cfp.english.upenn.edu

In 1799 Germaine de Stael wrote that there are " two completely
different kinds of literature... Southern and Northern... What I am going to call Southern literature includes the Greeks, the Romans, the Italians, the Spanish, and the French of Louis XIV's time. English works, German works, and a few writings of the Danes and Swedes must be classified as Northern, along with the literature that began with the Scottish bards, Icelandic fables, and Scandinavian poetry."

For the 5th-Annual Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta: Coordinates of Comparison we seek papers in world literature that expand and challenge Stael's notion of a European 'Northern and Southern' to global points of intersection involving languages, literatures, cultures, economies, and nations. Our conference invites you to explore and analyze this intellectual terrain from a variety of interdisciplinary critical perspectives. We invite papers for Remappings/Rereadings: Global Dialogues between East and West, North and South.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Zhang Hui (Peking University).

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Occidentalism and/or Orientalism
Definitions of World Literature
National divides e.g., Western Canada/ Eastern Canada
International divides e.g., Northern Hemisphere/Southern Hemisphere
Indigenous Narratives, Histories, and Politics
Gender Crossings: Feminisms and Masculinities
Postcolonialism and Hybridity
Globalization and/or Transnationalism
Acts and Questions of Translations
Theory and Practice of Anthologizing Literature
Pop Culture on a Local, National or International Scale
Diaspora and the Centre-Periphery
Digital Divides and the Multi-Media Means of Communication
Religious Influences and Anxieties
Book History as a Comparative Methodology

Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words by December 15th, 2010 to complitconference@gmail.com.Conference participants will be encouraged to expand and revise their papers for submission to the January 2012 issue of /Inquire/, a peer-reviewed international journal of comparative literature. Please check our website for updates and information: http://coordinatesofcomparison.blogspot.com/