As a concept, noise gathers a multitude of meanings, complexities, and contradictions. It is not an ontological category that stands stably on its own; what makes noise a meaningful thing depends on its relation to what stands in relation to and even opposed to it in a certain social, cultural, and aesthetic context. As a result, noise is often treated as a metaphor for something else. Take the French theorist Jacques Attali as an example: he examines noise as a symptom of institutionalized control and political power—by means of regulation, repression, and exclusion—in a capitalist society. But is it possible to consider noise in literary texts and practices not just as a metaphor while still being sensitive to its fruitfully disruptive, structure-defying quality? Is it even possible to have a productive discussion of noise in a historical and cultural context where there may not even be a consistent name for this concept?

In light of these questions, this seminar encourages participants to take noise as a counter paradigm for reconsidering what constitutes sound and sense (as both sensible and meaningful matters) in any type of literary practices. With the hope that we will bring together diverse approaches to considering noise as a literary phenomenon, we are particularly interested in reflecting on the mediums through which we experience noise in literature—especially language, textuality, and writing. How can we manage to examine something noisy on its own terms instead of making sense of it by seeking recourse from analogies and tropes? How can an inquiry about noise reveal, challenge, and undermine material conditions of racism, colonialism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of systemic and hermeneutic injustice? How does noise call into question conventional oppositions including sound and silence, musical and unmusical sounds, presence and absence, meaningful and nonsensical utterance, high-fi and low-fi modes of listening, and human and nonhuman source of meaning production, and therefore challenge us to overcome our habits as speakers, listeners and readers? What do we learn from the incommensurability among conceptions of noise informed by different historical and cultural contexts? How do we attend to noises that are unsounded or unheard? 

This seminar welcomes interdisciplinary inquiries including but not limited to studies of comparative and world literature, film and media, music, gender and sexuality, indigeneity and decolonization, accent, race, disability, intersectionality, translation, and cybernetics. If you are interested in joining this seminar as a presenter, please submit a brief abstract (around 250 words) and title on the ACLA online portal by Tuesday, September 22, 2026. Please feel free to reach out to the organizer Dr. Yiren Zheng ([email protected]) with any questions.