To whom does aestheticism belong? Traditionally critiqued as an outgrowth of western bourgeois culture, aestheticism, with its assorted attributes (including aesthetic detachment, disinterestedness, and autonomy) seems ill equipped to respond to our contemporary concerns with marginalization, power imbalances, and the reproduction of hegemonic structures. And yet, the commitment to aesthetic detachment continues to pop up in seemingly unlikely places—in various corners of postcolonial literary production and in the writings of political exiles and Holocaust survivors. We therefore ask to whom aestheticism belongs today, who makes use of it, to what ends, and under what circumstances?

The 45th Comparative Drama Conference welcomes Lucas Hnath as its Keynote Speaker.

Abstract Submission Deadline:  15 October 2022

Conference Online

17-18 November 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS:

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) - Chicago, Illinois, March 16-19, 2023

Video games and environmental imaginaries of the Anthropocene

From cold, creeping survival in the Canadian tundra to neon-cathode dreams of a geoengineered utopia, from the weed-choked ruins of far distant future cities to the shattered landscapes caught under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, numerous video game titles across multiple platforms have in recent years contended with the political ecologies, environmental implications, and apocalyptic manifestations of the Anthropocene.

Living as we do in the age of technology, we have witnessed the internet, social media, and smart devices penetrate every sphere of human activity. Technology provides  powerful tools to conduct research on a scale hitherto unimaginable: for the first time in history, scholars from the stream of humanities are facing the problem of data abundance rather than scarcity (Rosenzweig, 2003). New methods and tools are evolving everyday to analyse Big Data. New formats of presenting and disseminating research have also become available, of which pre-print archiving and open access projects are only some of the most common examples.