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 Monday, September 23, 2019 at 9 a.m. EST.

Literary Form and Potentiality

Organizer: Michael Swacha

This seminar will explore the relationship between literary form and the concept of potentiality. Through our papers and discussions, our hope is to come to a deeper sense of how form may hold... more

Snapshots of the Past: Memory and Photography in Literature and Film

Organizer: Mavis Chia-Chieh Tseng

Following the success of previous ACLA seminars, “The Story of Memory: Remembering, Forgetting, and Unreliable Narrators” and “The Story of Remembrance: The Future of Memory and Memories of the... more

Experiences and Existing Knowledge in Short Stories

Organizer: Jayshree Singh

Short stories' genre is a sort of ‘literary Darwinism’ in order to reconstruct and regenerate invaluable insights through the literary work not only for the majority of the submerged population... more

Women and Transnational Modernisms

Organizer: Camilla Sutherland

Responding to the recent ‘transnational turn’ in Modernist Studies, as well as the growing field signalled by the establishment of the Feminist Modernist Studies journal in 2018, this seminar will... more

Migration and Media: Reenvisioning Media Representations of Migration to and around Europe

Organizer: Gizem Arslan

The nexus between migration and media is usually framed on the one hand around minorities’ struggles for visibility, rights and recognition, and on the other hand, the power to influence public... more

Crisis, End, Lastness

Organizer: Patrick Dove

In his 1968 essay “The Ends of Man,” Jacques Derrida takes issue with those who would reduce the work of Martin Heidegger to just another form of humanism while also calling into question Heidegger’s... more

Imagination and the Body in 20th-Century Literature and Film

Organizer: Hale Sirin

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that it is from the gates of the imagination that lovers and friends draw their energies. Over the past few decades, scholarship has been ever more... more

Speculative World-Makings: The Environment and Human-Nonhuman Encounters in 21st.C Postcolonial Literary Imaginations

Organizer: Sreyoshi Sarkar

Postcolonial literary and cultural traditions have been always curious about worldmaking with nonhumans. In their introduction to Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011),... more

Forms of Attention

Organizer: Jennifer Reimer

Recent scholarship has placed renewed, and updated, focus on the question of aesthetic form. Building on that focus, this panel asks: how can aesthetic form produce or enable modes of attention, and... more

Anti-Historicism

Organizer: Benjamin Schreier

Much has been written about our discipline’s post-theory age. Some lament the passing of theory, many more celebrate it, and quite a few others have devoted their professional energies to... more

Rewriting a Korean Feminist History: Gender, Sexuality, and Media in Motion

Organizer: Anat Schwartz

Concurrent with the #MeToo movement in the United States beginning in late 2017, South Korea has seen an unprecedented rise in feminist activism, particularly in Internet-driven youth culture,... more

Writing without Writing: Fragments and Survivance

Organizer: Busra Copuroglu

Since the nineteenth century to the present, fragmentary writing has been widely deployed in literature and philosophy (i.e. Ernst Bloch, Schlegel, Mallarmé, Adorno,... more

Climates of Antiblackness

Organizer: Nicholas Brady

In her groundbreaking text In The Wake, Christina Sharpe describes antiblackness as a phenomenon that is “pervasive as climate.” Her emphasis on weather and climate reconceptualizes antiblackness as... more

Ramifications of the Literary Qur'an

Organizer: Mohammad Salama

Comparative scholarship on the Qur’an has often focused on affinities with its predecessors in the Abrahamic tradition: historical, linguistic, and eschatological. The literary and figurative aspects... more

Radical Inclusion: Reframing World Literature

Organizer: Marie Ostby

World literature remains an open problem: rather paradoxically, it encompasses all the literatures of the world, even as it operates through certain principles and practices of exclusion to refer to... more

Transits and Transitions Across the Indian Ocean

Organizer: Micheal Rumore

In Commerce with the Universe: India, Africa, and the Afrasian Imagination, Gaurav Desai challenges the ethnocentric assumptions labelling the Indian Ocean as “only Indian” (8). Despite hailing the... more

Mistaken Identities: Passing and the (In)Human

Organizer: Takeo Rivera

Now that the “post-racial” mirage of the Obama years has definitively dissolved, revanchist forms of white supremacy have infused long-standing debates about identity politics with fresh danger and... more

“An Ethics of Gender?” a seminar co-sponsored by the ICLA Committees on Gender and Religion, Ethics, and Literature

Organizer: Kitty Millet

Is there an ethics of gender — of doing or undoing gender, in binary or non-binary ways? And how does literature stage the dilemmas and choices that arise, repositioning subjects in unfamiliar or... more

Embodied and Embodying Space-Time in Visual and Textual Narratives

Organizer: Atsuko Sakaki

Space-time informs, forms, and transforms humans, and vice versa. In this process, the hierarchy between subject (observer, self, mind) and object (spectacle, the other, body) falls apart, and new... more

World Literature in the World: Teaching Literature in English Beyond Europe and North America

Organizer: Maya Aghasi

World literature has been the poster child of diversity in literary studies. It has been described as being a window on the world that allows us to glimpse unknown cultures and past times. It has... more

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