identity?
We especially welcome papers that explore how world literature can foster the inclusion of marginalized voices - indigenous, immigrant, exilic, and otherwise - in the ongoing development of Canadian literature. To what extent does world literature offer tools for unsettling dominant literary paradigms and for constructing a Canadian canon that is dynamic, plural, and reflective of the country’s complex cultural realities? Papers may consider comparative approaches, case studies, pedagogical strategies, translation networks, or institutional frameworks that highlight the interplay between world literature and Canadian literary production.
Potential topics might include:
- Small press strategies for transnational literary circulation in Canada
- Pedagogical frameworks for teaching translated world literatures in Canadian classrooms
- Indigeneity and settler colonialism in translation and reception
- Multilingualism and its representation in Canada
- Publishing infrastructures and the global mobility of texts
- Canon formation through translation and institutional adoption
- World literature in Canadian classrooms and national literature departments: inclusion and omission
- Translated literature as a site of cultural negotiation
- Cross-cultural frameworks for the representations of gender, race, and ethnicity
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Karolina Roman is a doctoral candidate in translation studies at McGill University. Her work focuses on translation criticism in Canadian literary magazines, through which she also advocates for the use of mixed methods in the field. She has published articles in Digital Humanities Quarterly, ContactZone, and Target.
Speaker Bio
Gan Lu, doctor of literature of Université Aix-Marseille and Nanjing University, is a junior researcher in the Si-Mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, at East China Normal University. Her area of academic specialty includes translation studies, comparative literature and world literature, and french literature.
Speaker Bio
Martin Breul is a PhD student in the Department of English at McGill University. His FRQSC-funded archival research explores the publication history of Canadian literature in socialist East Germany and the literary exchange between the two nations during the Cold War.His works of poetry, flash fiction, and reviews have appeared online and in print in the Montreal Review of Books, Acta Victoriana, Periodicities, and more.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Lu Yu is a PhD student in Nanjing Normal University from China. Now she is a visting PhD student in University of Alberta of Centre for Literature in Canada. She focuses on contempoary Canadian diaspora Literature, literary geography and Michael Ondaatje. She is dedicated to studying Canadian diaspora from Asian perspective, with particular how disaporic writers attand shaping Canadian national identity, while also exporing the circulation and translation of Canadian Literature in China.
Speaker Bio
M. Sevgi Sen is an independent scholar who holds a PhD in Turkish Language and Literature from Boğaziçi University, where she also completed her master’s degree. Her research interests include the aesthetics of literature, modernist fiction, and nineteenth-century literature, as well as the evolving forms of literary communities in the twenty-first century, particularly in the context of digital media.
Speaker Bio
Hande Gürses holds a PhD in Literary Studies from University College London. Her primary research interests include contemporary world literature, cosmopolitanism, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies. She is the author of Displacing Fictions of Orhan Pamuk: Beyond the Bridge (Lexington Press, 2023). She held positions at UMass Amherst, University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan University, and Simon Fraser University. Currently she is teaching at Capilano University in North Vancouver.
Speaker Bio
Nefise Kahraman is a translator and literary scholar with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and a BA in Translation Studies from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She is a co-founder of Translation Attached, an independent publishing house that introduces works of Turkish literature to English-speaking readers. Her work connects scholarship and publishing, with a particular interest in how translation shapes the circulation of literature within world literature.