theory

Decolonization and globalization have made us conscious of the fact that not only is literature no longer national and autonomous, but it never was. Indeed one can only understand any national literature by comparing it with others…or by comparing it with a non-national or a transnational literature. For these reasons the field of comparative literature is more urgent than it ever was.

2018 Annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association


University of California, Los Angeles

March 29 – April 1

Seminar: “Automation”

Abstracts due September 21, 9am EST; submit through the ACLA online portal.

Organizer: Jap-Nanak Makkar, University of Virginia (jkm5ar@virginia.edu)

Unnatural and otherwise strange narrative devices tend to be associated with experimental fiction, yet they are often used in nonfiction, including (auto)biography, documentary film, journalism, history and science. A few examples: Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah eschews chronological telling in order to repudiate notions of historical causality and inevitability; Richard Dawkins’ history of life on earth, The Ancestor’s Tale,uses similar manoeuvers, if for very different reasons.

The Arthur F. Kinney Center for Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will host its fifteenth annual graduate student conference on Saturday, October 28th, 2017. We are delighted to welcome Jennifer Waldron of the University of Pittsburgh as our keynote speaker.

"Just Read"?: Reviving Form in a Postcritical Terrain 

The postcritical turn has called for an alternative to critique in favor of description, surface reading, and the literal. In response, this panel investigates recent theorizations of form that rethink critique without leaving theory behind. Taking interpretation as indivisible from description, how might we consider form as a means by which texts theorize themselves? How can form explore questions of identity, environment, or politics? How can a return to form rethink the literary and the critical together?