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Seminars

Internationalist World Literature and Form

Organizer: Hunter Bivens

This seminar focuses on the alternative routes of cultural circulation that emerged in the socialist ‘second’ world during the 20th century. The Russian Revolution of 1917 ushered in a new period of... more

Natal Alienation, Emancipation, Damnation

Organizer: Taija Mars McDougall

This panel brings together black critical theory, religious studies, legal and economic history, and continental philosophy to interrogate the conceptual implications of  what has come after the... more

Paul de Man and the Future of Rhetorical Reading

Organizer: Nathan Brown

In “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Paul de Man suggests that “the relationship and the distinction between literature and philosophy cannot be made in terms of a distinction between aesthetic and... more

Literary Criticism as Environmental Thinking?

Organizer: Adrienne Ghaly

Is the 20 c. inheritance of literary criticism in its various modes of strong, ‘suspicious’, deep reading woefully inadequate for reckoning with the current and impending environmental crises, as... more

Theorizing Narrative Situation

Organizer: Marcie Frank

Here’s the situation in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery:” once a year, a New England town stones one of its residents to death. In Robinson Crusoe, it is that the eponymous protagonist gets marooned... more

States of Comparison

Organizer: Waïl Hassan

CFP: States of Comparison (2024 ACLA conference, Montreal) The ACLA Board is sponsoring a number of sessions on the upcoming State of the Discipline Report for the 2020s. Comparatists at all... more

Fiction, Belief, and Disbelief

Organizer: Daniel Hack

According to Deidre Lynch, eighteenth-century British culture displayed “a new readiness to explore the subtle and supple deployment of belief and disbelief that fiction reading entails.” There is,... more

Latin American and Latinx Ecohorror

Organizer: Nicolás Campisi

As Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez has recently stated, “Everybody will end up writing ecohorror.” Ecohorror is pervasive in Latin American and Latinx literary production, from Samanta Schweblin... more

Troubling the Urban Institution

Organizer: Keegan Cook Finberg

This session considers recent approaches in literary and cultural studies to ask how urban life simultaneously participates in and exceeds the institutions at the center of its production. We are... more

Cyborgs in Posthuman Worlds

Organizer: Margarita Saona

The Cyborg inhabits a special place in our imagination that is primarily associated with science fiction. However, even before the term science-fiction itself came into use, mythology provided... more

AI and/as Form

Organizer: Sayan Bhattacharyya

How does aesthetic, material, and theoretic form relate to the current generative AI revolution? How should we critique the ideological and material consequences of the “textpocalypse” and the deeply... more

Death and Filiation in Times of Extinction

Organizer: Maddalena Cerrato

Today we live in times of extinction. Thinking of extinction means thinking about the disappearance of our own and other species, but also about the destruction of our conditions of existence. The... more

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