"Decay Theory" Scholars have recently turned to processes of decay as a way to theorize what has been excluded or marginalized in totalizing formulations of capital, the Anthropocene, and the global. From within these fissures, explorations of decay emerge to challenge hegemonic political orders, tropes of human’s ecological dominance, and ontological or aesthetic stasis. This seminar will bring together these emergent disciplinary perspectives to begin theorizing how decay might reshape our scholarly methods and archives. Decay, we contend, is especially useful to think with because it spans the symbolic (e.g. Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay) and the material (e.g.

Call for Abstracts

  ACLA 2020 (American Comparative Literature Association)Conference Dates: March 19-22, 2020, ChicagoAbstract Submission Deadline: Sept. 23, 2019 (9 a.m. EST)  Ordinary Language Philosophy and Literary Studies  

A new preference for the production and consumption of lyric forms of poetry, over that of more narrative options like the epic, often coincided with a governing body’s establishment of courtly norms and practices. This trend is consistent across a multitude of seemingly disparate cultures. The popularity and refinement of the ghazal during the Ghaznavid dynasty and the sonnet at the Elizabethan court are just two examples of similar formal developments arising within different cultural contexts. Shorter lyrics were often formally rigorous, but also highly customizable, and many of these forms also called for a new emphasis on the construction and expression of self.

Georgia State University’s 2020 New Voices Conference: February 7-8th, 2020 in Atlanta GA. 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED to October 18, 2019 

Artistic products are cultural artifacts; language and symbols exist as methods of representing new feelings, ideas, and experiences. In turbulent and profound moments of history and personal experience, art and literature attempt to capture and retell the experiences of restlessness, feelings of movement, and reactions to disorder. The 2020 New Voices Graduate Conference invites submissions that consider concepts of (un)rest.

Ab initio.
On Openings, Incipits, & First Lines

ACLA Seminar, March 19-22, 2020, at the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Chicago

Organized by Kristina Mendicino and Dominik Zechner

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.
T.S. Eliot

In recent years, subtle discussions of beneficiaries (Bruce Robbins), bystanders (Robert Meister), spectators (Luc Boltanski), and implicated subjects (Michael Rothberg) have drawn attention to the political, ethical, and aesthetic imperatives emanating from occupying positions of complicity in structures propped up by historical injustice. While much of this scholarship zeroes in on atrocities and events of historical significance, Robbins and Meister, at least, also wedge open space for considering complicity at the level of everyday life. What does it mean for someone to feel depressed by diagnosis of climate catastrophe? To feel overwhelmed by capitalism? To desire escape routes in the face of resurgent racist nationalisms around the world?

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most compelling contemporary theorists of literature. Yet despite ever intensifying interest in Agamben’s work, his studies of literature and poetics remain a less explored dimension of his corpus. This seminar seeks spirited contributions that engage with Agamben’s reflections on literary texts, as well as those mobilising the concepts and interests of his aesthetics into new readings. Papers addressing the connections between literature and other aspects of Agamben’s thought (such as sovereignty and biopolitics) are welcome, as are explorations of his writing’s intellectual and historical contexts – including its affinities with the work of thinkers such as Benjamin, Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Hamacher.