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Seminars

Thank you to everyone who proposed a seminar for our March 19-22, 2020 conference in Chicago. The Program Committee has made final decisions about seminars and all acceptance letters have already been sent.

Please use the search below to find your seminar for reference (we recommend searching using only one or two keywords for best results). If you have already received an acceptance email but do not see your seminar listed below this does not mean that the status of the seminar has changed. Contact info@acla.org with any questions.

Poetry and Mass Collectivity

Organizer: Andrew Gorin

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson describes how the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier broadens the reach of the public it configures precisely by evacuating its act of memorialization of specific... more

Island Stories

Organizer: Nicoletta Pireddu

Edenic getaways and utopian elsewheres, or dystopian spaces of exile and segregation; marginalized, exploited, self-referential appendages of nations, but also fertile spaces of multicultural... more

Literary Characters. Where to?

Organizer: Alberto Comparini

Literary Characters. Where to? Since the early 2000s, there has been a new character turn within literary theory and comparative literary studies: from Woloch’sThe One vs. The Many... more

The Allure of Enigma in Modern and Postmodern Literature and Cinema

Organizer: Lily Li

Enigma, the cultivation of confusion, contradiction, complication, and paradox, has become a prime element in modern and postmodern narratives, notably in such novels and films as Umberto Eco’s... more

Indigenous Materialities and Temporal Divergences in the Americas

Organizer: Martín Vega

The reinvigoration of Marxist analysis in the field of colonial Latin American Studies has brought new attention to topics such as commodities, infrastructure, and forms of exchange between the... more

The Material Turn in Comparative Literature: The Old and the New, A Conversation

Organizer: Oliver Aas

Recent times have seen a proliferation of ontoepistemologies centered on the more-than-human. From object oriented-ontology, speculative realism, ecocriticism, animal studies, or plant studies to new... more

Staging Justice: Trials and Tribunals in Literature, Theater, and Film

Organizer: Rebecca Haubrich

The presumption of innocence, “until proved guilty according to law in a public trial,” has been proclaimed a human right in Art. 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed by the UN... more

Solidarity in Translation

Organizer: Anthony Alessandrini

In “Five Theses on the Common,” Gigi Roggero writes that “the common is always organized in translation.” This seminar begins from a related suggestion: that it might be possible to say that... more

Emergent Genres and Forms: Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East after the Second Intifada

Organizer: Isabelle Hesse

Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg have argued that the Second Palestinian Intifada has changed the ways in which Israel and Palestine have been represented and circulated in popular culture from... more

Fictions of the Neoliberal City

Organizer: Weihsin Gui

How does late-twentieth and early twenty-first century fiction represent neoliberal urban spaces and city life? While there are numerous studies about literature and the modern city in various... more

Doing Theory in Archipelagic Southeast Asia

Organizer: Elmo Gonzaga

This seminar will explore what it means to ‘do theory’ in and about Southeast Asia. Recent initiatives such as the University of California System’s International Consortium for Critical Theory... more

Modern Wars, Genocide, Survival, and Life Writing

Organizer: Phyllis Lassner

Although war has always inspired powerfully innovative writing and art, the incessant global wars and genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries continue to revolutionize life writing and art. For... more

Trouble Every Day: The Novella and its (Ordinary) Terror

Organizer: Marie-Luise Goldmann

Narrating against the crisis: a constitutive element of the novella and an effective way of coping with the catastrophe. As the European novella’s origin highlights, by narrating, the novella... more

Decolonial Epistemic Resistances and (Trans)local Practices

Organizer: Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang

We call for the researches on decolonial epistemic resistances that challenge Eurocentric modernity/coloniality. We look for (trans)local practices that show the epistemic disobedience or/and... more

After Race, Too: New Alignments in Comparative Racialization, Multiracialism, and Post-Racialism

Organizer: Lynn Itagaki

Given the resurgence of white supremacy in anti-(im)migrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Black fringe and mainstream politics in the Global North, this seminar plans to identify interracial conflicts and... more

Aesthetic Education: A Twenty-First-Century Primer

Organizer: Kate Stanley

This seminar seeks to stimulate discussion about the aims and assumptions of aesthetic education. When we teach literature—when we encourage students to read in particular ways or to appreciate... more

Conformity and Clandestinity in Iberian Literatures, 16th-21st c.

Organizer: Molly Borowitz

This seminar explores literary responses to exclusionary gestures of the State and state-like institutions on the Iberian Peninsula from early modernity to the contemporary period. How does Iberian... more

Comparative Returns

Organizer: Tom Eyers

What does it mean to return – to someone, to a place, to an earlier critical moment? One thinks of Heraclitus’ canard that one cannot step into the same river twice; that, in other words, to return... more

Thinking like a Sociologist: Theories, Methods, and Risks

Organizer: Bryan Yazell

This seminar focuses on the growing interest among literary critics in the social sciences. What are the affordances and limits of such cross-disciplinary work? What are its implications at the level... more

Victorian Worlds: Form, System, Atmosphere

Organizer: Robert Ryan

We are living out a sort of afterlife of the nineteenth century. Climate catastrophe, mutant capital, planetary dispossession: these now too-familiar environs are but the late, baggy chapters to a... more

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