Seminars

Please select a seminar for which you would like to propose a paper. Current ACLA guidelines specify that each ACLA member may submit only ONE PAPER for consideration. Abstracts must be received by Sunday, October 31, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

Chinese poets around the world at the beginning of the 20th century

Organizer: Giusi Tamburello

In contemporary China new trends in literature are often presented as a radical change if compared to tradition. For poetry, when “misty” poems appeared during the Cultural Revolution, the idea was... more

Transnational Southeast Asian Literatures and the World, Sec. 1

Organizer: Howie Tam

Much has changed since Benedict Anderson conceptualized the idea of the nation as an imagined community nearly four decades ago. Primarily, borders have become more porous as the trans-nation emerges... more

Narrating and Visualizing Youth, Sec. 1

Organizer: Miao Dou

This seminar explores the importance of youth in various cultural and intellectual contexts from the nineteenth century to the present day. The period witnesses the rise of and, more recently, the... more

Event, Nonevent, Unevent

Organizer: Gabriel Quigley

“the event...brings to pass ‘something other’ than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges...a hazardous, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears.” – Alain Badiou,... more

Rethinking the Historical Novel: Histories, Controversies, Futures

Organizer: Monika Bhagat-Kennedy

Historical fiction, and in particular the historical novel, has long been central to the imagining, interrogation, and subversion of ideas about the past. In his influential treatise The Historical... more

Derrida and Rancière

Organizer: Jen Hui Bon Hoa

This seminar examines the relationship between the work of Jacques Derrida and his former student at the École Normale Supérieure, Jacques Rancière. While Rancière has written two... more

Rethinking Diaspora: Travel, Transnationalism, and Self-Writing

Organizer: Yu Min Claire Chen

"It may be that writers in my position, exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of... more

Literature and Media, Sec. 1

Organizer: Renren Yang

Two decades into the twenty-first century, this seminar will look to assess and use a comparative approach to expand the “media turn” in studies of literature. The configurations of literature... more

Cultural Indexicality and Agency of Classical Myths

Organizer: Valerio Caldesi Valeri

Cultural Indexicality and Agency of Classical Myths Far from being immutable sacred texts faithfully and uncritically recited word for word long after their creation as the myth-and-ritual school... more

Fragments of a Theoretical Discourse. A New Lexicon for Literature

Organizer: Emily Apter

Abstract: Since the present has no sequel, no established future, it’s always difficult to define it or to give it a name. The “post” solution has long prevailed, obscuring the fact that “post-ness... more

The State of the Environmental Humanities: Takes by Early Career Scholars

Organizer: Sarah Dimick

“State of the field” panels typically convene a group of prominent, established scholars to assess a field’s key trends and questions, but the perspectives of emerging scholars are equally crucial... more

Can-ga : Canadian manga, the fourth solitude in Canada? Asian-Canadian comics and its connections between comics, manga and/or BD in Canada.

Organizer: Chris Reyns-Chikuma

American and French cultures, among some others, are known for having produced their own brand of manga known as OEL in the English-speaking world (see Chiu 2014; 2015; Brienza 2016; Johnson-Woods... more

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