ACLA 2015 Program by Day

ACLA 2015
Program Schedule Organized by Day and Stream
Based on http://acla.org/program-guide-0
Updated on 2015-03-27
Compiled by @rabidnumber
Part I
Friday, March 27th
1
Chapter 1
Stream A (8:30 – 10:10)
903. Active Voices: Global Literary Journalism and Social Justice
Location: Seneca
Intro Text: See page 209
The French Muckrakers: Journalism, Juvenile Penal Colonies, and the Rhetoric of Scandal
Kari Evanson, Fordham University
From Soulsearching to Performativity: The Aesthetic Potential of Literary Journalism

Isabelle Meuret, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Critical discourse analysis of the the 21st-century Mexican crónicas related to the illicit drug trade
Ave Ungro, University of Helsinki
Materiality and the Activist Potential of Literary Journalism

Holly E. Schreiber, Indiana University
887. Alien Approaches: Literary and Visual Representations of For-

eign Cities
Location: Diamond A
Heterogeneous Bodies: Alienation and Alterity in Chris Abani’s Los Angeles

Abigail Celis, University of Michigan
Approaches from the Edge: Urban Space in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission

Pamela McCallum, University of Calgary
2
A Walk through St. Petersburg: Gotô Meisei’s Translation of the City of Incidentality
Atsuko Sakaki, University of Toronto
Finten: Reflections on Gender, Class and Race in Victorian England

Sevim Kebeli, University of Washington
902. Americanist Criticism, Back and Forward
Location: Kirkland
Americanizing Michel Foucault

Jonathan Schroeder, University of Chicago
Rethinking the Nature-Culture Divide in Leo Marx’s ”The Machine in the Garden”
Agnes Malinowska, University of Chicago
Toward a Criticism of Self-Parody: Renewing Richard Poirier

Evan Carton, University of Texas at Austin
The Magisterial Mode in Criticism: Slotkin and Bancroft

Kevin Modestino, Howard University
805. Aunts and Uncles: Queer Kin and the Non-Reproductive Subject
After Sedgwick
Location: Room 3002

Queer Inheritances: Photography and the Avunculate in the Works of Claude Cahun, Hannah
Weiner, and Hervé Guibert
Phillip Griffith, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Endless Books, Endless Aunts: the reproductive metaphor in Hedda Gabler

Olivia Gunn, Pacific Lutheran University
Eugenia and Uncle Tyrold: Disability and Infertility in Fanny Burney’s Camilla
Adela Ramos, Pacific Lutheran University
Serial Deferral: Queer Time and Place in Single Fictions

Katherine Fama, National Endowment for the Humanities/ Winterthur Library
3
849. Bildung and Late Modern Development
Location: Greenwood
The Return of the Lost Child: Bildung and the Sense of Homelessness in Children’s Literature
Soyoun Kim, Texas A&M University
Youth, Femininity and Development: Radicalizing the Bildungsroman in Mahasweta Devi’s Mother
of 1084
Sreya Chatterjee, West Virginia University
Becoming Ill, Becoming Circle: Rethinking of Bildungsroman in 21st Century Through Leyla Erbil’s
Novel Kalan
Munire Sevgi Sen, Bogazici University
Where have all the grown-ups gone?: The emergence of children in the new Turkish novel
Meltem Gurle, Bogazici University
731. Breakdown
Location: Issaquah A
‘Still Life With Children’: Fun Home’s Queer Generations

Kate McCullough, Cornell University
Breaking Law and Language from Inside the System: M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG!
Nicole Gervasio, Columbia University
Building Upon Sand: Destruction and Creativity in the Literary Breakdown

Carol-Ann Farkas, MCPHS University
Racism as Public Feeling: Claudia Rankine’s American Lyrics

Cynthia Dobbs, University of the Pacific
Chronotopic Breakdown in Danielewski’s ”House of Leaves”

Emily Bald, University of Washington-Seattle
782. Childish Forms
Location: Room 2802

4
Forewording the Child: Juvenilia and the Adult’s Preface
Mallory Cohn, Indiana University
Of Being Numerical
Natalia Cecire, University of Sussex
Melville for Children and the Making of Adult Innocence
Nat Hurley, University of Alberta
Tween Media and the Infantilization of the Public Sphere
Tyler Bickford, University of Pittsburgh
601. Comparative Approaches to Federico García Lorca
Location: Eagle Boardroom

Long Live New York!: Elements for a Tragic View of Time in Lorca’s Poetry
Javier Rodríguez Fernández, New York University
Visions of the City that Never Sleeps: From ”Poeta en Nueva York” to “Empire State of Mind”
Silvia Bermúdez, University of California, Santa Barbara
“América, ¿the beautiful?. Caos, ecología y evolución: otras lentes para otras consideraciones de
”Poeta en Nueva York”
Candelas Gala, Wake Forest University
Lorca’s ”Poet in New York” Revisited
Anthony Geist, University of Washington
582. Crime Fiction as World Literature
Location: Cirrus
With a Global Market in Mind: Agents, Authors and the Dissemination of Contemporary Swedish
Crime Fiction
Karl Berglund, Uppsala University
Detecting the World Market: Orhan Pamuk’s Evolution from Realist to Noirist
Delia Ungureanu, Harvard University
Liza Marklund’s NOBEL’S TESTAMENT and the Academic Habitus
Lynn Wilkinson, University of Texas at Austin
World Literature par excellence. Crime Fiction as Vehicle for Local Phenomena
Andreas Hedberg, Uppsala University
5
799. Crossing the Borders of Comparative Epistemologies: Research
and Teaching in the Global Academy
Location: Room 2702

Does Existentialism Travel? Exploring the Subjective Universality in DeLillo’s Writing

Banu Helvacioglu, Bilkent University
Reading through Another’s Eyes: Globally Networked Learning and Comparative Literature
Alexander Hartwiger, Framingham State University
Universal in/and/or Global

Ming Xie, University of Toronto
Other People’s Classics: Content, Skills, and the Motivation to Read

Michael Subialka, St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford
738. Ecocriticism in Japan
Location: Virginia
From “Ecocriticism in Japan” to “Japanese Ecocriticism”

Masami Yuki, Kanazawa University
The Practice of the World

Mayumi Toyosato, Sapporo Univerisity
Nature Strikes Back: human interaction with natural forces in literary representations of disaster
Alex Bates, Dickinson College
Representation of Nomads in the Works of Michiko Ishimure

Daisuke Higuchi, Kobe University
701. Europe and Its Other
Location: Room 3202

Romanticism in Transit: the Idea of ‘America’ in the American Renaissance

Hiroki Yoshikuni, University of Tokyo
6
Byrd and Jefferson’s Old World: America’s ”Other”
Victoria Tietze Larson, Montclair State University
The Allure of the Exotic: Finding the Individual through Romanticism and Orientalism
Eva Singer, University of Texas at Austin
889. Fictions of Circulation
Location: Columbia
The Polyglot Vampire: Translation in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Katherine Brundan, University of Oregon
Glocal Allegories, Local Fictions: Latin American Narratives of Circulation in Mario Bellatin, San-
tiago Roncagliolo, and Luis Sepúlveda
Lorena Cuya, Bucknell University
The Role of Fictional Translators in Latin American and Spanish Contemporary Novels
Denise Kripper, Georgetown University
900. Form and its Function: the Practices of Literary Production
Location: Room 3228

The Form and Function of the Sanatorium in Yiddish and Hebrew Literature
Sunny Yudkoff, University of Chicago
Thornton Wilder, Community Man: The MacDowell Colony and the Formation of Middlebrow
Theater
Kathryn Roberts, Harvard University
From a Salon to a Social Network: Postwar Modernist Community in France, the United States, and
Africa
Lauren Du Graf, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
652. Form As/Against History
Location: Jefferson B
7
Inert Form, Impassive Materiality, and the History of the Everyday in Baudelaire
Tom Eyers, Duquesne University
Figure, Fetish, Formalization

Tracy McNulty, Cornell University
The Force of Indifference: Knowledge, Structure, and the Absence of Affect in Reading Capital
Knox Peden, Australian National University
Poetics, Commodity, Form

Josh Robinson, Cardiff University
(Digital) History, Form and Social Critique

Carolyn Lesjak, Simon Fraser University
853. Hölderlin’s Rivers
Location: Alki Boardroom

Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Turbulence of Language

Julia Ireland, Whitman College
Sediment of Greek Rivers in Der Rhein

Paul North, Yale University
The River of Rivers in Swabia: Hölderlin’s River Names

Marton Dornbach, Stanford University
The Law of the Song: Hölderlin’s ”Der Rhein”

Alexis Briley, Colgate University
820. Importing/Exporting Racism
Location: Issaquah B
Commodifying Indianness: The politics of exoticism in “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “The
Hundred-Foot Journey”
Parama Sarkar, The University of Toledo
The Flapper’s Transnational Circulation of Racism: Quicksand and the Racial Politics of Interwar
Fashion
Jennifer Sweeney, Binghamton University
8
The Wage Slave: Real Abstraction and the Fungibility of Blackness
Sara Sorentino, University of California, Irvine
Ivanov-Vano’s “Black and White”: Importing U.S. Minstrelsy as a means to Export International
Communism.
Ryan James Kernan, Rutgers University New Brunswick
835. Intersections of War, Memory, and Cities in Twentieth Century

Literature
Location: Room 2628

Fearing the Masses in Sofía Casanova’s Kola el bandido

Dorota Heneghan, Louisiana State University
Jelinek’s Vienna: Power and Decadence

Raina Kostova, Jacksonville State University
Wayward War: The Korean War and Disability Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Home and O Chong-Hui’s
Spirit on the Wind.
Ju Young Jin, George Mason University - Korea
613. Legitimate Voices in Contested Spaces
Location: Leschi
“Un créole extrêmement vivace”: Linguistic Identity and Belonging in Bessora’s 53 cm

Livi Yoshioka-Maxwell, Pomona College
“Facets of Our Diglossia”: Native Speakers in the (Post-)Colonial World

Jonathon Repinecz, George Mason University
Linguistic Authority in the Multilingual Mediterranean

Celine Piser, University of California, Berkeley
888. Literature and/as language-in-use
Location: Capitol Hill

9
Dick and Jane and You
Asif Agha, University of Pennsylvania
“The Sound Effects of Vox Populi in Public Radio”

Tom McEnaney, Cornell University
Transducing a Sermon and Inducing Conversion: Billy Graham, Billy Kim, and the 1973 “Crusade”
in South Korea
Nicholas Harkness, Harvard University
At Table with Proust and Goffman

Michael Lucey, University of California, Berkeley
578. Memory, Visual Culture, Affect, Bodies
Location: Room 2902

Memory Mapping and Ghostly Remains: Nona Fernández’s Mapocho (2002)

Katharine (Katie) Trostel, University of California, Santa Cruz
In Visible Pasts: Dialectics of Affect, Memory, and Testimony in El Lugar Más Pequeño
Kaitlin M. Murphy, University of Arizona
Empathic Unsettlement in the Films of Kamal Aljafari

Nadia Yaqub, University of North Carolina
742. Mimeses
Location: Cedar B
Mimesis, Pyschogeography, and Just Doing

Elin Diamond, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Mimesis, Repetition and the Possibility of Criticism

Michael Swacha, Duke University
Jameson and Mimesis

Conall Cash, Cornell University
A Common Life: Mimesis and History

Christopher Bush, Northwestern University
10
809. More Things Theory: On Hoarding, Hoarders, and Hoards
Location: Diamond B
Collection as Critique: examining poetic subjectivity, desire, and the accumulative authorial impulse
in Elizabeth Bishop and Lydia Davis
Anna Moser, New York University
The Miseress: On the Feminine Enjoyment of Avarice

Kaitlyn Tucker, The University of Chicago
Cultural Memory and the Practice of Hoarding in Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence
Elvan Julia Sayarer, Université de Montréal
583. Negotiating the Complementarity of Literature and Philosophy
Location: Madrona
The Origins of Knowledge: Narration, mathematics, and Gershom Scholem

Matthew Handelman, Michigan State University
“Transcending of that which, according to an ineluctable law, has necessarily to be the case:” Sebald’s
Two-World Theory
Doris McGonagill, Utah State University
The Dialectic of Early Modern Literary Narrative

Ann Delehanty, Reed College
Hegel and the Novel

Jin Chang, CUNY Graduate Center
639. Number in the Novel, or, Do Novels Count?
Location: Ballard
Population Psychology: The Crowded Mind in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu

Hannah Walser, Stanford University
Serial Thinking: Hardy’s Probable Realism

Daniel Williams, Harvard University
11
Posthuman Maos: Virtual Subjectivities, Utopian/Dystopian Nations, and Chinese Science Fiction
Mingwei Song, Wellesley College
Anne Elliot, or More Than One? What Counts in Persuasion

Stuart Burrows, Brown University
686. On Personhood
Location: Aspen
Like a Man: Black Age and the Temporality of Non-Personhood

Habiba Ibrahim, University of Washington
Audiovisual Products of Personhood in the Battle over Abortion

Shilyh Warren, University of Texas at Dallas
Persons, Closely Held (and Otherwise)

Daniel Stout, University of Mississippi
623. On the Margin: Rethinking Commentary, Gloss, and Marginalia
Location: Room 2928

For Want of a Gloss: Did Abuʾl-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī Really Try to Imitate the Qurʾān?
Kevin Blankinship, University of Chicago
The Parameters of Qur’anic language: Reading the Maqamat through the Qur’an in the late 12th
Century
Matthew Keegan, New York University
Commentary as Literary Criticism: Preliminary Remarks on al-Wahidi’s (d. 468/1076) commentary

on al-Mutanabbi (d. 354/955).
Walid Saleh, University of Toronto
781. Performing History in Early Modern France
Location: Chelan
12
Performative Polemic: Toward a Literary History of Pamphlet Writing
Kathrina LaPorta, New York University
Lafayette’s ”La Princesse de Clèves”: A lieu de mémoire for the Fronde

Caroline Boone, Vanderbilt University
From Staged Chorus to Unseen People: Seventeenth-Century French Tragedy as an Archive of Col-
lective Voice
Anna Rosensweig, University of Southern California
Performing History Through Theater Paratexts

Jessica Kamin, Independent Scholar
803. Permutations of Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Persian

Literature
Location: Ravenna A
The Belt of the Infidel: Adventures of Classical Gazel Topoi in Anatolia

Selim Kuru, University of Washington
And thus he said: The poems of Bayezid II and Prince Cem as historical dialogue between a king
and his seditious brother.
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, University of Washington
The Lover Imprisoned: Devotion as Persuasion in the Habsiyāt of Ghanī Asadābādī

Sarah Morrell, Indiana University
The Wounds of Desire in Sixteenth-Century Persian Ghazals: Authenticity and Performance in the
Maktab-e Voqu’
Sheila Akbar
Yearning not to Yearn: Contentment in Sa’di and Sa’eb

Paul Losensky, Indiana University
877. Poetic Subversions
Location: Richmond
Cuban Mysticism as Revolutionary Doctrine: Two Poets and Their National Intimacies
Stephanie Malak, The University of Texas at Austin
13
Sacred Realm and Commodity: The Representation of Caribbean Nature in Luis Pales Matos’s
Tuntun de pasa y griferia
Victor Figueroa, Wayne State University
María Zambrano’s Poetics and the Political Theology of the Commons

Henry Berlin, University at Buffalo, SUNY
The Metaphor of Silence in Plautus’ Rudens

Michael Becker, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“As If” We Might Speak: The Subversive Structures of Poetry and Human Being
Johanna Skibsrud, University of Arizona
911. Race, Form, and Resistance
Location: Ravenna B
Forms of Narrative, Identity, and History in Jazz Literature

Daisuke Kiriyama, University at Albany, State University of New York
Racial Formalism
Sue Shon, University of Washington
On the edge of fiction: Genre, voice, and Jim Crow America in James Weldon Johnson’s The Auto-
biography of An Ex-Coloured Man”
Marta Puxan Oliva, Harvard University
Shaping Racism or Resistance Through Marketing: Samule Fuller’s white Dog and Chester Himes’
Run Man Run
Alice Mikal Craven, American University of Paris
631. Relatedness
Location: Room 3128

Touching hard(ly): Violence and Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of touch

Denise Koller, Princeton University
Political Promises, Serious Art

Brian Price , University of Toronto
Relations of Poverty and Figures of Life

Lenora Hanson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
14
Variety, Ontology and the Spectacle of Modern Reason
Meghan Sutherland, University of Toronto
626. Sadism after de Sade
Location: Room 2828

The Sadean Stage?

Julia Jarcho, New York University
Bend Over, Bourgeois: Sadism in Queer Leftist Writing in Britain

Glyn Salton-Cox, University of California, Santa Barbara
Kant with Sade with Mill

Emily ORourke, University of California, Berkeley
753. Science Fiction and Transgressive Identities
Location: Room 3328

Dungeons and Drag-queens: Transgender Identities in Speculative Roleplaying Games

Shelly Jansen, SUNY Schenectady County Community College
Science Fiction and Masculinities in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Antoinette Hertel, St. Joseph’s College of New York
Transgressive Sexualities in the Novels of Dietmar Dath

Stefan Hoeppner, University of Calgary
Passing for Human/for Robot

Bianca Westermann, Ruhr-University Bochum
716. Settler Colonial Literatures in Comparison
Location: Room 2502

Settler Cultural Texts of the 1990 Oka Crisis

Isabelle St-Amand, University of Manitoba
15
Gendering the Pastoral: Comparative Readings of New Zealand and Canadian Settlement Litera-
ture
Amelia Chaney , University of Delaware
Settler Modernism: J.M. Synge and Katherine Mansfield

Michael Bogucki, Stanford University
The Settler Saga, Guilt and White Victimhood in 19th Century South African and Australian Novels
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, University of North Dakota
640. Socialist Texts in Post-Socialist Times
Location: University
Art and Anarchy

Peter Knutson, Seattle Central College
Antoine Volodine’s Terminus Radieux and the Fall of the Second Soviet Union
Diana George, Brandeis University
The Poetics of Socialist Space: The Factory Complex in 24 City and The Piano in a Factory
Zhen Zhang, University of California, Davis
How the Steel Was Tempered: The transformation of a Russian novel in post-socialist China
Hongmei Yu, Luther College
Len’ after Lenin. Kazimir Malevich and Post-Socialist Labor

Jason Strudler, Vanderbilt University
572. Sound and Performance in Poetry of the Americas
Location: Room 3302

Music and Silence in the Performances of Three Latin American Poets: Melisa Machado, Lía Colom-
bino and Rocío Cerón
Maria Figueredo, York University
Poetic Performances: Andean Dialogues with the Avant-Guards

Jill Kuhnheim, University of Kansas
Reading Caribbean Performance Poetry as Education Activism

Janet Neigh, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
16
819. Tender Empiricisms and Weird Sciences
Location: Room 3102

Testing Animals and Film Form

Sarah O’Brien, Georgia Institute of Technology
Pierre Huyghe’s Evolutionary Practice
Kathleen Morris, University of Oxford
Almanacs and Atmospheric Fluidity in Charlotte Brontë’s Novels
Catherine M. Schwartz, University of Toronto
Identification, Metaphor, and Motive in Feminist Science Studies
Adam Frank, University of British Columbia
610. The Messianic Trope in Twentieth-Century Texts
Location: Dashpoint
Ending Foe
Russell Samolsky, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Road: Cormac McCarthy and the Finality of Hope
Andrew Slade, University of Dayton
Donald Barthelme’s Dead Father as Messianic Ideologue
Daniel Chaskes, LIM College
643. The Opening of the Field: New Approaches to Ecopoetics
Location: Room 2728

Darkness and Delight: Crisis and Pleasure in Contemporary Eco-Apocalyptic Poetry

Lynn Keller, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Meaning of “Nature” in 19th-century American “Nature” Poems
Gillian Osborne, University of California, Berkeley
Spacetime Anthroposcenes: Thought Experiments & Geometries of Attention
Joan Retallack, Bard College
17
What Was Ecopoetics?
Margaret Ronda, University of California, Davis
850. The Politics of Form in the Age of Austerity
Location: Room 3028

Against the Politics of Form

Tim Kreiner, Yale University
Ron Silliman’s Ketjak Beyond Programmatism
Joel Duncan, University of Notre Dame
History, Ethics, Form: The afterlife of Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après
Lauren Benjamin, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Versions of Poetic Technophilia in the Long Downturn
Aaron Begg, Johns Hopkins
687. The Rhetoric of Intermediality
Location: Everett
Ekphrasis and Address: The Ethics of Intermedial Space in Adam Bede

Alicia Williams, Rutgers University
In Defense of Traditional Priority: Lessing’s Laocoön and Pater’s Renaissance and their Rhetoric
of Intermediality
Pragyan Rath, Indian Institute of Management Calcutta
Minding the Body: Intermediality and the Rhetoric of Disability
Rajiv Krishnan, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India
827. The Right to Literature
Location: Ravenna C
Literary and Photographic Refractions in Double Negative by Ivan Vladislavić

Beata Potocki, John Jay College
18
“Let’s be serious”: From Rogues to “Limited Inc a b c . . .”
Mark Sanders, New York University
Robust and Fragile: Shaftesbury on Enthusiasm and the Question of Literature

Johannes Turk, Indiana University Bloomington
The Illegitimacy of Literature

Kirk Wetters, Yale University
636. The Rights to Translation
Location: Medina
The Politics and Poetics of Retranslation: The Case of Freud

Spencer Hawkins, Bilkent University
A Case for ’Public’ Translations

J. Scott Miller, Brigham Young University
Who Speaks for Whom: Translating Priorities in Studies of Al-Qaida

Flagg Miller, The University of California, Davis
907. Thinking Relationally: Sinophone Studies as Comparative Stud-

ies
Location: Juniper
Encountering Ghost: Associating Haunting and Obsession in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge

Jing Chen, Duke University
Trauma, Body, and Desire in Sinophone Queer Cinemas

Kai Kang, University of California, Riverside
The Dictatorship of a Common Strangeness in Chinese and Southeast Asian Literatures

Nicholas Y. H. Wong, University of Chicago
Sinophone Queer Homecoming: A Translocal Remapping of Kinship

E.K. Tan, State University of New York at Stony Brook
19
658. Transparency
Location: Boren
”Thought grows in silence”: Revising Transparency in Anzia Yezierska’s Autobiography

Abigail Seeskin, Duke Univeristy
See-Through Populism: Ignatius Donnelly, Race, and Representation

Nathan Wolff, Tufts University
Transparency in Neoliberal Academe

Jeffrey Di Leo, University of Houston-Victoria
4852. Undergraduate Seminar
Location: Fremont
Time and Mutability: Linguistic Preservation of Cultural Worldview in The Wanderer

Sarah Vogel, University of Northern Colorado
Sufi Literature and the Expansion of Islam in the Subcontinent

Morgan Khan, University of British Columbia
A Comparative Study of Raise the Red Lantern and Lola

Yueran Tian, University of California, Riverside
It’s All for You but It’s All about Me: The Concept of Charity in Galdós’ Marianela and Torquemada
en la hoguera
Shelley Tompkins, Louisiana State University
721. Visualizing Spectrality
Location: Room 2602

Rose Hobart: Filmic Specters of Memory and Constructions of the Foreign

Isa Murdock-Hinrichs, Tulane University
The Spectral Spectator: The ‘visor effect’ in film

Guillermo Rodriguez, University of Southern California
20
Becoming Specter: Cinematic Gaze and Ethics of Temporality
Ahmad Nadalizadeh, University of Oregon
Spectrality and Trace: Deconstruction Beyond Writing

Robert Trumbull, University of Washington, Bothell
744. What Is Zoopoetics?
Location: Jefferson A
On Constructing Borders
Christian Doelker, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Resistance to Allegory: On Thomas Mann’s Tobias Mindernickel

Jonathan Kassner , New York University
Of Zoogrammatology as a Positive Literary Theory

Rodolfo Piskorski, Cardiff University
The Sticky Temptation of Poetry

Kári Driscoll, Utrecht University
21
Chapter 2
Stream B (10:30 – 12:10)
883. Allegory and Political Representation
Location: Cedar B
Allegory, critical literacy, and settler colonialism

Rania Jawad, Birzeit University (Palestine)
Allegory and Impasse
Deborah Elise White, Emory University
Policy of Augustus and Its Mythological-historical Allegory in the Roman Poetry of Early Princi-
pate
Giorgi Ugulava, Institute of Classics, Byzantine and New Greek Studies of Tbilisi
Allegories in Ruins
Jon Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia
The Object of Allegory
Jacques Lezra, New York University
705. Anthropocene Historicism
Location: Virginia
Modernist Fire and Romantic Ice: Anthropocene Time by Degrees and by Duration
Bo Earle
Nature and Freedom at the Origins of Historical Materialism
Greg Ellermann, Concordia University
22
Coincidence, the Anthropocene, and the eighteenth century
Morgan Vanek, University of Toronto
Conceptual Emergence and the Anthropocene

Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington - Seattle
818. Bandung, Afro-Asianness, Non-Alignment, Tricontinentalism

and Global South Comparatism

The Architecture of Erasure in The Color Curtain: Richard Wright and the Curtaining Question of
Palestine
Mahmoud Zidan, SUNY, Binghamton
The Africa-China Imaginary and the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement

Duncan Yoon, University of California, Los Angeles
Tashkent Postcards; Algeria at the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference, 1958

Elizabeth Bishop, Texas State University
720. Between Dissidence and Co-option: Literature, Intellectuals,

and the State
Location: Ravenna B
Propaganda or Resistance: Some Questions on Reading North Korean Literature

Birgit Geipel, University of California, Riverside
Rescripting Human Rights: Genre, Authorship, and Authoritarianism in Contemporary Syrian

Prison Literature
R. Shareah Taleghani, Queens College, City University of New York
What is the Genre of a Report on Human Rights Violations? Literary Conventions and Czech Dissent
of the 1970s
Jonathan Bolton, Harvard University
Language, literary awards, and still ‘turning the page’ on human rights abuses in Morocco: an
examination of Youssef Fadel’s A Rare Blue Bird Soars with Me
Alexander Elinson, Hunter College of the City University of New York
23
645. Beyond Tears and Moonshine: Sympathy in the Long 18th Cen-
tury
Location: Fremont
A Strange or Terrible Pity: Philoctetes and the Aesthetics of Mitleid

Ellwood Wiggins, University of Washington
Sympathetic Affect in Alcestis Operas of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
John Pizer, Louisiana State University
From Agon to Sympathy. Transformations of comparatio in 18th-century German Literature
Bernhard Metz, Freie Universität Berlin
Sympathy and the Spectator in Bourgeois Tragedy and Moral Philosophy
Tove Holmes, McGill University
4509. Bildung and Late Modern Development, Group 2
Location: Greenwood
Naguib Mahfouz, the Bildungsroman and the Egyptian Intellectual in the 20th century
Rania Mahmoud, University of North Carolina Wilmington
The Post-war Bildungsroman in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Shih-Pei Kuo, National Chengchi University
The Go-Between and Batallas en el desierto: Two Novels of Stunted Growth
Jorge Alcázar, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Anger Management: Enclosure and Development in JANE EYRE and I WALKED WITH A ZOM-
BIE.
Vivian Kao, Rutgers University
743. Black Thought and the Popular
Location: Everett
Black Radical (In)Action

Emma Stapely, University of California, Riverside
24
Black Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Popular
Surya Parekh, Pennsylvania State University
Freedom is Near!!!: Insurrection and Failure in Chester Himes’ Plan B

Yumi Pak, California State University, San Bernardino
That There Might Be Black Thought

Ashon Crawley, University of California, Riverside
901. Body and Sexuality in Context (Group 1: Bringing a Compara-

tive Perspective)
Location: Seneca
”Trying All Things”: The Use of Pleasure and Medieval Arts of Love
Wei Hu, Harvard University
Statecraft and Discipline of the Body in Daxue yanyi bu

Leihua Weng, Pacific Lutheran University
The Body’s Borders: Violation and the Visual in the Carmina Priapea
Tyler Travillian, Pacific Lutheran University
Enjoyment Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Paul Allen Miller, University of South Carolina
829. Comparative Literature and Intellectual Property
Location: Leschi
Who Owns Culture?

Douglas Scott Berman, University of Wisconsin
From Genealogy to Dispersion. Literary Studies and Copyright

Maciej Jakubowiak, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
Texts With No Authors: On Translation, Originality, and Derivative Work

Karen Emmerich, University of Oregon
Intellectual Property: From Personhood to the Biopolitical

Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania
25
735. Comparing Queer Temporalities
Location: Juniper
Sexy Banalities: Consuming the Baroness’s Timely Stuff

Michael Sloane, Western University
“Queering Lyrical Time: Felt Asynchrony in Frank Bidart’s Metaphysical Dog”

Cathy Irwin, University of La Verne
Proust’s Queer Time

Adeline Soldin, Boston University
WWI and Queer Times: Miss Ogilvy and Chris Baldry’s Painful Returning from/to the Battlefield
Jinhwa Lee, Rutgers University
878. Cosmopolitan Deviations: Minor Affect and Peripherality in the

Long Twentieth Century
Location: Room 2802

Displaced Anachonisms: Lu Xun’s Repositioning of Chinese Literary History in Old Tales Retold
Daniel Dooghan, University of Tampa
Performing Cosmopolitanism: The Anxiety of Participation within Modern Indian Theatre.

Sharvari Sastry, University of Chicago
Boredom in Africa: Sarmiento’s Corrupted Cosmopolitanism

Kristen Meylor, University of Pennsylvania
Hollow Subjects, Full Horizons: Transnational Experience and the Problem of Relation
Jay Rajiva, Georgia State University
618. Cosmopolitan Palestine
Location: Ballard
Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Time

Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
26
Of The Sublime, Or Thinking Again About Gaza
Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt University
A Deep, Dark, Secret: The Israel-Singapore Love Affair. Then and Now
David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University
“…alleged crimes committed in Palestine”: The Case of Palestine In International Law and Before
the Courts of World Opinion
Barbara Harlow, University of Texas at Austin
4530. Crime Fiction as World Literature (Group 2)
Location: Cirrus
A Missing Literature: Dror Mishani’s A Missing File and the Case of Israeli Crime Fiction
Maayan Eitan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Marketing Scandivicious. The Making of Swedish Crime Fiction as World Literature in a Transna-
tional Context
Louise Nilsson, Uppsala University
Making it Ours: Translation, Domestication, and Catalan Crime Fiction
Stewart King, Monash University
Who is the Stranger
Edward Aiken, Syracuse University
718. Cultures of Settlement and Unsettlement
Location: Room 2502

Telling/Counting/Mapping: Narrative Cartographies of Settlement by Glen Dawson and Margaret

Pearce
Marcel Brousseau, University of California, Santa Barbara
Profiling Indigenous Peoples and Other ‘Lexical Strategies of Belittlement’:A Contrapuntal Reading
of Patrick Douaud’s The Western Métis: Profile of a People
Allyson Anderson, Vancouver Island University
Settler Colonial Hegemony in Canada: Exclusion, Appropriation and Totalization
Peter Kulchyski, University of Manitoba
Virgil, Dido, and the Colonial Gaze
Jesse Russell, University of Mary
27
893. Dolls & Dummies
Location: Room 3328

’She’s Not There’: Privacy, Surveillance, and Emerging Modes of Being in Spike Jonze’s Her
William McBride, Illinois State University
Chinese Women and Other Objects in Larissa Lai’s ”Rachel”

Marcelle Kosman, University of Alberta
Galatea’s Freedom: Romantic Automatons and the Life of Art

Simone Stirner, University of California, Berkeley
Automaton as Fiction
Christopher Chiasson, Indiana University
627. Double frames: authors, texts, audiences in original translation
Location: Room 2702

Je est un autre: The Curious Case of Vernon Sullivan

Alya El Hosseiny, New York University
Béla Balázs & the ”Chinese Dreams” of Early German Film Theory
Moira Weigel, Yale University
Liliane Welch: Word-House of a Grandchild : Multiple underlying languages for a trans-border

European and a Canadian frame
Marie-Anne Hansen-Pauly, University of Luxembourg
Authorial fictions in/and original translation

Beatrijs Vanacker, KU Leuven / FWO (Research Foundation Flanders)
797. Ecstasy
Location: Room 3202

Ecstasy and its Discontents: Hart Crane’s poetics of connection

Esther Sanchez-Pardo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
28
Ecstatic Blackness
Seulghee Lee, Williams College
“I am going to keep dancing”

Daniel Benjamin, University of California, Berkeley
“Total Fog Is Total Illumination”: Oceanic Feelings and Exilic Attachments in Etel Adnan’s Poetry
Adam Ahmed, University of California, Berkeley
761. Fictions of Capital: Form and Failure
Location: Room 3028

Authorship, Aesthetics, Value

Davis Smith-Brecheisen, University of Illinois at Chicago
Narrating the New Economy: Bleeding Edge as Historical Novel of the Present.
Johanna Isaacson, University of California, Santa Cruz
Easier to Imagine the End of the World: Capital , History and Narrative Form
Neil Larsen, University of California, Davis
699. Figural Evasions: The Poetics of Defense
Location: Room 3228

Against Common Sense: Descartes and Poetic Envy

Andrea Gadberry, New York University
Forgiving Poetic Language

Adam Rosenthal, Texas A&M University
No End In Sight: Romantic Forms of Refusal

Rachel Feder, University of Denver
747. Forms of Talk
Location: Room 3128

29
Talking to a computer: J. M. Coetzee, interviews and the (digital) subject
Rebecca Roach, Kings College London
Interview-Talk and Disfluency in Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors
Amy Wong, University of California, Los Angeles
The poetics of stammering in the work of Y.H. Brenner and the question of “reviving Hebrew”
Roni Henig, Columbia University
840. Gendered Bodies in Literature and Medicine
Unseen Enemies: Neisseria, Desire, and Bodily Discourse

Lisa DeTora, Hofstra University
“L’ Œil Gauche Barré:” Troubled Vision and Migrainous Bodies in Émile Zola’s Pot-Bouille and
George DuMaurier’s Trilby
Janice Zehentbauer, Western University
Gendered Scripts in Discursive Constructions of Aging

Yvonne Stephens, Hofstra University
Anatomy and the Riotous Body: Public Disorder and Gendered Narration
Carl Fisher, California State University, Long Beach
635. Genre in Africa
Postcolonial Scatology and African Disillusionment

Alexander Adkins, Rice University
Publishing Genre Fiction in South Africa: NB Publishers, Kwela Books, and HJ Golakai’s The
Lazarus Effect
Emily Davis, University of Delaware
Memory and the Popular

Eleni Coundouriotis, University of Connecticut
Cassava Westerns: African Outlaws

Tsitsi Jaji, University of Pennsylvania
30
876. Infrastructure and Form
Location: Richmond
Wire Aesthetics
Joseph Jeon, Pomona College
Oil Infrastructure and Literary Realism in The Oil Road

Brent Bellamy, University of Alberta
Off the Grid: Contemporary Photography & the Infrastructure of Global Exchange
Sara Blair, University of Michigan
Plastic Form in Concrete: Cement Industry and Tectonic Mediations in Chinese Modernism
Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang, University of California, Berkeley
651. Kristeva’s Revolt and Reliance
Location: Diamond A
Kristeva’s Psychoanarchic Politics

Rebecca Tuvel, Rhodes College
Kristeva’s Notion of Revolt and the Ukrainian Maidan

Julia Sushytska, Independent Scholar
Investing in a Third: Colonization, Religious Fundamentalism, and Adolescence in Julia Kristeva’s

later work
Elaine Miller, Miami University
The Mother in Revolt

Pleshette DeArmitt, University of Memphis
777. Labor and the Unconscious
Location: Room 2928

Exhausting Militancy: Guattari, Bifo and the Reinvention of Work

Diane Rubenstein, Cornell University
31
On the Labor of the Mass and of the Unconscious
Karen Benezra, Columbia University
Adorno and the Unconscious of the Concept

Osman Nemli, Emory University
918. Literatures of Devotion
Location: Room 2628

“Till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke”: Doctrines of Justification in Spenser’s Amoretti
Lauren Shufran, The University of California, Santa Cruz
What’s Belief Got to Do With It? Early Modern Poets on Love and Devotion
Constance Furey, Indiana University
Popular Romance and the American-Muslim conversion narrative

Kathrina Haji Mohd Daud, Universiti Brunei Darussalam
913. Maintenance Work
Location: Ravenna C
Thoreau’s Maintenance Work in a Changing Climate

Sarah Weiger, University of Portland
The Female Essay, or, Girl Talk as Maintenance

Eva-Lynn Jagoe, University of Toronto
“My Working Will Be the Work”: Feminist Art and the Uncounted Time of Upkeep
Michelle Ty, University of California, Berkeley
728. Messianism, Nation and Empire in the Americas
Location: Room 2728

Messianic Visions from the Chimborazo: An Andean Poetics of Bolivarianismo

Carlos Abreu Mendoza, Texas State University
32
“We will obey no-one but God: Millenarianism in 19th century Mexico”
Ana Sabau, University of California, Riverside
Exceptional Brutality: Legitimizing Violence through the People’s Will in William Walker’s The
War in Nicaragua
David Ober, Northeastern University
Messianic Compulsion: Laureano Vallenilla Lanz’s national-republicanism

Juan Castro, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
882. Minimalisms, Maximalisms, Modes: Formal Scale and Poetic

Attention
Location: Medina
The Exploratory Poetics of Elena Minor’s ”Titulada”

David Colon, Texas Christian University
A sleep echoing with footsteps: Reading silence in Paul Celan’s poetry

Daniel Stephensen, University of Wollongong
The Poetics of Totality: Two Paradigms

David Hock, Princeton University
Forms of Poetic Attention: A Phenomenology of Dynamic Modes

Lucy Alford, Stanford University
683. Movement Control and the Modern Novel
Location: Diamond B
Control of Writing and Orientation in Modern German Diary Novels

Mirjam Berg, The University of Chicago
The Chronotope of Globalization: Imperial Mobility in the Long 19th Century

Nienke Boer, New York University
The Poetics of the Stay-at-Home Novel: Daniel Defoe’s ’A Journal of the Plague Year’
Martin Wagner, Yonsei University
On the Trail of Refugees: Narrative Tracking

Charlton Payne, Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study, Greifswald
33
The Novel and the Passport: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
Jesper Gulddal, University of Newcastle, Australia
869. Orientalism within Europe: Difference, Minorities, Divisions
Location: Room 2828

The Exoticized Image of Spain and its Margins—Atxaga, Moncada and Muñoz Molina
Matylda Figlerowicz, Harvard University
Orientalizing Spain: Modernity otherwise during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39)
Azahara Palomeque-Recio, Princeton University
Spanish Double Consciousness in Visual Representations of Boabdil
Erin Roark, Emory University
Founding the Father: Constructing Paternal Identity in Alexandre Dumas’ “Blanche de Beaulieu”
and Alexander Pushkin’s The Negro of Peter the Great
Ekaterina Alexandrova, University of Wyoming
906. Popular, Prosaic, Profane: Structures of ”Pre-Critical” Art and

Literature
Crucifixion and Cognition in the Early Modern Emblem

Nathaniel Wallace, South Carolina State University
Famine in Early Modern India and Britain: connected cultural histories of food security
Ayesha Mukherjee, University of Exeter
Endoxon, Topos, petite perception – On Microevents and the Beginning of Prose
Florian Fuchs, Yale University
The evil eye
Christopher Wood, New York University
885. Postcolonial Redux: Reactivating Methods and Materials
Location: Cedar A
34
Losses and Returns: Finding the Postcolonial
Pashmina Murthy, Kenyon College
Edward Said and Unesco’s Postcolonialism

Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University
Postcolonial Theory in the Age of the Less-Lethal

Christopher Taylor, The University of Chicago
4374. Race, Form, and Resistance (Group 2)
Location: Aspen
Naming Resistance: Identifying Forms of Black Womanhood in Sula

Sasha Panaram, Duke University
The Illusion of Inclusion: Autoethnographic Racial Performance and the Failed Promise of Multi-
culturalism in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled
Sophie Ell, University of New Mexico
Making ”Saints” and Videos: Black Female Pleasure at the Limits of the Archive
J. Brendan Shaw, The Ohio State University
On Hip-Hop and Honesty: Nas, Nietzsche and the Limits of Truth

Mukasa Mubirumusoke, Emory University
680. Security and Hospitality
Location: Room 3002

”Towns of Unquestionable Insignificance” in Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore

Ameeth Vijay, University of California, Irvine
“Welcoming the Other: Hospitality and Citizenship in Chinese American Literature”

Melissa Lee, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Baiting Hospitality
Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
On Being Chosen by (Rather than Choosing) the Entry of the Strange

Robert Abrams, University of Washington
35
769. Seeing Animals
Location: Room 2902

Approaching Animals in Nicola Barker’s ”In the Approaches.”

James Tink, Tohoku University, Japan
The Surreal Gaze of the Animal Other: Uncanny Encounters in Magritte and Buñuel
Kirsten Strom, Grand Valley State University
The Animal In the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility

Antoine Traisnel, Cornell University
Seeing animals on cave walls: animality and the birth of art in Georges Bataille’s Lascaux essays
Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield, University of Colorado, Boulder
904. Sex/Comedy

Jungle Humping
Cliff Mak, University of Pennsylvania
Unforgivable Camp
Jenai Engelhard Humphreys, Boston University
Iced: Biopower and the Pain of Others

Cecilia Corrigan, New York University
Abjection, Projection, Mimesis

Joseph Litvak, Tufts University
698. Special session in honor of the lifetime scholarly achievement of

Lois Parkinson Zamora at ACLA 2015
Location: Kirkland
Galician Neobaroque: Álvaro Cunqueiro’s ’Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes’

Catalina Castillón, Lamar University
36
Baroque Buñuel: The Hidden Culteranismo in Un chien andalou
James Ramey, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa
Lois Parkinson Zamora and the Reinvention of the New World Baroque
Michael Schuessler, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa
910. Terrorism, Tragedy, Trauma
Location: Room 3302

“Something Worse Than Death”: Traumatic History and the Right to Die
Jared Stark, Eckerd College
Two Commutes, Eleven Packets, Three Bombs, 253 Possible Worlds: Counterfactual Testimony
Ben Miller, Georgia State University
Horrorism Redux: Terrorism in The Secret Agent

Nidesh Lawtoo, Johns Hopkins University
Beyond the Breach: Trauma, the Hijacked Imagination, and “maybe Comp Lit”
David Kelman, California State University, Fullerton
663. The Economic in Literature
Location: Boren
The Literature of Economic Apocalypse, Or How to Survive NAFTA

Stephen Park, University of Texas at Brownsville
Form, Capital, and the Critical Possibilities of the Neoliberal Gothic

Emily Johansen, Texas A&M University
Gentrification of the Spirit: Latina/o Economic Imaginaries in NYC

Israel Reyes, Dartmouth College
The Last Seduction? (De)Mystifying Images of Economic Greed and Excess in The Wolf of Wall
Street
Vartan Messier, Queensborough Community College (CUNY)
37
709. The Hospitality of the Poor: The Plural of World Literature
Musing Among Muses: A Conversation Of Literary Iconoclasts in Jovita González’s “Shadows of

the Tenth Muse”
Anna Nogar, University of New Mexico
Mario Vargas Llosa: Conversaciones con Flora Tristán
Oswaldo Estrada, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
La arena errante o el libro de los muertos de José Emilio Pacheco
Bruno Rios Martinez de Castro, University of Houston
Our Heritage, a Net Full of Holes: On Morirás lejos by José Emilio Pacheco
Evelien Christina Soto van der Plas, Cornell University
The Past is a Different Country
José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra, University of Houston
859. The Objects of Still Life
Location: Pacific
Entropic Life
Nicholas Gamso, City University of New York
Anamorphic Morality in Anita Brookner’s Family and Friends and Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever
Laurence Petit, Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3

Still Life without References
Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan
674. Theology: Sentencing God
Location: Columbia
“Being beyond being”: Naming God in Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Divine Names and Mystical Theol-
ogy
Monica Cure, Biola University
38
Noli me vertere: Logos, Incarnation, and Unwriting in Doctor Faustus
Omar Qaqish, McGill University
Translating the Rational: The Meanings of Religious Speech

Zoe Anthony, University of Toronto
Describing God: Sentence Categories

Sam Caldwell, University of Toronto
922. Tracking the Chinese Avant-Gardes: Literary and Visual
Location: Dashpoint
Zhong Biao at the Margins of the Avant-garde

Paul Manfredi, Pacific Lutheran University
Digital Remaster
Jacob Edmond, University of Otago, New Zealand
Inevitable Russia: Russian Literature in Bei Dao‘s Poetic World

Jinyi Chu, Stanford University
Network Theory as Globalizing Apparatus; the Avant-Garde in Anqing

Nick Admussen, Cornell University
905. Twists of the New Aesthetic Turn: Politics and the Event of Art
Location: Room 3102

On Not Seeing Clearly Before Oneself: Vision and the Fragmentary in Jean-Luc Nancy
Anthony Abiragi, University of Colorado, Boulder
Welding the Age for a Fractured Subject: Agamben’s and Badiou’s Mandelstam
Daniele Monticelli, Tallinn University
Beyond the Consensus of Incompatibility

Ioana Vartolomei Pribiag, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Neo-Aesthetics and the Ethics of Becoming (with Guattari and Whitehead)

renee hoogland, Wayne State University
39
736. Vernaculars, Memory, and Globalization
Location: Room 2602

“Vernacular Soundwaves”
Jessica Berman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
The Languages of Inappropriate Reverse-Appropriation in Gautam Malkani’s *Londonstani*

Winnie Chan, Virginia Commonwealth University
Vernacularizing the Partition

Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, James Madison University
The Future as Feeling-Tone: Music and the Vernacular Idiom of Progressive Cinema
Keya Ganguly, University of Minnesota
669. Vulnerability, Precarity and Human Rights
Location: Ravenna A
Grieving Absence: Precariousness, Biopolitics, and Teju Cole’s “A Piece of the Wall”
Nicolette Bragg, Cornell University
The Lost Boys of Sudan as Vulnerable Subjects in Dave Eggers’ What is the What
Lena Khor, Lawrence University
The Limits of Precarity? Pashtun Women in Eliza Griswold’s Humanitarian Feminist Bildungsro-
man, I am the Beggar of The World
Brenda Vellino, Carleton University
Vulnerability and Precarity, Innocence and Guilt

Elizabeth Goldberg, Babson College
766. What Does War Look Like?: Visual Trauma and Representation
Location: Chelan
Performing War: Making the Ruined Visible

Candice Pipes, United States Air Force Academy
40
Not a Red Badge of Courage: Representations of Female Combat Injuries in the War on Terror
Brenda Sanfilippo, University of California, Santa Cruz
Visible and Invisible Wounds in Dangfung Dennis’s ”Hell and Back Again”
Susan Derwin, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Obliteration of the Human: Aerial Bombing, Trauma, and the Problem of Representation
Nil Santiáñez, Saint Louis University
4373. What Is Zoopoetics? (Group 2)
’Hello, this is Dog.’ German Canine Narration and the Modernist Crisis of Language
Joela Jacobs, University of Chicago
”A Past That Has Never Been Present:” Zoopoetics in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ”Reitergeschichte”
Eva Hoffmann, University of Oregon
‘Ein Wiehern wie ein Lustschrei‘: Whinnying and other Tierstimmen in Storm’s Der Schimmelre-
iter
Melanie Kage, University of British Columbia
Zoological poetics or poetical zoons? Animal autobiography and the politics/poetics of life-writing
Frederike Middelhoff, Julius-Maximilians-University of Wuerzburg
854. Wilderness and Temporality in the Americas
Location: Madrona
Death in the Wilderness: Making Nature, Making History in Bolaño

Gabriel Horowitz, University of Michigan
A Zapotec Wildnerness: Bird Song, Time, and Wild Animals in Oaxaca´s Central Penitentiary
Bruno Renero-Hannan, University of Michigan
Menos cóndor y más huemul: Extinction, Ecological Time, and Political Allegory.
Carlos M. Amador, Michigan Technological University
Ecocriticism and the Wilderness of Reading: Trope, Text, and the “Wilding” of Poeisis
Ian Jensen, University of California, Irvine
41
776. World Literature, World Religion

World Literature as the Aleph

Nazry Bahrawi, National University of Singapore
The Anthropocene, Theology, and the Cosmological Imagination of Literature

George Handley, Brigham Young University
Love, Revelation, and Faith in World Literature: Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching Global Con-
nections—Beyond Religion
Marian Wolbers, Albright College
World Literature and the Crisis of the Sacred

Matthew Godfrey, York University
42
Chapter 3
Stream C (3:00 – 4:40)
899. Aesthetic Works, Affective Worlds
Location: Boren
Utopian aesthetics, affective biopolitics

John Su, Marquette University
Fassbinder’s Martha and the Female Complaint: Estranging the 1940’s Hollywood “Woman’s Film”
Mary Hennessy, University of Michigan

Revealing Apocalypse: On the Book of Revelation Through Lawrence and Deleuze
Grant Dempsey, The University of Western Ontario
Everyday Ugliness in By the Waters of Manhattan by Charles Reznikoff
Vedran Catovic, University of Michigan
The Affects of History in the Early Modern Hispanic World
Patricio Boyer, Davidson College
875. Aesthetics and Catastrophe: Women’s Transnational Narratives

in the 21st Century
Location: Dashpoint
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII: Forensics, Memorialization and the
Transnational Aesthetic
Stephenie Young, Salem State University
43
From Violence to Vanguard: Italophone Women’s Transnational Literature in the Post-Cold War
Era
Renata Redford, University of California, Los Angeles
Algerian and Lebanese Women’s Voices in War Time

Mireille Rebeiz, Stony Brook University
789. Aesthetics, Politics, and Ethics of Close Reading versus Distant

Reading in World Literature
Location: Chelan
The Biogenetic Dynamics of Translation

Jihee Han, Gyeongsang National University
Political Intertextuality in ”The Name of The Rose”

Vassil Anastassov, Fatih University
808. After Nature: Feminist Futures
Location: Room 3102

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth? Female Roles and Power Structures Post-Apocalpyse
Kelly Franklin, Southwestern Community College
LOST Potential: Infertility and Unharnessed Feminine Energy within Dr. Juliet Burke
Susan Leary, University of Miami
Gilman’s Herland and the Future of the Human

Jittima Pruttipurk, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Does Yes always means Yes? The Struggle of cybernetic organisms for (sexual) independence
Magdalena Hangel, University of Vienna
4397. Allegory and Political Representation (Group 2)
Location: Cedar B
44
Putinism and Aesthetic Ideology, or, ”Polittekhnologiia” in the Language of the Fifth Empire
Matthew Walker, Stanford University
Dostoevsky’s Demons: Death and Resurrection of Allegory

Anastassia Kostrioukova, New York University
Musical Allegories
Nimrod Reitman, New York University
Ruin Lust: Totalitarian Remnants in Nabokov’s ’Invitation to a Beheading’

Yelizaveta Goldfarb, Emory University
The Story of an African Form: The Politics of Representation in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an
African Farm
Rithika Ramamurthy, University of Illinois at Chicago
824. Amateur Theories
Location: Fremont
Non-professionals translating for online social movements

Sebnem Susam-Saraeva, University of Edinburgh
Crowdfunding Literary Production: Author-Reader Equity in the Age of Kickstarter

Paul Hansen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Algorithmic Muse: authorship and creativity in Gustavo Romano’s ”IP Poetry”
Heather Cleary, Whitman College
A displaced Avant-Garde. Roberto Arlt or an artist in the media.

Maria Baffi, Tufts University
Meet the Common Man: Jean Dubuffet and the Paradox of Art Brut
Raphael Koenig, Harvard University
707. Asian-Hispanic Dialogues through Literature and Cinema: Ex-

ploring Direct and Indirect Connections
Location: Boren
Un mundo por descubrir: Películas de ficción, documentales y reportajes sobre China

Maria-Dolores Garcia-Borron, Independent Scholar
45
Chronopolitics of Historical Memories in the post-Dictatorial Societies of Spain and China: Pedro
Almodovar’s Volver and Zhang Yimou’s Guilai
Miaowei Weng, Southern Connecticut State University
(Capital) Spanish influences in Shanghai’s development as China’s film capital

Juan Ignacio Toro Escudero, East China Normal University
The Consumption of Chinese Identity Through Argentinian Film

Giovanna Urdangarain, Pacific Lutheran University
872. Between Nostalgia & Dystopia
Location: Medina
Man, Magnitude, Fear and Earth’s Death: Michel Deguy’s Ecologiques

Adelaide Russo, Louisiana State University
The Moroccan Rise of the Andalusiyyā: al-Andalus in the Riḥla of Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Wahhāb
al-Ghassānī (d. 1707)
Nizar f. Hermes, University of Oklahoma
Vergil, Góngora, and the Spanish Epic Tradition: Nostalgia for Dissent in Juan Goytisolo’s Reivin-
dicación del conde don Julián
Leslie Harkema, Yale University
Nostalgia and Dystopia: The Ironies of Homecoming in Homer’s Odyssey and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier
d’un retour au pays natal
Michelle Zerba, Louisiana State University
725. Biologism and Identity
Location: Cedar A
Strike Their Roots into Unaccustomed Earth: Biologism and Diasporic Identity Re-Considered in
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth
Hsin-Ju Kuo, China Medical University, Taiwan
“We Want Our Future Back:” Memory Failure and Identity in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker
Francisco Delgado, Stony Brook University
Paradoxical Essentialism in the writings of Black Abolitionists and Asian Adoptees

Jenny Heijun Wills, University of Winnipeg
46
Just Your Average Prophet: Giles Goat-Boy and the Pathos of the Statistical Self
Lee Norton, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
647. Compartments
Location: Leschi
Comparting Form and Function in the Quest for Longitude

Adam Miller, Vanderbilt University
Spaces of Comfort and Control: Compartmentalization in Balzac’s Père Goriot and Wes Anderson’s
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Amanda Cornwall, University of Oregon
In the Air: Towards an Aesthetics of Atmosphere

Dora Zhang, University of California, Berkeley
Compartments of Corrugated Metal: The Topographical Opposition of Informal Settlements and

the City in Francophone Literature
Katarzyna Pieprzak, Williams College
653. Compromised Radicals and Failed Revolutions: The Unfinished

Politics of the ’70s
Location: Room 2728

Queer, Radical, Underground: Queer Liberalism, History, and the Rearticulation of Race and Sex-
uality in American Woman and American Pastoral
John Macintosh, University of Maryland, College Park
The more it changes…: contemporary revaluations of May ‘68

Rares Piloiu, Otterbein University
Weathering Solidarity: The Political Family in Novels of the Underground

Kurt Cavender, Brandeis University
’99 our ’68? Hacktivism and the Activism of the ’70s

Megan M. Ewing, Princeton University
Crisis and Repetition: Revolutionary Temporality in Contemporary 68 Cinema

Sarah Hamblin, University of Massachusetts, Boston
47
890. Creating Contemporary Canons
Location: Room 2828

Canons New and Old: BME British Poetry after New Labour
Omaar Hena, Wake Forest University
New African Canons and the Nigerian Prize for Literature
Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Emory University
Firing Canons: Teaching Contemporary World Literature
Emily Wittman, The University of Alabama
Canons Now
Kara Lee Donnelly, University of Notre Dame
790. Detective Fiction and The Arts
Location: Cirrus
Making “Literature” of It: High and Low Art in S. S. Van Dine and Dashiell Hammett
Adeline Tran, University of California, Berkeley
Subverting the Epistemology of the “Whodunit”: Postmodern Scandinavian Detective Novels
Richelle Wilson, Independent Scholar
Differing functions of art in Scandinavian Detective Fiction
Ross Shideler, University of California, Los Angeles
852. Economies and Currencies in Literature
Location: Juniper
Against Symbols: Money and Value in Chekhov’s Drama

Alisa Sniderman, Harvard University
Economy of Words: The ABCs of Ezra Pound
Helena Ribeiro, Seattle Central College
Poe’s Preference for Liquidity, and the Emergent Truths of the Market
Andrew Knighton, California State University, Los Angeles
48
Attention Deficits: Time, Money and Ennui in Baudelaire’s Correspondence
John D’Amico, Harvard University
894. Fractured Landscapes, Fractured Imaginaries: The Wor(l)d of

Arabic Writing in the Third Millennium
The Spread of the Camp: Power, Law and the “New Democracy”
Ikram Masmoudi, University of Delaware
Dwelling Among the Ruins: A Move Toward Happiness, Perhaps, in Solidere’s Beirut
Anna Ziajka Stanton, The University of Texas at Austin
Ruins of the Sublime: Burke, Volney, and the Arab Apocalypse
Tarek El-Ariss, University of Texas at Austin
Courting Violence in Writing: Complicity or Struggle against the Spectacle?
Muhsin al-Musawi, Columbia University
Semiotics of Space: Ruins
Yasmine Khayyat, Rutgers University
765. Freedom and Constraint in Literature and Latin America Today
Location: Room 3028

Spinoza in Mexico
Bécquer Seguín, Cornell University
Fictions of Form: Latin American Literature and the Neoliberal Present
Emilio Sauri, University of Massachusetts Boston
Thinking Free-Market Freedom: Lessons on the Free Market’s Epistemological Constraints from
Latin American Film
Dierdra Reber, Emory University
Constraint, Form and Latin American Literature Today
Eugenio Di Stefano, University of Nebraska at Omaha
How to read Rigoberta Menchú through transitional justice practices and theory? Literary criticism
and the project of political transformations
Elise Couture-Grondin, University of Toronto
49
704. Frontiers in the Americas, Cangaceiros, Gauchos, Cowboys, Char-
ros and other figures of the range.
Location: Ravenna B
Eduardo Gutiérrez, Buenos Aires, and the Politics of the Gaucho Malo
Juan Pablo Dabove, University of Colorado at Boulder
The Devil in the Badlands: Evil incarnate in Blood Meridian and Grande Sertao: Veredas.
Rafael Acosta, University of Kansas
Bandidaje mexicano frente a la ley del gabacho: Intercultural Conflict in the Corrido of Juan Gar-
cía
Christine Arce, University of Miami
An American Cowboy in Mexico: Héctor Manjarrez’s “Johnny”

Jason Bartles, West Chester University
758. Gender and Trauma
Writing as a Way of Surviving Trauma: Tracing a Woman Writer’s Trauma in Leyla Erbil‘s Kalan
(The Remnant)
Serife Seda Yucekurt Unlu, Bogazici University
When Reality Cracks: The Beginning and (Un)Ending Trauma in Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of the
Dove
Susan Beam, Temple University
Gendered Violence, Post/Colonial Trauma: Indigenous Feminist Responses in Native Pacific Liter-
ature
Michaela Moura-Kocoglu, Florida International University
“We must look out for C.”: Trauma and Empathy in Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After
Anna Veprinska, York University
642. Genre and Geopolitics
Location: Room 2502

50
Genre and Embeddedness: Vikas Swarup’s Thrillers and Neoliberal India
Weihsin Gui, University of California, Riverside
Giving Form to Slow Violence Through Prolepsis: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
Gloria Fisk, Queens College, City University of New York
Denver’s Latino Street Art: Social Movement or Fame Banging?

Stacey Van Dahm, Philadelphia University
A Backroad to Gilas: Form and Identity in Hamid Ismailov’s Novels

Jefferson Gatrall, Montclair State University
“What’s a Story Like You Doing in a Genre Like This?”: Editing Indigenous Genre Fiction
David Gaertner, University of British Columbia
682. Government / Literature
Location: Room 3128

Three Canonical Case Studies Against the Politics of Exilic Literature

Djordje Popovic, University of Minnesota
Judgment, Democracy, and the U.S. Dictator Novel

Matthew Stratton, University of California, Davis
Dancing the National Bodies on Global Stage: the Paradox of Korean Ballet
Hyunjung Lee, Nanyang Technological University
(American) Soldiers, (World) Literature, and Nationhood

Nicholas Hengen Fox, Portland Community College
581. In the Garden of the Mother Tongue: African Language Litera-

ture
The Disenchantment of the World: Intertextuality and Disillusionment in Euphrase Kezilahabi’s

Nagona and Mzingile
Meg Arenberg, Indiana University
Habari ya ‘meta-’? Metanarration and Metareference in Contemporary Swahili Novels

Lutz Diegner, Humboldt University Berlin
51
Linguistic and Literary Tensions and Moroccan Poetry: A Darija Renaissance?
Rachid Aadnani, Wellesley College
862. Latin American Left: Aesthetics and Politics
Location: Madrona
Sovereignty, Hegemony and Primitive Accumulation: Steven F. Austin and the “Old 300”
Ronald Strickland, Michigan Technological University
Argentina’s new past: a case study to think the ”pink wave” historiographical strategy
Matías Beverinotti, University of Michigan
La Sonrisa de Perón. “Bombita Rodríguez” and the Framing of the Peronist Unconscious in Ar-
gentina
Federico Pous, Elon University
”Mediaesthetics”: Rewiring Rancière in Mexico

Maximillian Alvarez, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
757. Literary Finance: Why Now?
Location: Ravenna C
”Who Paid for Culture”: an 800-year view

Paul Delany, Simon Fraser University
On Entrepreneurship and Social Being

Imre Szeman, University of Alberta
Financializing the Feminine in Steinar Bragi’s Konur

Vidar Thorsteinsson, The Ohio State University
Is Anybody A Keynesian?: Misunderstanding Mixed Economy in The Great Recession

Matt Seybold, University of Alabama
Model, Market, and Metaphor: On Rehumanizing Finance

John McGlothlin III, Indiana University
52
856. Literary Historiography: Ethnography, Oral history, and the
Archive
With and Without Quotation Marks: Ethnography as Citation in Los indios de México
Karina Palau, University of California, Berkeley
Anthropology, Folklore and Literature: Paths to Indigenous Cultural Memory

Amal Eqeiq , Williams College
The Native American novel as an alternative archive

Laura De Vos, University of Washington, Seattle
The meeting between the Settler and the Indigenous Native in Colonial Brazil: The Pimenteiras
Nation in the Piaui’s captaincy on colonial period
Marcus Baptista, Universidade Estadual do Piauí
702. Literary Networks
Location: Room 2602

Dada Inceptions
Cosana Eram, University of the Pacific
The Propinquity of the Love Letter: Improvisation in Literary Networks

Math Trafton, University of Alaska Southeast
”The Honour of the Mind”: Academe in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Dorothy
Sayers
Kathryn Mogk, University of Minnesota
Exchange Poems in Late Medieval China (c. 840-940 CE): A Network Analysis of Connections be-
tween Scholar-Officials and Buddhist Monks
Thomas Mazanec, Princeton University
What’s a Little Borrowing Between Friends? Sociability, Property, and Theft in Medieval Italian
Lyric
Elizabeth Coggeshall, Stanford University
53
768. Literature, Aesthetics, Scholarship: the State of the Arts in Academia
(with a focus on the Americas)
Location: Room 3328

Misreading poetry: academia and overinterpretation in Bernardo de Balbuena’s Grandeza Mexi-

cana.
Jorge Tellez, University of Pennsylvania
El último lector de Ricardo Piglia y la apuesta por lo estético y la literatura

Rita De Grandis, The University of British Columbia
El texto vuelto residuo: las borraduras como caso de estudio para las materialidades literarias, a
partir de Poesías, de Ulises Carrión
Cinthya García Leyva, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM
A Raymond Williams study of the Mexican Literary Journals: Contemporáneos and Literatura
mexicana
Dustin Dill, University of Colorado at Boulder
“Colección de Voz Viva de México: ¿materia documental o la otra cara de la obra?”

Susana Gonzalez Aktories, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
821. Literatures of Church and State
Location: Room 2802

“Whiffs of god”: Religious Language in the Public Sphere in Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest
Norah Franklin, University of Toronto
Lost Between Islam and State: Dutch Literature of the “Second Generation”
Claire van den Broek, Indiana University
Revealing Subjects: The Book of Mormon’s Anti-Liberal Aesthetic

Grant Shreve, Johns Hopkins University
Hope Leslie and the Grounds of Secularism

Ashley Reed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
54
597. Literatures of the Post-Socialist European Diaspora in the United
States

The Dancing ’Storyteller’: Situating Ilya Kaminsky’s Collection Dancing in Odessa as Poetry of
Inherited Witness
Julia Dasbach, University of Pennsylvania
Tea Obreht: A New American Voice

Damjana Mraovic-O’Hare , Carson-Newman University
The Alternative Geo-politics of Croatian American Diasporic Writers

Jelena Sesnic, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Fictions of Irregular Post-Soviet Migration and Notions of U.S. “Whiteness”

Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Arizona State University
Transnational American Studies and Postsocialist Eastern Europe

Joseph Benatov, University of Pennsylvania
831. Mental Illness in the Literature of the Symbolst Movement
Location: Room 2928

From Death in Venice to Empathy in Venice

Lou Agosta, The Illinois School of Professional Psychology at Argosy University
Proust and Remembrances of Benozzo Gozzoli

Albert Alhadeff, University of Colorado, Boulder
Charcot and Redon’s writings

Rosina Neginsky, University of Illinois
Salammbô’s Sisters: Syphilitic Bodies in Belgian Symbolism

Natalia Vieyra, Temple University
729. Modes of Literary Diffusion
Location: Richmond
55
“Likes” and “Followers:” Francophonie and Authority in the Digital Age.
Claire Mouflard, Union College
Code-Switching as a Mode of Circulation & Diffusion in Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Demain
Antonietta Lincoln, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Diffusing the “Facts”: Borges’ Translation of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”
Emron Esplin, Brigham Young University
Buenos Ayres Everywhere: Yiddish Literary Diffusions

William Runyan, University of Michigan
Illustrated Gazetteers and Literary Diffusion in Early Modern Japan

Robert Goree, Wellesley College
690. Narratives of Violence in Latin America
Location: Diamond B
Literature, Displacements and Violence

Alessandra Santos, University of British Columbia
Traumatized Bodies and Collapsed Masculinities in Socavón (1999) by Luis Cano

Noelia Diaz, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Infectious Words and Uncanny Laughter in The Armies and Senselessness

Laura García Moreno, San Francisco State University
Beyond the Nota Roja: Spectacles of Narcoviolence in the Contemporary Mexican Chronicle
Juan Carlos Aguirre, New York University
897. Nineteenth-Century Literary History and Historiography
Location: Seneca
Dilthey’s Sublation of Historicism

Helmut Illbruck, Texas A&M University
Realism and Empire

Walter Cohen, University of Michigan
Sismondi’s Garden: Lyric in Romantic Literary Historiography

Naomi Levine, Rutgers University
56
4376. Number in the Novel, or, Do Novels Count? (Group 2)
Location: Aspen
”Unemployed Persons and Women”: Realism, the Census, and the Residues of Class
Emily Steinlight, University of Pennsylvania
How Characters Count in Cather

John Plotz, Brandeis University
The Salt of the World

Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania
Half and Half in Casterbridge

Audrey Jaffe, University of Toronto
825. Objects in Motion: Travel Writing and Materiality in Latin

America
Location: Room 2702

”Imported Gadgets and the Prosthetic Body Politic in Uruguay’s Avant-Garde”

Brais Outes-Leon, Northwestern University
Del relato de viaje al museo. Las antigüedades y artefactos mexicanos en el Egyptian Hall (1824-1825)
Laura Gandolfi, University of Chicago
Travel Writing and Suitcases

Leila Gomez, University of Colorado at Boulder
18th century travel narratives: what makes the journey possible.

Marie Escalante, University of Pennsylvania
4370. Permutations of Desire in Modern Persian Literature (Group

2)
Location: Ravenna A
57
An Analysis of the Translation of Feminine Imagery in Metaphors of the Rubáiyát in English and
French
Bentolhoda Nakhaei, Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris3)
A Postmodern Exploration of Love in Mahsa Moheb Ali’s ”Love in the Footnotes” (2004)
Maryam Zehtabi Sabeti Moqaddam, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Remembering the future: memory, desire, and literary modern making
Hamid Rezaeiyazdi, University of Toronto
Eschatology and Intercourse: Forough Farrokhzad’s Aesthetics of Catastrophe and Desire
Saharnaz Samaeinejad, University of Toronto
Desiring Subjects in Two Contemporary Iranian Poets
Nasrin Rahimieh, University of California, Irvine
746. Poetry after Language
Location: Everett
Occupy Verse: What the Diasporic as Aphasic Said (and Could Not Say)
R. Erica Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The No Prospect Poem: Lyric Finality in Prynne, Awoonor, and Trethewey
Walt Hunter, Clemson University
Sadness After Happily: Claudia Rankine and the Post-Lyric Moment
David Gorin, Yale University
Archipelaggio: Kamau Brathwaite and the Caribbean
Kate Brennan, University of Toronto
788. Postcolonial, Diaspora, and American Studies: The Terms of

Engagement
Location: Room 3202

Situating Vaan Nguyen and the Vietnamese in Israel

Evyn Lê Espiritu, University of California, Berkeley
Savages and Citizens: Revisions of the Indian Captivity Narrative in James Welch’s The Heartsong
of Charging Elk
Lydia Cooper, Creighton University
58
Postcolonial Aporia in the Early Twentieth Century Afro-Asian Diaspora
Smita Das, University of Illinois at Chicago
The Cunning of Multiculturalism from a Caribbean Perspective
Viranjini Munasinghe, Cornell University
846. Queer’s Affective Histories
Location: Room 3002

Feeling Otherwise: Black-Indigenous Coalitions and Transnational Networks in Martin Delany’s

Blake
Christine Yao, Cornell University
Queer Affect in Latin America
Cole Rizki, Duke University
Queer imaginaries in France and the US: homo-ness, deconstruction, and diversity
Damon Young, University of Michigan
Queer Theory’s ”Return”
Katherine Costello, Duke University
Queer’s Affective Histories: A Manifesto
Kadji Amin, Stony Brook University (State University of New York)
739. Rethinking Text As “Process” in the Humanities, Digital and

Non-Digital (Group 1)
Location: Columbia
Tender Buttons and Regular Expressions

Jordan Buysse, University of Virginia
The book as an interface: materiality and process in mexican contemporary poetry
Roberto Cruz Arzabal, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Free Necessity and Real Complexity: Causality in Pierre Macherey’s ”A Theory of Literary Produc-
tion”
Peter Libbey, Duquesne University
Textual Intimacy in Wearable Technology
Chelsea Adewunmi, Princeton University
59
676. Rising Asia
Location: Ballard
Rising Yoga, Falling India

Shameem Black, The Australian National University
Monks Encountering Samurai: Zen Buddhism and Imperialism in Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi
Ben Van Overmeire, University of California: San Diego
Rising Futures: The Temporalities of Asian Religiosity in Western Management Discourse
R. John Williams, Yale University
871. Shifting Cultural Geographies: Literature, Maps and Travel

Writing in the Age of of Discovery and Exploration
Location: Pacific
Sor Juana and The Sea

Molly Martin, New York University
Geographical Scales and the Novels of Amitav Ghosh
Sagarika Chattopadhyay, Indian Institute of Technology Indore
Ethiopianism – an Early Africanist Discourse in Early Modern Travel Writing
Sarah Fekadu-Uthoff, Washington University in St. Louis
775. Sincerity, Authenticity, and Affect in the Neoliberal Age

Sincerity and Solipsism: the Shallow Neoliberal Latter-Day Monologists of Ostensibly Deep Con-
sciousness
Eric Bennett, Providence College
Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity
Adam Kelly, University of York
Tao Lin’s Sincerity
Lee Konstantinou, University of Maryland, College Park
60
909. Spectrality: Images Out of Time
Location: Diamond A
Virginia Woolf and the Spectacle of the Lighthouse

George Derk, University of Virginia
Paris as the Spectral Capital of Mass-Produced Images
Christina Svendsen, Harvard University
Spectral Glass of the Future Past: Scheerbart with Taut
Josh Alvizu, Yale University
791. Texts without Borders: Novel Networks in the Ottoman and

Turkish Context
Location: Kirkland
Modern Turkish Poetry and the Networks of Global Radicalism

Kenan Sharpe, University of California, Santa Cruz
The Rise and Death of the Ottoman Novel: Armenian and Turkish Texts in a Comparative Perspec-
tive
Mehmet Uslu, Istanbul Sehir University
From Literary Gatherings to Medical Spectacles: Venues of Network and Themes in Circulation in
early 20th Century Istanbul
Nefise Kahraman, University of Toronto
Sisterhood and Intellectual Practice in Turkish Mysticism and Its Role in Ottoman/Turkish Litera-
ture
Didem Havlioglu, Istanbul Sehir University
A Turkish Woman in Bloomsbury: Halide Edib Adıvar’s London Years, the Bloomsbury Group,
and Literary Modernism
Kaitlin Staudt, University of Oxford
620. The Desire for the Vernacular: Quest for Information, Index of
Authenticity
61
Vernacular and Spiritual Code
Dominique Jullien, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Carnival of languages in Nerval’ Voyage en Orient

Sarga Moussa, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
Vernacular Curiosity in Travel Literature

Paulo Horta, New York University Abu Dhabi
838. The Elusive World
Location: Room 3302

The immonde in Jean-Luc Nancy

Sol Pelaez, Mississippi State University
Inside Out: The Location of World as Within

Adhira Mangalagiri, University of Chicago
Homely Metaphysics in a Heideggerian World: Notes on Dasein and Landscape

Taylor Eggan, Princeton University
Begriffsgeschichte der Weltbegriff: Reading the “World” in the Continental Tradition

Aakash M. Suchak, University of California, Berkeley
734. The Future of the Anthropocene
Location: Greenwood
Idiots of the Anthropocene: Uncommon Knowledge in Scientific Practice

Adam Nocek, University of Wisconsin
Prolepretrosis: Anthropocene Time and Narrative

Paul Harris, Loyola Marymount University
Post-Oil Futures in David Mitchell’s ’Cloud Atlas’ & ’The Bone Clocks’
Treasa De Loughry, University College Dublin/University California, Los Angles
Futures of Bewilderment: Genre the Environment in Charlie Booker’s Black Mirror and Colson
Whitehead’s Zone One
Justin Omar Johnston, Stony Brook University
62
590. The Rise of Superheroes: Hollywood, Genre, and Global Varia-
tions
Location: Room 2902

A Superhero of the Third Kind: The Irony of Traumatic Madness in Save the Green Planet (2003)
Woosung Kang, Seoul National University
Suffering in Silence: The Stigma of Superheroism in Suicidality for the End-of-Life Population
Sara Murphy, University of Rhode Island
De-imagining American Super Power in Park Min-gyu’s Legend of Earth’s Heroes

Youngjeen Choe, Chung-Ang University
Exceptionalism, Living Law, and Superheroic Anomie in Brad Bird’s The Incredibles
Don Rodrigues, Vanderbilt University
Could Superhero change the World?: Superhero and the Transformation of Film
Taek-Gwang Lee, Kyung Hee University
784. The Subject Beside Itself: Ecstasies of Juxtaposition
Location: Room 3228

“I Had No Thoughts At All”: Voice-Over, Ecstasy, and Women’s Sexuality

Kyle Stevens, Brandeis University
Anger Games: The Politics of Misrecognized Infidelity

Nico Dicecco, Simon Fraser University
Genre Beside Itself: David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Pulp Intrusions, and the Cosmic Historians’
War
Joseph Metz, University of Utah
Ecstasies of Remodeling: Adaptation Between Betrayal and Incommensurability

Christophe Collard, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels)
Transhistorical Connections and Racial Schemas in Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence
Michelle O’Brien, University of British Columbia
63
661. Theatre and Dictatorship in the Luso-Hispanic World
Location: Room 2628

Dagoll Dagom’s No hablaré en clase, a Postdramatic Response to Francoism

David Rodriguez-Solas, Amherst College
Site-specific or Site Generic? Space and Performance in the First Portuguese Stage Adaptation of
the Quintessential Anti-Colonial Mozambican text
Vanessa Silva Pereira, Independent Scholar
Soldiers Without Orders, Actors Without Stages: Carlos Manuel Varela’s Interrogatorio en Elsinore
and Bosco Brasil’s Novas diretrizes em tempos de paz
Katya Soll, University of Kansas
”Crossing Borders in a Dictatorial Context: An Aesthetics of Multisensoriality in the Theatre of

Abilio Estévez”
Ángela Dorado-Otero, Queen Mary University of London
898. Will, Willfulness, Willingness
Location: Virginia
Willful creatures: consent, response, and the animal

Kimberly O’Donnell, Simon Fraser University
The Willful Ill and the Politics of Infection

Drew Danielle Belsky, York University
Bio-digital population management and subject futures in personalized and participatory health-
care
Graham Potts, Wilfrid Laurier University
Normalizing Worlds: Consent as Will and Representation

Matthias Rudolf, University of Oklahoma
64
Chapter 4
Stream D (5:00 – 6:40)
865. (M)othering the Transatlantic: Representations of Motherhood

in a Transatlantic Context
Location: Greenwood
Of Monsters and Mothers: Exploring the Female Gothic from the Perspective of Slavery
Alice Pedersen, University of Washington Bothell
Hell Hath No Fury: Chrononormativity and Feminine Rage in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
Carolyn Davis, University of Texas at Austin
Situating Mary Shelley’s The Last Man in a Progressive Legacy of Maternity.
Chingling Wo, California State University, Sonoma
629. After Acéphale: Politics & Poetics of Assemblage in the Decapi-

tated Economy
Location: Fremont
Schizogenesis and Bataille’s Economy Beyond Economics

Andrew Kingston, Emory University
Inclemencies of the Sun: Per Capita
Etienne Turpin, University of Wollongong
Automation/Autonomia
Karen Pinkus, Cornell University
65
841. Art & Accident
Chew well: Casting the formless in Szapocznikow’s photosculpted gum

Emma Zofia Zachurski, Harvard University
Translating Waves
John Melillo, University of Arizona
Accidents of Scale: Hooke, Butler, and Aesthetic Microscopy

Lili Loofbourow, Liliana M Loofbourow
Involuntary Perceptions, Emotions as Physiology, and the Un-Self

Monica Huerta, Duke University
692. Articulating “Literature” beyond the English-Speaking World
Location: Room 2502

Where Did Chinese Science Fiction Go?

Nathaniel Isaacson , North Carolina State University
“Usefulness without Use”: Lu Xun, the Efficacy of Literature and modern Chinese Biopolitics
Wenjin Cui, Sun Yat-sen University, China
Language as Politics: Defining the Vernacular in Colonial Taiwan

Li-ping Chen, University of Southern California
Taiwan’s Postcoloniality and Postwar Memories of Japan

Liang-ya Liou, National Taiwan University
810. Before and Beyond the Law: Cultural Representations of Im-

punity and Immunity.
Location: Richmond
Landscapes of Transnational Impunity: Visions of the Tamaulipas Migrant Massacre

Manuel Chinchilla, Sewanee: The University of the South
66
Narrating Impunity, Exposing Immunity: Horrorism and the Contemporary Central American
Chronicle
Christian Kroll, Reed College
The Accumulation of Tragic Excess and Repetition: the Exception and Impunity of Mexican Devel-
opment
Paige Andersson, University of Michigan
Zombie Girlfriend, Zombie Mexicans, Zombie Bolaño: Revolution and the Undead in ”El hijo del
coronel”
Robert Wells, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

and the State (Group 2)
Location: Ravenna B
Dissociative Resistance: The Lives and Writings of Hans Fallada and Isabelle Eberhardt
Rowan Melling, The University of British Columbia
“A slow smell of hay mixed with something else”: Poetics of Do’ikayt in Moyshe Kulbak’s The Zel-
menyaners
Madeleine Cohen, University of California, Berkeley
Saʿlaka as a Lived Poem: The Life and Times of Jan Dammu

Suneela Mubayi, New York University
Hyperbole and the Limits of Criticism from Within: Reading the Chronicles of Ahmad Rajab and
Hector Zumbado
Eman Morsi, New York University
666. Beyond Waverley: Writing Historical Fiction in the Periphery

During the Long Nineteenth Century
Location: Room 3028

”Absolutely making history, sir”: Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo as World-Historical Novel

Edward King, Yale University
Melville Contra Scott: Israel Potter as the Anti-Ivanhoe

Thomas Massnick, University of Wisconsin
67
The Past in Revolt: Theories of History in A Tale of Two Cities
Elizabeth John, Princeton University
Location: Cedar A
The Politics of Blood in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

Rick Snyder, University of Southern California
Asian Settler Ally: Building Genealogies of Resistance

Kelsey Amos, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
“Collard Greens and Ham Hocks”: Politics of Race and Disease in Contemporary North America
Joshua Whitehead, University of Winnipeg
Intersections of Postcolonial and Transnational Feminist Discourse: Representations of Muslim

Women in Media
Sobia Khan, University of Texas at Dallas and Richland College
4510. Body and Sexuality in Context (Group 2: Modern Chinese Lit-

erature)
Location: Seneca
Sexed Identities and the Confines of Gender: Portrayals of Female and Male Subjectivities in the
New China
Eileen Vickery, Independent Scholar
Sexual Transformation and Its Social Significance: a critique of some adaptations of Journey to the
West
Hongmei Sun, George Mason University
Sisters in Love: Body and (A)Sexuality in Chinese Female-Female Love Stories of the 1920s and
1930s
Yun Zhu, Temple University
Dressing the National Bodies: Cross-Cultural Disguise in Late-Qing China

Yingying Huang, Purdue University
68
586. Comparative Literature: Global Practice
Location: Pacific
Comparative and Global Portuguese

Helena Buescu, Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon
How much culture is there in comparative literature? A view from the (European) South.
Isabel Capeloa Gil, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
The Scandinavian Telescope
Svend Erik Larsen, Aarhus University
749. Comparative Social Media Studies
Location: Everett
This Person: The Chin-Down Selfie and the Aesthetics of Ambiguity

Samantha Shorey, University of Washington
Sense and Dissensus: Aesthetic Judgment in the Time of Yelp
Brian Droitcour, New York University
Fait Divers, Modernist Miniatures, and Digital Shorts: Tracing Teju Cole’s Twitter Feed throughout
the Twentieth Century
Christiane Steckenbiller, Colorado College
822. Contamination and Quarantine
Location: Room 2802

“Infected Carriers”: Djuna Barnes’ “Blood-Consciousness”

Katherine Ryan, San Jacinto College
Too Inoculated to Be Contaminated: Viral Disasters and Betting on Biopolitical Futures in Alexander
Laing’s The Motives of Nicholas Holtz
Rachel Walsh, St. Bonaventure University
AIDS in the Great Society: Prosthesis, Containment, and Neoliberal Flexibility in David Foster Wal-
lace’s ‘Lyndon’
Travis Alexander, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
69
Viral Control: W.S. Burroughs and the Autopoietics of Power
Steven Pokornowski, University of California, Santa Barbara
771. Counsel in Context: Literature, Advice, Modernity

Copying the Maxim of Clarissa

Kelly Swartz, Princeton University
Counter-Didactic Moral Tales in the Early 18th Century
Thomas Reinert, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Resisting Counsel: The Idea of Self-Help in the Renaissance
Ivan Lupic, Stanford University
693. Critical University Studies in Times of Global Precarity
Location: Room 2828

Within and against University Discourse: Willy Thayer, Chilean Student Protest Movements, and
Academic Capitalism’s Crises of Representation
Bret Leraul, Cornell University
No Parking: Student Movements and the Post-Catholic Legacy in Italy and Quebec
Joseph Sannicandro, University of Minnesota
”#Un-Occupy”: Palestinian Universities and the Palestinian Youth Movement
Sunaina Maira, University of California, Davis
Conjuring ”Solidarity for All” at the University of Kankan, Republic of Guinea
Jay Straker, Colorado School of Mines
Location: Cirrus
’It’s not like in your movies’: Representations of Hollywood in Hardboiled Detective Fiction
Christine Photinos, National University, San Diego, California
70
Exteriorizing the Interior: The Architecture of Sentiment in BBC’s Sherlock
Elizabeth Howard, The University of Oregon
Contemporary Sherlock Holmes’s Relationship to Art

Kathleen Komar, University of California, Los Angeles
Location: Juniper
Accounting for God: Tragedy and Economy

Anick Boyd, CUNY Graduate Center
Never Again Will I Go Reverent to Delphi

Colin Drumm, University of California, Riverside
Almost Magic
Dan Sinykin, Cornell University
Mercurial Capital: The Economy of Fecal Matter in Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction

Ikuho Amano, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Arabic Writing in the Third Millennium (Group 2)
Tahar Ben Jelloun: A Troubled World Littérateur in Exile?

Anouar El Younssi, Pennsylvania State University
Anti radical discourse in Saudi Culture

Mohammed Alshammari, University of Arkansas
National Literature, Foreign Tongue: Palestinian Witness Literature in English

Sheena Steckl, University of Utah
Narrativizing Loss: Form in the Palestinian Novel

Amanda Batarseh, University of California, Davis
71
4377. Gender and Trauma (Group 2)
Gendered Trauma in Trans/National Memory: Sofi Oksanen’s Purge and Imbi Paju’s Memories
Denied
Eneken Laanes, Under and Tuglas Literature Centre/Tallinn University
“May the War be Remembered and Not Repeated:” Trauma, Mourning, and Forgiveness in Nadine
Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now?
Nadine Sinno, Virginia Tech
Forgiveness and Time—Gendered Trauma in Women’s Theatre

Joy Shihyi Huang, Tamkang University
Performing Pain: Women’s Work Songs as a Cultural and Social Tools

Diana Garvin, Cornell University
4371. Gendered Bodies in Literature and Medicine (Group 2)
Written on the Body Read as a Cyborg

Laura Broom, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Telling Stories about Sex: The Problematic Story-telling of Eugenides Middlesex and Kathleen Win-
ter’s Annabel.
Katelyn Dykstra Dykerman, The University of Manitoba
Baby X: Queer Futures and the Figure of the Child

Gabrielle Owen, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Textual Trouble in the Enlightenment: James Parsons’ A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the
Nature of Hermaphrodites (1741)
Stephanie Hilger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
783. Global Communities
Location: Room 2602

72
To Inherit and Inhabit or To Re-imagine and Re-purpose, From Cesaire to Butler: A Survey of
Emancipatory Literary Practices
Corina Kesler, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Female Identities in Transition in Contemporary Women’s Writing: A Comparative Study of Simin

Daneshvar’s “Anis”, Alice Munro’s “Friend of My Youth”, and Iris Murdoch’s The Bell
Mansoureh Modarres, University of Alberta
Rushdie’s Vision of a Future Community in Shalimar the Clown

Ubaraj Katawal, Valdosta State University
Beyond Mediation: Performing New Genres of Resistance in Chharanagar

Allison Shelton, University of Colorado Boulder
802. Global Perspectives on Revolutionary Theater
Location: Room 3302

Performing a Constitution: Revolutionary Theatre in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century

Iran
Sheida Dayani, New York University
Post-Revolution Theatricality in Iran, Conventions that (Con)form and (Con)test

Marjan Moosavi, University of Toronto
Revolt in the Theatrical World; Reconstruction on the Worldly Stage: A Case Study of Two Chinese
Peasant Theatres in the 1930’s
Man He, Williams College
From Actors to Actants: Prototype of Chinese Revolutionary Theater

Tingting Zhao, Stanford University
770. Graphic Reading
Location: Room 3102

Careful Whispers: Close Reading and Keeping Secrets in the Work of Alan Hollinghurst
Angus Brown, University of Oxford
The Marks on the Page: On Not Reading Virginia Woolf

John Lurz, Tufts University
73
Grasping the Graphic: The Sensuous Pleasure of Reading Technologies
Matt Hayler, University of Birmingham
Reading Patchwork Girl Twenty Years Later

Alissa Bourbonnais, University of Washington
Faceless Books
C. Namwali Serpell, University of California, Berkeley
715. Inhumanities: The Human and Its Limits

Atrocity’s Tedium: West, Arendt, and the Post-Holocaust Trial

Sangina Patnaik, Swarthmore College
Kant in Flux: Terada, Tawada

Caroline Rupprecht, Queens College & The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Rethinking Human/Inhuman Via Human-Animal Collaborations in Science and Art

Dale Hudson, New York University Abu Dhabi
”The Art of Not Having Children”

Jill Richards, Yale University
Private Obscenities: The Woman Artist and Her Objects in the Works of Rachilde
Jessica Crewe, University of California, Berkeley
691. Intranational Modernisms
Location: Dashpoint
Self, Love and Ghosts - Narrating Modern Japan in the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti,
Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki
Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa, University College London
Transfiguration, Embodiment, and the Eternal Feminine: The Curious Case of Russian Symbolists
and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Daria Ezerova, Yale University
A comparative perspective on non-Anglophone modernisms: ”Solaria” and the ”Nouvelle Revue

Française” as laboratories of the modernist short story
Mathijs Duyck, University of Ghent / University of Bologna
74
Articulating a Literary Space: J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians as World Literature
Christian Howard, University of Virginia

Archive, Group 2
Archiving African Slavery in the Iranian New Wave

Parisa Vaziri, University of California, Irvine
Alternative Spatial Ontologies: A Reoriented Reading of Los Comanches in the Spanish Archives
Lisa Schilz, University of California, Santa Cruz
Palestinian Folklore And the National Allegory

Ibrahim Muhawi, University of Oregon
Reductions, Double Column, and the Deferred Representation of the Mapuche in the Ethnographic
Archive
Sebastián López Vergara, University of Washington
Turkey As a Case of Archive

Adile Aslan, University of Massachusetts Amherst
833. Locating Contemporary Asian American Poetry
Location: Leschi
Rediscovering the Poetry and Poetics of Wong May

Jane Wong, The University of Washington
Uses of the Mask: Presence, Persona and Hybridity in the Facebook Age
Pimone Triplett, University of Washington, Seattle
Things, Objects, Canonical Assimilation and the Avant-Garde in Asian American Poetry
Prageeta Sharma, University of Montana
Revisiting Janice Mirikitani: a Search for Unencumbered Aesthetics

Toshiaki Komura, Fuji Women’s University
“I’d like to be free to write about the world”: Locating Contemporary Asian American Poetry
Kornelia Freitag, Ruhr-University Bochum
75
839. Modernism in East Asia: Fluidity and Fragmentation
Location: Virginia
The Translation of American Comics into Japanese 1923-1941

Eike Exner, University of Southern California
Soseki, Modernity as Hyperstimulus, and the Urban Gothic

Sayumi Takahashi Harb, Independent Scholar
Modernism in East Asia: Historiography

Kyunghee Pyun, State University of New York-Fashion Institute of Technology
816. Negation in modern Middle Eastern Literatures
Location: Room 2728

Utopian Negation in Zionist and Israeli Literary Imaginaries

Oded Nir, The Ohio State University
”From Where Did I Inherit My Song?” Intertextuality and Temporality in Yaakov Steinberg’s Po-
etry
Elazar Elhanan, The City College of New York - CUNY
Economies of Survival: Informal Economic Activity and the Negation of Iraqi State Authority in
Betool Khedairi’s Absent
Gary Rees, Bemidji State University
The Third Person: Impersonal Poetics and Bearing Witness in Elias Khoury’s City Gates
Shir Alon, University of California, Los Angeles
801. New Political Materials
Location: Boren
Is Financial Capital Truly Virtual? On Limits to Economic Speculative Materialism

Joshua Ramey, Grinnell College
Vitalpolitik: Between “raw” and “cooked” Capitalism

Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University
76
Biopolitical Deep Time
Aaron Jaffe, University of Louisville
Differentiable Objects, Integrated Commodities: Towards a Radical Critique of Postfordist Economies
of Distributed Production and Valorization
Jonathan Beller, Pratt Institute
Love as Action: Materiality of Affect in Moses Hess’s “Philosophy of the Act”
Tracie Matysik, University of Texas at Austin
726. Producing War: The Militarization of Culture
Location: Room 3328

Peace as Process: Medoruma Shun’s Writings for the Future

Satoko Kakihara, Nagoya University
The Exceptionalist Optics of 9/11 Photography
Joseph Darda, University of Connecticut
Post 9/11 American Masculinities: The Messenger and other War Films
Andrea Opitz, Stonehill College
Beyond the Latin@ Martial Affect in American War Cinema
Felipe Quintanilla, San Diego State University
Evasions and Confrontations in William Dean Howells and William Faulkner’s (Non)War Novels
Kim Trinh, University of Washington
688. Remapping the Political in Contemporary Cultural Production
Location: Room 2702

Iconicity and Affect: the Privatization of Political Activism in Contemporary Argentina

Veronica Garibotto, University of Kansas
The Impolitical Aleph in Contemporary Argentine Fiction
Brendan Lanctot, University of Puget Sound
Movement in Print: Migrations and Dialogues in Grassroots Publishing
Magalí Rabasa, University of Kansas
Territorial Reorganizations: Fiction, Criticism, Latin America
Catalina Ocampo, The Evergreen State College
77
895. Representations of Medieval and Early Modern Minorities in the
Mediterranean Countries
Location: Kirkland
Messer Torello’s Magic Carpet Ride

Beatrice Arduini, University of Washington
The Moral Muslim and Moorish Music: Maurophilia and Transcultural Relations in Juan Ruiz’s
Libro de buen amor
Teresa Clifton, Brown University
Turning Turk/Turning Christian
Debra Bronstein, Pasadena City College
Poetics of Exile: Examining the Dialogue between Spain’s sixteenth-century Maurophilic Ballads
and North Africa’s Malhoun Poetry
Zainab Cheema, University of Texas at Austin
4369. Rethinking Text as Process in the Humanities, Digital and non-

Digital (Group 2)
Location: Columbia
The Poem as a Practice of Information: Mnemonic Dimension in Ernst Meister’s Wallless Space
Lea Pao, Pennsylvania State University
Digital Paratextuality as Subversion: How New Technologies Alter Traditional Processes of Textual
Production and Reading
Jaime Lee Kirtz, University of Colorado Boulder
Media Convergence + Participatory Culture = De-fictionalization
Rhona Trauvitch, Florida International University
Reading the Primeros libros: from archive to OCR
Hannah Alpert-Abrams, University of Texas at Austin
676. Rising Asia
Location: Ballard
78
Rising and Uprising: The 100 Days Reform, the Boxer Rebellion, and the First Anglophone Novel
in China
Ross Forman, University of Warwick
”Ah, Xiao Xie”: Zhu Wen’s satirical critique of :”Rising China” and the dubious benefits of global-
ization for Asia and the West
Karin Gosselink, Yale University
Revisioning Global Modernity through the Prism of China

Sheldon Lu, University of California, Davis
679. Sensate Sovereignty
Location: Diamond B
Nightmares and Dreamscapes: Traditional Knowledge and Sovereignty in Inuit Horror

Katherine Meloche, University of Alberta
The struggle for Aboriginal Rights in Canada: Dialogues, Fractures, Dead-ends and Future Possi-
bilities
Sophie McCall, Simon Fraser University
Performing Dechen Ts’edilhtan: Tsilhqot’in Law and ”Tsilhqot’in Nation v. B.C.”

Lorraine Weir, University of British Columbia
Dancing Sovereignty: Reclaiming the Grease Trail Through Movement and Song
Mique’l Dangeli, University of British Columbia
Location: Diamond A
The Spectrality of Operational Systems: Spike Jonze’s film “Her.”

Dorothee Ostmeier, University of Oregon
The Ghost in the Archive: Spectral Images in Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished
Daniela Agostinho, Catholic University of Portugal
Wind 24x a Second

Jane Hu, University of California, Berkeley
The Collage Effect: spectrality in Walker Evan’s photographs

Christie McDonald, Harvard University
79
616. Speculative Fiction and the Global South
Location: Ravenna C
Caves Full of Computers: Techno-Sorcery and the Pursuit of the Green World in Nnedi Okorafor’s
Who Fears Death
Erin Fehskens, Towson University
Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial SF Narrative: The Ambivalent Utopianism of Nnedi Okorafor’s
Lagoon
Hugh O’Connell, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Metaphor and its Related Concepts as Lexical Indicators of Postcolonial Trauma in The Calcutta
Chromosome
Jennifer Olive, Georgia State University
633. The (Re)vision of Nature, Eco-consciousness, and Modern Chi-

nese Literature and Culture in Cross-Cultural Context
Location: Room 3002

Chang Yao and Chinese West: One Man’s Pilgrimage in Nature and Collective Memory
Xin Ning, Jilin University
Animal Incorporated: A Plead for Compassionate Gastronomy

Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College
Uprooting the Family Tree: Redrawing the Landscape of the Lineage in Late Imperial China (1900-1928)
Tristan Brown, Columbia University
The Similarities and Dissimilarities of the Attitudes on Nature between Chinese and Western Tradi-
tional Romantic Literature
Cheng Jin, Jilin University
861. The Global Lives of Poems
Location: Suite Parlor 12

80
“El Cisne Desdichado:” Rubén Darío Reads Edgar Allan Poe
Erin Singer, University of Houston
Global Ballads and National Poetry
Caroline Gelmi, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Illuminating Parodies: Club Poetry in Postbellum America
Erin Kappeler, Massachusetts Historical Society
Tennyson in Japan in the 1880s
Rachel Epstein, University of Pennsylvania
659. The Persistence of Race: Neoliberal Colorblindness in Western

Europe and the Americas
Location: Room 3228

Disarming Difference: Reading Race and Diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying
Andres Amerikaner, The Pennsylvania State University
Contemporary literature written by an Afro-Brazilian woman
Felipe Rodrigues, Dartmouth College / Rio de Janeiro State University
The Persistence of Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art: The Queloides and Grupo Antil-
lano Exhibits
Marilyn Miller, Tulane University
Beyond the Avant-Garde: Hybridism, Ambiguity, and Contradiction in the Representation of the
Afro-Antillean in Alejo Carpentier´s Écue-Yamba-Ó
Silvia Ruiz-Tresgallo, University of Wisconsin-Stout
657. Theory in Twenty-First Century Literature
Location: Room 2628

Experimentalism After Theory

Rachel Greenwald Smith, Saint Louis University
Mediating Medium: Theory in the Contemporary Novel
Vincent Adiutori, University of Illinois at Chicago
Nevérÿon after Derrida
Jason Gladstone, University of Colorado, Boulder
81
Against Reflexivity
Mitchum Huehls, University of California, Los Angeles
774. Toward a Global America
Location: Room 3128

The Outsider Within: Mexican Language, Culture and History in the Novels of Willa Cather
Molly Metherd, Saint Mary’s College of California
The Age of the Wilde Picture: ’World-Federation’ and Racial Fascination in Trans-National Amer-
ica
Ryan Weberling, Boston University
Mark Twain, Hawai’i and the Philippines
Andrew Opitz, Hawai’i Pacific University
745. Toward a Posthumanist Memory Studies
Location: Cedar B
Memory as an Affective Archive

Erica L. Johnson, Pace University
Subjects of Memory
Vilashini Cooppan, University of California, Santa Cruz
Animal Witnesses: Adorno, Celan, and Poetry After Auschwitz
Natalie Lozinski-Veach, Brown University
Dialoguing with Diderot: Technics / Body / Memory
Tracy Rutler, Dartmouth College
The Humanist Legacy in Memory Studies: Problems, Challenges, and New Perspectives
Susanne Knittel, Utrecht University
615. Transgenerational Dynamics and the Human Geography of Post-

Communist Space
Location: Room 2928

82
Father Figures, Interrupted, in Three Romanian Movies
Otilia Baraboi, University of Washington
Aleksandar Hemon and the Intimate Map of Home

Irena Percinkova-Patton
The Artistic Colony in a Former Death Camp: The Case of Belgrade’s Old Fairground
Dragana Obradovic, University of Toronto
804. Translingual Imagination from Eastern Europe

Ilya Kaminsky and the Myth of the Odessa Poet

Adrian Wanner, Pennsylvania State University
Translingual Identity and Art: Marc Chagall’s Stride through the Gates of Janus
Natasha Lvovich, City University of New York
‘Daytsh iz dokh yidish’: Translingualism in Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peysi

Michael Boyden, Uppsala University
834. Travel and Intersections: The Curious Identities of Modern Chi-

nese Poetry
Location: Room 2902

Exiled ‘I’: Maoism in Post-Revolutionary Poetic Modernism

Jennifer Lee, College of William and Mary
”The Murmur of Underground Streams”:The Weight of Light Verses

Qiang Zhang, City University of Hong Kong
The Varying Forms of Roving as a Poetic Ideal in Modern Chinese Poetry

Liansu Meng, University of Connecticut
Travels through Heterotopias: The Technique of Ostranenie in Lü Bicheng’s Lyric Poetry

Ying Xiong, University of Oregon
83
826. Untamed Networks and Digital Temporalities
Location: Chelan
“Buried Alive in History”: Digital Poetics and Ethics of Time-travel Historical Novel in China
Renren Yang, Stanford University
The Times of the Wound and the Digital in Claire Denis’s films
Sabine Doran, Pennsylvania State University
Reading Dickinson’s Fascicles as Networked Nodes: Deleting Time and Enabling Spatial Awareness
with Open-Source Tools
Kyle Bickoff, University of Maryland, College Park
755. Who is Your Audience? The Reading Public in the Discourse of

Middle Eastern Literature
Location: Medina
Contested Confinements: Iranian Prison Memoirs in Persian and English

Samad Alavi, University of Washington, Seattle
Women writers and the Arab audience
Wijdan Alsayegh, the University of Michigan
Contemporary Turkish Literature’s Readership: Limited, but Politically Vocal
Jeannette Okur, University of Texas at Austin
A Short Story is Written in Afghanistan
Chad Kia, Harvard University
4372. Wilderness and Temporality in the Americas (Group 2)
Location: Madrona
Nambikwara deserts and the American night

Raphael Piguet, University of Geneva
The Melancholy Imprint of Landscape: Around James Benning’s Topographic Film
Benjamin Leon, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
84
Time in Ruins: Indigeneity and Cinema in Brazil
Gustavo Furtado, Duke University
Natureza Morta
Adriana Johnson, University of California, Irvine
85
Part II
Saturday, March 28th
86
Chapter 5
Stream A (8:30 – 10:10)
Location: Seneca
Mexico City Chronicles

Monica Hanna, California State University, Fullerton
Moral Communication in Different Cultures. Comparing Front Pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung and the New York Times
Reinhard Mueller, University of Texas at Austin
Storytellers & Communities of Listeners: The Ethical Demands of Literary Journalism
Marryam Abdl-Haleem, University of Wisconsin- Madison
Redefining Resistance: Social Criticism and Classical Virtues in Manuel Vicent’s Newspaper Columns
Jovana Zujevic, Georgetown University

eign Cities
Location: Diamond A
Lost Childhood Found in Buenos Aires: Florian Cossen’s The Day I was not Born (2010)
Ulrich E Bach, Texas State University
Unreal city, invisible city: Ghada al-Samman’s Beirut-in-Vienna
Katie Logan, The University of Texas at Austin
87
The self and the city: explorations of the identity in the foreign urban framework in Ishiguro and
Leavitt
Alessia Ursella, University of Guelph - Ontario/Canada
Location: Kirkland
Has America Lost Its Mind? Precarious Nationalism at Sacvan Bercovitch’s New Historicist Turn
John Hay, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Reading Historically
Jay Grossman, Northwestern University
The Fulbright Scholar’s Properly Political Project of Love

Merve Emre, Yale University
Doing Interpretive Justice to Matthiessen’s From the Heart Of Europe: A Case Study for Ameri-
canist Criticism, Back and Forward
Donald Pease, Dartmouth College
After Sedgwick
Location: Room 3002

Incest and Infidelity: Perverse Families and Promiscuous Politics in Eduardo Machado’s Kissing
Fidel
Jesus Hernandez, Williams College
Queering of Kinship in Carmen Boullosa’s They’re Cows, We’re Pigs

Alana Reid, University of Central Arkansas
The Bear with the Goat Beard: An Ambiguous Uncle in the Saga of the Faeroe Islanders
Elisabeth Ward, Pacific Lutheran University
A Queer Uncle, a Queer Child, and a Straight Bear Cub

Dario Sanchez-Gonzalez, Gustavus Adolphus College
88
Location: Greenwood
Coming (Out + of Age): Young Adult Literature, the Closet, and the Novel of Development
Angel Matos, University of Notre Dame
The Environmental Bildungsroman
Bishupal Limbu, Portland State University
Peripheral Bildung and Generic Innovation
Sarah Townsend, University of South Dakota
Bildung, Belatedness and the Modernist Novel
Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
731. Breakdown
NOX: The Trauma of the Letter

Camille Norton, University of the Pacific
Fat Fiction and the Breakdown of Capitalism
Frann Michel, Willamette University
Theorizing Convulsive Martyrdom
Marija Krtolica, Temple University
Sectarian Fractures and the Post-Lebanese Civil War Novel
Danielle Haque, Minnesota State University at Mankato
782. Childish Forms
Location: Room 2802

Katherine Mansfield and Childish Form

Devorah Fischler, University of Pennsylvania
Printed by [Indian Boys: Compliant Forms in Children’s Writing for Periodicals, 1870-1920]
Jessica Isaac, University of Pittsburgh
89
Margaret Wise Brown and Domestic Modernism
Anne Fernald, Fordham University
Giving Form to the Human: Sex, Eugenics, and the Transgender Child
Julian Gill-Peterson, Rutgers University
A Child as the Natural Slave

Anna Mae Duane , University of Connecticut

The Gazelle in Lorca’s Garden

Travis Landry, Kenyon College
’We will guard your memory, your constant presence’: Langston Hughes’s Translations of Federico
García Lorca
Evelyn Scaramella, Manhattan College
”Libro de poemas” vs. ”Ultra”: Poetry in Spain 1918-1921, Influence, and Canonization
Andrew Anderson, University of Virginia
Lorca’s Musical Legacy: From Strayhorn to Golijov

Jonathan Mayhew, University of Kansas
Location: Cirrus
Which Story Would You Like to Hear? Murder Mysteries, Detective Fiction, and World Literature
Eralda Lameborshi, Texas A&M University
Urban Crime Fiction and the South American Avant-Garde: Pablo Palacio and Roberto Arlt in
World Literature
Juan G. Ramos, College of the Holy Cross
The Ludicrous Lairs of Edogawa Ranpo

Raven Johnston, University of Texas at Tyler
Power and Mimicry in the First Detective Novel of Turkish Literature: Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s Es-
rar-i Cinayat
Ali Kulez, University of Southern California
90
Location: Room 2702

Migrating between Homes: Cross-Cultural Teaching in Taiwan, Turkey, and Ohio

Linda Strom, Youngstown State University
Transgressing National, Cultural and Disciplinary Boundaries in Teaching Anglophone Literatures

and Cultures in Turkey
Esen Kara, Yasar University
Teaching American Ethnic Texts in Turkey: Challenges and Rewards

Meldan Tanrisal, Hacettepe University
Location: Virginia
Writing on Catastrophes as a Poet

Goro Takano, Saga University
Looking at Photographs After 11 March 2011

Keijiro Suga, Meiji University
If You Are A Flower in the Field of Nuclear Pollution

Atsunobu Katagiri, Misasagi Ikebana School
Long-distance Ecopoetic Entanglement: Taiwan Tanka Association Poetry after 3.11

Dean Brink, Tamkang University
Location: Room 3202

Constitution and Alterities of Europe: Two Converging Perspectives in Contemporary French Phi-
losophy
Laura Chiesa, University at Buffalo
91
Europe through the Looking Glass of Exoticism: Three variations
Xiaofan Li, St Anne’s College, Oxford University
The Potential of Obscurity: the Sublime Landscape in Taoist Aesthetics and Victor Hugo’s Trans--
Media Creation
Jiani Fan, University of Paris III-EHESS
Location: Columbia
Circulating Sophistry: Charles Brockden Brown and the Worldliness of Werther

Nicholas Grant-Collins, CUNY Graduate Center
Cosmopolitan Texts and Global Audiences: The Multiple Narratives of Rana Dasgupta and David
Mitchell
Gretchen Busl, Texas Woman’s University
Traveling Voices: Salvational Moments in W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten

Benjamin Brand, Brown University
Location: Room 3228

Form and Its Symptom: Making Tennyson through In Memoriam

Stephen Tardif, Harvard University
Black-boxing Poetry: Keats’s ”Endymion,” Glitch Poetics, and Invisible Technology

Deven Parker, University of Colorado, Boulder
Historical Present: The Lyric According to Whitman

David Miller, Loyola Marymouth University
The Turn of the Seasons: Publishing Format and Subject Formation in Arthur Rimbaud’s Une
saison en enfer and William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All
Amy Leggette, University of Oregon
92
Form, Immediacy, and the Periodization of the Contemporary

Mathias Nilges, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada
Raw Materials for a Reading of Mildred Pierce’s Young-Girl as Melodramatic Form

Monique Rooney, The Australian National University
Form as Law in Victorian Poetry

Andrea Henderson, University of California, Irvine
Formalims for Change

Caroline Levine, University of Wisconsin-Madison

‚In Feuer getaucht‘: Liquid Empedokles

Katrin Pahl, Johns Hopkins
Riven Spirit—: Hölderlin’s Pindarfragmente

Kristina Mendicino, Brown University
River, Fragment, Script: On Hölderlin’s Ninth “Pindar-Fragment”

Alexander Verdolini, Yale University
Exporting Islamophobia through the ’Veiled best-seller:’The Rise and Fall of Muslim women’s post-9/11
memoirs
Leila Pazargadi, Nevada State College
How to exploit clichés about Negroes to produce literature?

Alex Lenoble, Cornell University
93
Trading Signs, Translating Experience: Islamic Difference and the Political Economy of Frenchness
Guilan Siassi, The University of Southern California
Racism as Denial
Anca Parvulescu, Washington University
Dreyfus in the Colony
David Fieni, SUNY College at Oneonta

Literature
Location: Room 2628

Exotic Cities, War, and Memory in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul and Christine Evans’s Trojan
Barbie
Eda Dedebas Dundar, University of Nevada, Reno
Walking the Occupied City: Errance in Marguerite Duras and Patrick Modiano
Katherine Balkoski, Columbia University
Rubble and Rebuilding: City Space and Subjectivity in the Work of Abe Kōbō and Teshigahara
Hiroshi
Devon Cahill, University of Minnesota
In Between Shanghai and Hong Kong (1940s): Love, Loss, and Memory in Eileen Chang’s non-fic-
tion.
Yu Min Claire Chen , St Mary’s College of Maryland
Location: Leschi
From Taibele to Blackie: Negotiating Jewish Identity in Argentina through Jazz, 1920-1940
Raelene Wyse, The University of Texas at Austin
Mario Castells’ “El mosto y la queresa”: narrativizing the linguistic landscape of Argentina’s Guarani-s-
peaking immigrants
Juan Caballero, Earlham College
Legitimacy through Ladino: Appropriating Diasporic Language to Assert Identity During the Ar-
gentine Dirty War
Brandon Rigby, University of Oregon
94
Gastro-Judaization? The Judaizing Properties of “Homey” Meals in Elye Levita’s 16th Century
Yiddish Epic, Bove-bukh
Margot Behrend Valles, Michigan State University

The ethnohistorical contextualization of a Kiksht hapax legomenon

Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago
Death, Text, and Interaction in Muslim Iberia

Vincent Barletta, Stanford University
Towards an Understanding of the “Minor Writer”: Zoe Wicomb, Social Value, and the Windham
Campbell Prize Reading
Aaron Bartels-Swindells, University of Pennsylvania
Proust’s Ear: Auditory learning in À la recherche du temps perdu

Carli Cutchin, University of California, Berkeley
Location: Room 2902

Body – [Memory – City: Performative Sites Overcoming Trauma]

So-Rim Lee, Stanford University
The unintended witnesses of the circumstances also have something to say”: Patricio Pron, Post-
memory and the Destabilizing Nature of Literature
Lori Hopkins, University of New Hampshire
Embodied Documentation in the Work of Horacio Castellanos Moya

Molly Appel, Pennsylvania State University
742. Mimeses
Location: Cedar B
95
What is Poetic Realism?
Eric Hayot, Pennsylvania State University
Irony and the World Concept in W. M. Thackeray
Matthew Phillips, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
Global Mimesis
Madigan Haley, University of Virginia
Literary History and Uneven Development: The African Example of The Golden Notebook
Susan Andrade, University of Pittsburgh
Location: Diamond B
Possessed, Abandon: on Hoarding and Fetishism

Rebecca Falkoff, New York University
Bridging the Gap between People and Things: Hoarding, Collecting and Fetishism in Pamuk’s The
Museum of Innocence
Hulya Yagcioglu, Zayed University
Hoarding, Thing Theory, and the History of Off-Off-Broadway
Raymond Malewitz, Oregon State University
Recession Era Hoarding: Mediating the Rise of Middle-Class Decluttering to Disaster Therapy Nar-
ratives
Lara Bradshaw, University of Southern California
Location: Madrona
Aphorism as Philosophy in Kierkegaard

Leonardo Lisi, Johns Hopkins University
Die Vollendung des Ästhetischen: Musil in the Trajectory of Romanticism
Mark Freed, Central Michigan University
Beyond Aesthetic Theory: The Persistence of Romanticism in the Tides of Modernity
Azade Seyhan, Bryn Mawr College
The Poetic Tale and Absolute Chaos
Yvonne Toepfer, University of Oregon
96
Location: Ballard
Lived Time in Cinema: the Underwater View

Margaret Cohen, Stanford University
Style as a Countable Experience

Marissa Gemma, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Counting Sheep
Mario Ortiz-Robles, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Emma’s Comprehension
Alex Woloch, Stanford University
686. On Personhood
Location: Aspen
The Radically Open Minds of Henry James

Shari Goldberg, University of Texas at Dallas
How Live a Life without a Self—Woolf’s Living Philosophy and Her Writer’s Territory
Tsaiyi Wu, Indiana University Bloomington
Sex and the Series: Whitman, Fourier, Cosmic Sex

Dorri Beam, Syracuse University
Location: Room 2928

Sense and sensibility: Iskandar Sultan’s London Anthology

James White, University of Oxford
Fanning the Fire of Legal Change With the Mukhtaṣar-Sharḥ Bellows

Matthew Ingalls, University of Puget Sound
97
Commentary and the Reception of Medieval Arabic Poets with Minority and/or Marginalized Reli-
gious Affiliations
Jocelyn Sharlet, University of California, Davis
Commentaries on Arabic Mystical Poetry (with reference to ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī’s Radd al--
muftarī ʿan al-ṭaʿn fī al-Shushtarī)
Jawad Qureshi, University of Chicago
Location: Chelan
”L’Astrée” and French Religious History from the Fifth to the Twenty-First Century
Ellen McClure, University of Illinois at Chicago
Suspicious Hagiographies: Spiritual Performance, Literarity, and the History of Religious Practice
Joy Palacios, Simon Fraser University
Torture and Martyrdom: Discourses of Truth in Agrippa d’Aubigné

Cynthia Nazarian, Northwestern University
The Ambassador’s Exile: Representation and Self-Representation in the Letters of François de

Noailles
Antonia Szabari, University of Southern California

Literature
Location: Ravenna A
Burning in the Fire of Love: Stages of Love on the Mystical Path

Arjun Nair, Harvard University
Theories of Desire and Theoria through Desire: ‘Ayn al-Qudat’s Passionate Pluralist Metaphysics
Nicholas Boylston, Harvard University
Cultivation of Desire: The Cosmological Rhetorical Strategies of Ḥāfiẓ of Shīrāz

Axel Takacs, Harvard Divinity School
Queering the Qalandariyyāt: The Poetics and Cultural Politics Desire in the Poetry and Biographical
Tradition of the Qalandari Poets
Matthew Miller, Washington University in St. Louis
98
The Witness of God’s Beauty: A Male Persian Analogue for Dante’s “Lady of the Screen”
Domenico Ingenito, University of California, Los Angeles
Location: Richmond
Poetic Exile and Spatial Negotiation: the Poems of Joy Harjo and Li-Young Lee
Jingsheng Zhang, University of South Carolina
“Bristling Lists”: The Documentary Poetics of Juliana Spahr and Dionne Brand
Moberley Luger, University of British Columbia
Resisting ‘Invisible Racism’: Documentary Poetics and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American
Lyric
Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza, University of Iowa
Reading Poetry as Non-Narrative History: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen & the Critique of Postracial
American Society
Whitney DeVos, University of California, Santa Cruz
The Radical Chronograph: Poetic Time in the Broad Present

Derek Gromadzki, The University of Iowa
Location: Ravenna B
The Reluctant Resistance of Contemporary African American Satire

Brandon Manning, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Eliza’s Lament as Resistance in 12 Years a Slave

Caleb Knapp, University of Washington
New World Griots: Music, Literature and the Development of the Black Public Sphere
Delphine Gras, Florida Gulf Coast University
PerFORMING Polyrhythmic ReSISTAnce

Iris Viveros Avendaño, University of Washington
99
631. Relatedness
Location: Room 3128

Sonic Relations
Pooja Rangan, The New School
”The things you don’t choose”: Unrelatable Experience in Lacanian Ethics and GONE BABY GONE
(film)
Scott Krzych, Colorado College
Photographic Latencies
Linda Austin, Oklahoma State University
Theory By Other Means: From Rossellini to Documenta 13

Domietta Torlasco, Northwestern University
Location: Room 2828

A Pastoral Sade: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University
Gestures Toward a Sadeian Animation

Hannah Allen, Michigan State University
The Biopolitial Sade: Agamben, Bataille and the Use of Bodies

Cooper Francis, Kingston University
Is Decadence Sadistic?: Perverting Rhetoric and Sodomitic Naturalism in Huysmans’s ”Là-bas”

Simon Porzak, Columbia University
Location: Room 3328

Aliens Worldly and Otherworldly: The Case of Bangla Science Fiction

Anwesha Maity, University of Wisconsin Madison
100
Re-Imaging the Racialized Body: Fantasies of Medical Technology and George Schuyler’s Black No
More
Kate Schnur, University of Michigan
The Genetic Engineering of Octavia Butler: Biocapital and the Laboratory in the Xenogenesis Tril-
ogy
Matthew Hadley, University of Minnesota
Location: Room 2502

The Visual Rhetoric of Stamps: Katanga, Rhodesia, and the Projection of Sovereignty
Josiah Brownell, Pratt Institute
William Henry Bell: Composing an Art Music Frontier in South Africa

Claudia Jansen van Rensburg, Stellenbosch University
Settlers Abroad: Imagining Daily Life in Colonial German Southwest Africa

Martin Kalb, Northern Arizona University
The Melancholy of Resisting Categories

Lilla Balint, Vanderbilt University
With the Eyes of Children: Nostalgia for Yugoslav Punk and New Wave, the Once and Future
Promise of Utopia
Matthew Boyd, University of Washington, Seattle
Re-Reading Kis: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich in the Post-Yugoslav Sphere

Slaven Svetinovic, University of Washington
Where is ”the International” in World Literature?

Marike Janzen, University of Kansas
101
Location: Room 3302

The Poetry of Sound: Place, Memory, and the Senses in Michael Ondaatje’s Handwriting and
Édouard Glissant’s Les Indes
Mirja Lobnik, Georgia Institute of Technology
Animating Dead Languages: Rachel Zolf’s Bungee

Sarah Dowling, University of Washington Bothell
Sound, Gender, and the New Lyric Studies: Brooks, Niedecker, Rankine
Julia Bloch, University of Pennsylvania
Location: Room 3102

Lugones and the Meta Aesthesis of Relativity

Senen Carlo, University of Pennsylvania
Refusing Discovery: Naturalistic Observation and Surface Reading in Lord Jim

Marianne Kaletzky, University of California, Berkeley
Botching the Detectives: Realism’s Belief in the Law

Geoff Baker, California State University, Chico
Fantastic Science: Experiment and Knowledge in The Lifted Veil

Yizhi Xiao, Brown University
Location: Dashpoint
“Melancholy Redemption:” Gershom Scholem and Messianic Despair

Mazalit Haim, New York University
Messianic Remnants in ”Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Concetta Principe, York University
102
Interpreting the Contemporary: Reading, Writing, and the Return of the Present
Zachary Hope, University of Toronto
Agamben’s Messianic Time

Frances Restuccia, Boston College
Location: Room 2728

Outer Anthropocene Poetics

Joshua Schuster, University of Western Ontario
Poetry and History, Plot and Plantation

Sonya Posmentier, New York University
Organisms, Urns, and Ecopoetics: Sliding Metaphors for Poetic Form in Modernist and Mid-Twen-
tieth-Century Poetry
Michelle Niemann, University of California, Los Angeles
Ecopoetics and the New Lyric Studies

Angela Hume Lewandowski, University of California, Davis
Location: Room 3028

Zukofsky, Spinoza, Marx: Form and Politics in the Great Depression

Oliver Southall, University of Cambridge
The Politics of Indeterminacy

Christopher Miller, University of California, Berkeley
”The Possibility of Song”: Paul Blackburn’s Longue Durée Poetics of the Quotidian
Tobias Huttner, Johns Hopkins University
”Indifferent Truth”: Susan Howe’s Formal Politics

Jen Hedler Phillis, University of Illinois at Chicago
103
Location: Everett
Intermediality at Play
Arina Rotaru, New York University-Shanghai
The Resistance to Intermediality in Wyndham Lewis
Nandini Ramesh Sankar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
Perception is Reading: How to Look at a Painted Inscription by David Jones
Thomas Berenato, University of Virginia
Location: Ravenna C
From Nietzsche’s Antichrist to Lu Xun’s War Drums: How Prefaces Declare War
Huiwen Helen Zhang, University of Tulsa
Rights of Fiction: Expatriation and the Art of Consent
Carrie Hyde, University of California, Los Angeles
Translation and Injustice
Emily Apter, New York University
“The freedom of literature and of thought is at the origin of all freedoms”
Michiel Bot, Bard College
Location: Medina
The Right Not to Translate: Multilingualism in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Marlene Hansen Esplin, Brigham Young University
Translating Silence(s) in Mahashweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps translated by Gayatri Spivak
Nirmala Menon, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) India
The Paradox of Translatability in Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby and Mian Mian’s Candy
Sunny Xiang Xiang, Florida Atlantic University
104
The Obscurity of Elie Wiesel’s Night and the Task of the Self Translator
Allison Posner, Indiana University

ies
Location: Juniper
Hearing Attachments: Affect and Sinophone as Echoing Paradigm in MP & GI’s Calendar Girls
Lily Wong, American University
When Han is Bailang: an Indigenous Pop-Music Variation on Taiwanese Multiculturalism

Tzu-hui Celina Hung, New York University-Shanghai
Explosive Mixtures: Hong Kong, Sounds, and Chineseness

Chien-hsin Tsai, University of Texas at Austin
Why Not write in Shanghainese? Contemporary Novels in Shanghainese Examined through a Sino-
phone Lens
Yunwen Gao, University of Southern California
658. Transparency
Location: Boren
Blue Screen of Death: Exposure, Distance, Sanitization

Stefka Hristova, Michigan Technological University
A body of glass: The strange case of El Licenciado Vidriera.

Elena Fabietti, Johns Hopkins University
Stubborn Shadows
Nicole Simek, Whitman College
Location: Fremont
105
The Body Without Organs in the Street: Deleuze, Guattari, and Political Protest
Mary Clark, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Wren Opon her Nest”: Gendering Language in Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters
Sara Harvey, University of Northern Colorado
Whiteness Made Strange: Off-White Performance in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust and
Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone
William Conable, Saint Mary’s College of California
Location: Room 2602

Strategies of Attention: Wanda Wulz’s Portraits

Silvia Valisa, Florida State University
Sous-Surveillance: The Spectral Image of Saturation
Camila Moreiras, New York University
Novel Images: Photojournalism and the Spectral Traces of Violence in Kevin Barry’s City of Bo-
hane
Annie Galvin, University of Virginia
A spectrum of shades: shadow-projection & the spectral origins of the image
Emmy Waldman, Harvard University
“Straining eye and ear to follow the dog”: The Hunt and Signifying Metonymy in Leopold and
Tolstoy
Carolyn Ayers, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota
Written Species. Buffon and the Poetics of Nature
Sebastian Schönbeck, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Marian Engel’s Bear: Queering Ecocritical Spaces by Resisting Species as an -ism
Chelsea Kachman, University of Washington
New Perspectives on (Post-)Human-Animal Relations
Sabine Frost, University of Washington, Seattle
106
Chapter 6
Stream B (10:30 – 12:10)
Location: Cedar B
Allegory and Denarrativization

Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M University
Beyond Jameson: The Metapolitics of Allegory

Erin Graff Zivin, University of Southern California
Arendt’s Allegories: Non-Citizens between Literary and Political Theory

Munia Bhaumik, Emory University/ Cornell Society for the Humanities
Allegory, Revolution, and Rape in Clélie, histoire romaine

Megan Kruer, Cornell University
Location: Virginia
The Climate of Infinite Jest: on David Foster Wallace and the Problem of the Externality
Justin Neuman, Yale University
The Rise of Coal and the Dissolution of Form

Tobias Menely, University of California, Davis
History according to Energy

Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia Unversity
107

Progressive Feeling: Visceral Aesthetics and the All-India Progressive Writers Association
Neetu Khanna, University of Southern California
The Past and The Futures of Mahdi ’Amel

Ziad Dallal, New York University
Solidarity Reportage: Second World Internationalism in the Cold War Writing of Ryszard Kapuś-
ciński
Marla Zubel, University of Minnesota

and the State
Location: Ravenna B
Jean Sénac and the Common Language of Revolutionary Poetics

Kai Krienke, Bard High School Early College
Aesthetics of Dissent
Yasmine Ramadan, The University of Iowa
Dissenting from Dissidence: From the Avant-Garde to Dissident Capital in the Work and Activism
of Ai Weiwei
Gregory Fenton, University of Guelph
The Mukhabarat Novel and its Discontents in Syria and Iraq

Max Weiss, Princeton University
tury
Location: Fremont
108
Schopenhauer on the Moral Value of Artistic Sympathy
Colin Marshall, University of Washington
Pity as a female virtue: Moral-medical discourse in late 18th Century France

Angelika Pumberger, University of Vienna
Autopsy of Vice: Schiller’s Early Critique of Sympathy

Anna-Lisa Baumeister, University of Oregon
The Dark Sides of Empathy

Fritz Breithaupt, Indiana University
Location: Greenwood
Slaughterhouse Five and Yaşar Ne Yaşar Ne Yaşamaz: Challenging/supporting the Bildungsroman

tradition
Hardy Griffin, Istanbul Sehir University
A Backward-Facing Bildungsroman: Growing Out of Time in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything

Is Illuminated”
Lisa Mulman, Salem State University
Rebellion Going Awry: School Stories, Corporal Punishment, and the Formation of Imperial Sub-
jects in Kipling, Musil, and Natsume Sōseki
Qingyuan Jiang, University of Notre Dame
Location: Everett
Ratchet as Revolution? Black Female Flesh and Political Violence in/as the Popular
Selamawit Terrefe, University of California, Irvine
The Age of the Crowd and The Negro Question

Stephen McCulloch, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Violations and Black Activations

Jed Murr, University of Washington Bothell
The People, in Theory: How Black Studies Makes its Object

Nick Mitchell, University of California, Riverside
109
tive Perspective)
Location: Seneca
How to Learn to Be Happy: An Analysis on An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights

Xuefei Min, Peking University
Female Textuality in Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story

Anita Rosenblithe, Raritan Valley Community College
Brother-Sister Attraction: Man’s Sister Soul in Kabuki Plays

Seigo Nakao, Oakland University
From courtly love to the modern subject. Love, Sexuality, and Laughter in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s
”Orlando Innamorato”
Umberto Mazzei, Columbia University
The Construction of the Male Body and Sexuality in the Ottoman Physiognomy Texts
Ozgen Felek, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Location: Leschi
The Edge of the Literary: Quotational Excess and Authorship Beyond Copyright
Paige Sweet, University of the Western Cape
Privatizing Literature: Producing Literariness

Shakti Jaising, Drew University
Ownage
Martin Zeilinger, University of Toronto / OCAD University
Metadata, Life–Writing, and Comparative Literature

Hanna Musiol, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Location: Juniper
110
Affect, Queer Body and Time-image of Trans-Asian Migrants: Tsai Ming-Liang’s I Dont Want to
Sleep Alone
Ivy I-chu Chang, National Chiao Tung University
Islamic Orality as Queer: Oral Tradition and Queer Sexualities in La nouba, A Jihad for Love, and
Berbagi Suami
Sahin Acikgoz, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Ever Queerly, Gazing Forward: Queer Childhood and the Postcolonial Rememory
Robert LaRue, The University of Texas at Arlington
Queering the Fantastic or How to Delve into Latin American Queer Temporalities
Héctor García, Loyola University Chicago

Location: Room 2802

“Too Fair and Lovely to be Local” The Cosmopolitan Othering of Dolly/Desdemona in Omkara
Sucheta Kanjilal, University of South Florida
Does Dalit Writing Belong to the World? Weltliteratur, Subalternity, and Philological Homelessness
Micheal Rumore, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Southern Seraphim in the Northern Circles of Hell: Problematic Diversions in O guesa’s “Wall Street
Inferno”
Allison White, Tulane University
Bound Abroad: Negligent Sovereignty and the Juvenile Delinquents of Herman Melville
Laura Soderberg, University of Pennsylvania
Location: Ballard
From the First Well to the Last House: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s Exilic Poetics of Nationalism
Hosam Aboul-Ela, University of Houston, University Park
Arab Solidarity Sacrifical Palestine
Yaseen Noorani, University of Arizona
Refusing to Mourn: Gaza and the Language of Resistance
Karim Mattar, University of Colorado at Boulder
111
Location: Cirrus
Undoing the Noir for Worlding Galicia. Domingo Villar’s A praia dos afogados
César Domínguez, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
“Red Herrings and Read Alerts: Crime and Trans-Cultural Clues in ’Almost Blue’ and ’Nairobi
Heat’”
Minu Tharoor, New York University
From Bengali Detectives and Hindi Noir to Tamil Pulp Fiction: Crime Fiction as Popular Literature
in South Asia
Rita Banerjee, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
The Metaphysical Detective in Postcolonial Fiction

Bhakti Shringarpure, University of Connecticut, Storrs
Location: Room 2502

”[G iving up on land to light on”: Dionne Brand’s Unsettling Poetry]

Margaret Herrick, University of Toronto
Feeling “Nègre”: Racial Analogies and the Depoliticization of Whiteness in a Peculiar Settler Con-
text
Bruno Cornellier, University of Winnipeg
Unsettled culture: the Algerian afterlives of the children of the pieds-noirs in The Last Life (Messud,
1999).
Fiona Barclay, University of Stirling
Location: Room 3328

Dead Girls: Causality and the objectification of agency

Katie Lally, University of California, Santa Cruz
112
Laurie Simmons’ Love Doll Looking Twice at a Sex Doll
Christophe Koné, Williams College
Doll it Up: Posthuman Nostalgia in Otaku Fandom
Yu-I Yvette Hsieh, Rutgers University
Deadly Dolls: Talky Tina and Odradek as Animated Threats to Domesticity
Rob Ryder, University of Illinois at Chicago
Dolls, Childhood, and Racialized Innocence in Tony Morrison’s ”The Bluest Eye” and Dorothy Al-
lison’s ”Bastard out of Carolina”
Kristina Gibby, Louisiana State University
Location: Room 2702

Original Translation and Censorship in Colonial Korea

Heekyoung Cho, University of Washington
Validating State Power, Extending Censorship: Functions of Pseudo-translations in Franco’s Spain
Inci Sariz, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Empire in Crisis: “Translating” the Origins of the Spanish Nation
Ana Méndez-Oliver, Columbia University
Mediating the Past: Translation and History in the works of C.F Meyer
Maeve Hooper, University of Chicago
797. Ecstasy
Location: Room 3202

The Frenzy: Ecstasy and Hip-Hop Aesthetics

James Ford, Occidental College
Drunkenness as Solidarity in Romains’ Les Copains
Robert Barton, Princeton University
Stasis vs. Finitude: Saint Teresa and the Experience of Ecstasy
Nell Wasserstrom, Boston College
The Commune as Festival: On Work and Play in Utopian Time
Maysam Taher, New York University
113
Location: Room 3028

Narrative Form and Economic Totality in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition

Richard Daniels, Oregon State University
Totality at the Periphery: Capitalism and Late Nineteenth Century American Fiction
Walter Oliver Baker, University of New Mexico
Anil’s Ghost and Immanent Critique

Erin Paszko
Location: Room 3228

Plasticity at the Violet Hour: *The Waste Land* and the Problem of Form
Matthew Scully, Tufts University
“Where are the rights of my solitude?”: Poetry Asleep, Poetry Alone

Matt Longabucco, New York University
“Might Half Slumb’ring on Its Own Right Arm”: Failure and Action in Nineteenth-Century British
Poetry
John Golden, Florida Atlantic University
Neither a Be-all nor an End-all Be: Hamlet and the Poetry of J. L. Austin’s Example
Kathryn Crim, University of California, Berkeley
747. Forms of Talk
Location: Room 3128

Graham Greene’s Little Games: The Postcolonial Politics of Phatic Talk

Jennifer Schnepf, Harvard University
Bon Mots and Wisecracks: Idle Talk in the Modernist Novel

Ayten Tartici, Yale University
114
Must We Mean? George Meredith’s The Egoist and Meaning to Mean the Many and Contradictory
Meanings of What We Say
Erin Greer, University of California, Berkeley
The Illness That Is Female Modernism: Rereading Ding Ling’s Fictions

Kaixuan Zhang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Defying Expectations: Gendered Bodies as Patients and Practitioners in Egyptian and Japanese
Literatures
Karen Thornber, Harvard University
The Idea of Body in the Japanese Medical Literature

Giovanni Borriello, Roma Tre University
Gubar’s Debulked Self: Telling the Truth about Illness and Gendered Bodies
Rachel N. Spear, Francis Marion University
Circulating Sound: Karmen Gei and the Queer Afro-Jazz Musical

Lindsey Green-Simms, American University
Remediations of Romance in Africa

John Nimis, University of Wisconsin-Madison
What Am I Doing in the Middle of the Revolution?: Ennio Morricone and Anti-Apartheid Senti-
ment
Lily Saint, Wesleyan University
Reading for Plots

Caitlin Scholl, University of California, Berkeley
115
Location: Richmond
César Aira’s Architectural Affect

Michelle Clayton, Brown University
The Infrastructure of the Formless
Nasser Mufti, University of Illinois at Chicago
Any Semblance of Order: Borges, Jane Bennett, Art Objects, and People Objects
Benjamin Widiss, Hamilton College
Bad Forms of Second Modernity
Charles Tung, Seattle University
Location: Diamond A
Revolting Maternal Return

Marygrace Hemme, University of Memphis
Pedagogies of Revolt, Politics of the Self
Sarah Hansen, Drexel University
Kristeva on the Politics of Revolt
Shannon Hoff, Institute for Christian Studies
Disability, Vulnerablity, and Revolt
Melinda Hall, Stetson University
Location: Room 2928

Maurizio Lazzarato: Tools for a Critique of Neoliberalism

John Johnston, Emory University
The desire to be unruly, inefficient or asleep
A. B. Huber, New York University
116
Biopolitical Masochism in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present
Jaime Brunton, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Agents of the Drives: On the Capitalist Production of Asubjectivity on Digital Social Networks
Rick Ramrattan, Western University
Location: Room 2628

Returning to What Matters in Hadewijch’s Liederen

Kris Trujillo, University of California, Berkeley
Negation and Devotion in Thirteenth-century Hagiographical Writing

Rachel Smith, Villanova University
Henry Adams’ Devotional Refusals

Amy Hollywood, Harvard Divinity School
Analyzing Feeling in Medieval Christian Devotional Literature

Robert Davis, Fordham University
Location: Ravenna C
Journaling of Maintenance, Journaling as Maintenance: Carolina Maria de Jesus’s diary Quarto de

Despejo and Frustrated Interpretations
Annette Rubado, University of Oregon
After the Flood: Lorine Niedecker, Environmental Clean-Up, and the Poetry of Repair
Samia Rahimtoola, University of California, Berkeley
Do What You Prefer Not To

Erin Trapp, University of Minnesota
Location: Room 2728

117
Photographing the Nonexistent. The Ghostly Iconography of the Mexican Revolution and its After-
math
Horacio legras, University of California, Irvine
Secular Messianism Gone Awry: The Catalan Cabetians Ill-Fated Trip to Texas
Teresa Vilaros, Texas A&M University
El llano en llamas and The Vacuity of Time
Gustavo Quintero, Cornell University
Messiah, Asylum: Redemptive Historiography in Cuban Film
Cory Hahn, University of Texas at Austin

Attention
Location: Medina
The Objects of Abstraction: Stein and Khlebnikov’s Inarticulate Landscapes

Michael M. Weinstein, Harvard University
Boredom, Restlessness and the Structure of the non-epic Long Poem in the Eighteenth Century
Alfred Sjödin, Lund University
“A Huge Unruly Text that Grapples Ravenously with Everything Under the Sun”: Reading the Long
Impossible Poem
Bronwen Tate, Stanford University
Macro, Micro and Gender in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts
Alan Golding, University of Louisville
Location: Diamond B
Stories ships tell. B. Traven‘s „Death Ship“ and the end of maritime romance
Wolfgang Struck, University of Erfurt, Germany
“Towards Unknown, Unseen Cities”: Literary Geographies in Intizar Hussain’s Basti (1979)
Maryam Fatima, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Crossing Borders: Narratives of Infiltration in Israel/Palestine
Simon Williams, The Israel Institute
118
Migrant Americanisms: The Aesthetics and Politics of Movement in US Immigrant Narratives
Joshua Miller, University of Michigan
Location: Room 2828

Portugal’s Peripheral Modernity: a North and South Perspective

Sara Ceroni, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Croatia Colonizes Its Islands: A Case of Nesting Orientalisms

Nika Šetek, University of Texas at Austin
Locating Postcolonial Subjectivity: Poland, ”Europe,” and Border Management

Krzysztof Rowiński, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Beyond and behind the Iron Curtain: Sándor Márai crossing the borders between 1946 and 1948
Judit Papp, University of Naples ”L’Orientale”
Modernity, Folklore and the European Periphery

Elisa Segnini, University of British Colombia

Literature
The Mysterious Seal of Modernity

Howard Bloch, Yale University
Kleist an the Prose of the World. Anecdote and Journalism

Rudiger Campe, Yale University
Re-Visioning the Aesthetic: The Conditions and Conditioning of Expereince

René Boullet, University of Washington
Giving Form to Life: Essay and Experience in Montaigne, Lukacs, and Barthes
Raina Levesque, New York University
119
Location: Cedar A
Epidemic Materialism
Anjuli Kolb, Williams College
A Genealogy of Emergency
Siraj Ahmed, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
Colonial Ressentiment: A Genealogy

Sunil Agnani, University of Illinois at Chicago
Present Pasts: Intergenerational Exchange and Anticolonial Afterlives in Contemporary Global Fic-
tion
Anne Gulick, University of South Carolina
Location: Aspen
‘All Welfare Stories Are Not Grim’: Charles Wright’s Black Humor and the U.S. Welfare State
Irvin Hunt, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Marxist Historical Form and the Black Reconstruction of the Southern Past
Nathaniel Mills, California State University, Northridge
Who Said the Resistance is Futile?: Science Fiction as a Site of Resistance in U.S. Ethnic Fiction
Anne Jansen, University of North Carolina at Asheville
The Politics of Form and Resistance in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart
Bradley M. Freeman, The Ohio State University
Location: Room 3002

Guests or Hostages? Security, Participation and Banned Spaces in Installation Art from the Amer-
icas
Carlos Garrido Castellano, University of Lisbon
120
Narrative Hospitality in Cities of Refuge
Sarah DeYoreo, Portland State University
How secure is the native speaker?

David Huddart, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Yeats’s Tower as Target: Thoor Ballylee’s Vulnerability

Jason Coats, Virginia Commonwealth University
769. Seeing Animals
Location: Room 2902

Grant Morrison’s Animot Man

David Coughlan, University of Limerick
Nick Abadzis’ Laika and the Work of Mourning

Jose Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle
Chris Marker’s Alter Egos: The Camera and the Cat

Bonnie Gill, University of Virginia
Seeing Bobby
Elizabeth Wijaya, Cornell University
904. Sex/Comedy

Freud in the Locker Room

Jerry Aline Flieger, Rutgers University
Ridiculing Rape
Anja Wieden, Oakland University
Sex, Laughter, Fukushima: Charity Porn vs. the Ambassador

Jordan Smith, Josai International University
Virtuality, Sexuality, Slavery

Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania
121
Location: Kirkland
Going for Baroque, or How Cuba Read Mexico to Invent the Neo-Baroque
John Ochoa, Pennsylvania State University
Affective Discontinuities in the Americas: Victoria Ocampo and Waldo Frank

Priscilla Archibald, Roosevelt University
Dark Meadows of Gnosis: Robert Duncan and José Lezama Lima’s Interamerican Mythopoetics
Christopher Winks, Queens College, City University of New York
As If beyond Compare: Hemisphere and Globe in American Studies

Antonio Barrenechea, University of Mary Washington
Location: Room 3302

Names and The Names: Terrorism, Tragedy, and Representation

Jennifer Ballengee, Towson University
Trauma, Memory, and the Future Anterior

Jennifer Yusin, Drexel University
Ajax in America, or Catharsis in the Time of Terrorism

Matthew Roberts, The University of California, Irvine
Remembering Terrorism: Staging Testimony Through Site-Specific Theater

Stephanie Johnson, Emory University
Location: Boren
Dead Capital: Chichikov’s Vanguard Economics

Kyle Wanberg, New York University
122
Fallada’s Little Man: Economic Rationality in the Weimar Republic
Nurettin Ucar, Indiana University
Transacting Death: The Politics of the Death Industry in José Saramago’s Death at Intervals
Devaleena Kundu, The English and Foreign Languages University
The Origins of Capitalism and the Transatlantic Novel: A Secret History of the Economic in Liter-
ature
Laura Martin, University of California, Santa Cruz
Éste no es un libro de viaje: Morábito ante el travel writing en También Berlín se olvida.
Irma Cantu, Texas A&M International University
Ni Macondo ni San Salvador: otras genealogías hospitalarias en la obra de Horacio Castellanos--
Moya
Cristina Carrasco, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
”Está la claridad abierta”: Los alcances de la hospitalidad del instante en ”Satori” de León Plascen-
cia Ñol
Sarah Pollack, College of Staten Island, City University of New York
Revisiting Mexican Art Writing: Octavio Paz and Modern Art
Manuel Gutierrez, Rice University
Hospitable Spaces: Contradictory Cosmopolitanism in Hispanic Vanguard Journals
Vanessa Fernández, Duquesne University
Location: Pacific
Tableau Vivant or Nature Morte? Images and the Lives of Women: Edith Wharton’s The House of
Mirth and Hanan al-Shaykh’s Hikayati Sharhun Yatul
Maya Anbar Aghasi, Notre-Dame University- Louaize
Flat Ontology Meets Still Life in Danielle Dutton’s S P R A W L
Karen Jacobs, University of Colorado at Boulder
Objects and the Feminine in Twentieth-century Still Life Poetry
John Stout, McMaster University
123
Location: Columbia
O Taste and See that the Lord is Good: Reading the Bible as Praxis of Eating the Logos Incarnate
Jueun Moon, University of Alberta
Hegel, Language, and Hegel’s Language: §17 of the Phenomenology

Jason Yonover, The Johns Hopkins University
“There is a Scale or Range of Pitch”: Early Measure, Affinitive Poetics, and Making a Memory of
God in Gerard Manley Hopkins
Alexa Winstanley-Smith, University of Toronto
Location: Dashpoint
Social Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Avant-garde Theater: the Case of Downstream Garage
Yang Zi, Shanghai Jiaotong University
Remaking the Body through Self-Torture: Yu Hua’s Two Stories and the Art of Post-Mao China
Popo Pi, Washington University in St.Louis
The Struggle for China in Chinese Contemporary Art – The Art Critic Wang Nanming
Florian Wagner, Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg
Poets, Critics, and the work of Chinese Avant-garde Poetics

Jonathan Stalling, University of Oklahoma
Location: Room 3102

Badiou on Wagner
Robert Hughes, The Ohio State University
Event Aesthetics between Hayden’s White’s ”Figural Realism” and Slavoj Zizek’s ”Undoing of an
Event”
Karyn Ball, University of Alberta
124
Badiou, Adorno, and the Modernist Event
Neil Levi, Drew University
Location: Room 2602

Lets Make Noise: Vernacular Resistance and the Digital Polity

Soham Bose, Texas A&M University
Vernacularizing Loss: Haunted Trajectories of Love in Post-Partition Lyric

Rituparna Mitra, Michigan State University
Literary Anthropology, Minor Literature, and the Sensuous Magic of Language

Mrinalini Chakravorty, University of Virginia
Modernity, World Literature, and Vernacular Modernisms in India

Supriya Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University
Location: Ravenna A
Queer Heartstrings of Human Rights

Greg Mullins, The Evergreen State College
Chronic, Acute, and Posthumous: Laughter in the Face of Precarity

Michael Galchinsky, Georgia State University
Embodied Memory Archives in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother

Sarah Waisvisz, Carleton University
Location: Chelan
Ariella Azoulay and the Photographic Situation of War in Iraq

Peter Molin, U.S. Army (Ret.), Rutgers University
125
Confronting the Faces of War in Juan Travnik’s Malvinas: Retratos y paisajes de guerra
Ivett López Malagamba, University of California, Berkeley
Witnessing, Remembrance and Trauma: The Photography of Ali Mustafa (1984-2014)

Johannah May Black, York University
“A Girl and a Gun”: Locating Palestinian Terrorism through Leila Khaled

Jennifer Varela, New York University
A New Materialist Approach to Angel-Animal Imaginings in British Fiction

Karen Ya-Chu Yang, Tamkang University
Animal Encounters in Literature and Zoopoetics

Anne Mairesse, University of San Francisco
Hail La Gloria
Lacie Rae Buckwalter, Cornell University
Location: Madrona
Wilderness and Guerrilla Warfare

Alejandro Quin, University of Utah
Temporality and commodity production in Mansilla’s Una excursión a los indios ranqueles
Mayra Bottaro, University of Oregon
Orchid Hunters: Cosmopolitanism and Sketch of Manners in Late-19th Latin America

Felipe Martinez-Pinzon, College of Staten Island - CUNY

126
Spiritus Mundi. Poetics of the Sacred in Portuguese
Gonçalo Cordeiro, University of Lisbon
The grotesque body: hagiographic metaphors of the postcolonial and the postsecular
Sara Nimis, Sewanee: The University of the South
The Re-enchantment of Ritual in South Asian Post-secular Fiction

Roger McNamara, Texas Tech University
Global Literary Studies and the Anthropocene: Reading cross-cultural narratives of disaster for
models of a “living” faith
Mara Steele, State University of New York at Buffalo
127
Chapter 7
Stream C (3:00 – 4:40)
Location: Boren
Affect and Aesthetics

Stanton McManus, East Tennessee State University
The Contemporary Lyrical Novel; an Aesthetic Praxis of Perception.
Virginia Ramos, Stanford University
Benjy’s World: Affective Landscapes, Autistic Difference in William Faulkner’s “The Sound and
the Fury”
Ajitpaul Mangat, State University of New York at Buffalo
Emotions and the Divided Self in 1900 Austria
Derek Hillard, Kansas State University
Schiller’s Pathetic-Sublime and the Suppression of Affect
David Pugh, Queen’s University

in the 21st Century
Location: Dashpoint
Of Mothers, Daughters, and Infanticide: Gendering Multidirectional Memory as a Cathartic Device

in Women’s Trauma Narratives.
Nathalie Segeral, University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa
128
Unraveling and Reweaving Authority in Najat El Hachmi’s L’ultim patriarca
Sarah Atkinson, University of Chicago
Aesthetics, Violence, Justice: The Affect of Representation in Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother
Manav Ratti, Salisbury University
Death of the Father in Zahia Rahmani’s Moze
Adele Parker, College of the Holy Cross

Location: Chelan
Zooming-in and Zooming-out from Grid to Scale: Aesthetics, Politics, and Ethics of Close and/versus
Distant Reading in Modern Poetry
Youngmin Kim, Dongguk University
A Galaxy-Wide Audience. On displacement, time-lapse and storytelling in Calvino and Lee Hae-jun
through the lens of 19th-century astronomy.
Elena Fratto, Harvard University
Glocal Perspective of Studying World Literature
Jahyon Park, Cornell University
Location: Room 3102

Towards a Queer/Feminist Wilding of the Imagined Future(s)

Allyse Knox, Stony Brook University
Un-knowing the Body: Dance, Epistemology, and the Novel
Dalia Davoudi, Indiana University Bloomington
The revision of Little Red Riding Hood in a dystopian novel Auringon ydin by Johanna Sinisalo
Hanna Samola, The University of Tampere
Young Adult Dystopias, and the New Feminism
Nicole Thompson, Weber State University
Can Zoë Speak? A Political Exercise Towards the Nonhuman
Marit Bugge
129
Location: Cedar B
Teacher in Charge: the Allegorical Subject and its Rising in Post-Mao China
Jun Xie, New York University
Korean Colonial Film and the Question of National Allegory
Ery Shin, Rutgers University
Trouver le mot juste: Allegory and the Rhetoric of Convention in Camus’ La Peste
Jenny Tan, University of California, Berkeley
Getting to Utopia: Medieval Allegory and Modern Allegoresis
Tara Mendola, New York University
Location: Fremont
Amateur Theory
James Dobson, Dartmouth College
Alternatives to the expert paradigm in Spain’s economic crisis
Luis Moreno-Caballud, University of Pennsylvania
Old and new makings in Chile’s street amateur art
Lucia Vodanovic, Middlesex University
Amateur Culture and Postsocialist Citizenship
Paloma Duong, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Location: Boren
Loving the oriental man in colonial contact zones: Isabel Allende’s ”Daughter of Fortune” and
Cristina García’s ”Monkey Hunting”
Fei Shi, Quest University
130
Landscape and Identity in José Watanabe’s La piedra alada
Samuel Jaffee, University of Washington
Remake transnacional: realizaciones locales de temas globales

Sohyun Lee, Texas Christian University
Location: Medina
You Have Another Life! Journeying to the Past in Ready Player One
Deborah Daley, United States Military Academy at West Point
Born Too Late Syndrome: Decolonization and Despair in The Bird Is Gone
Adam Spry, Florida Atlantic University
Mourning Forevermore: Ustopian Nostalgia in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Anna Grelson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Year of the Flood: Margaret Atwood’s Iron Age Pastoral

Richmond Eustis, Nicholls State University
Catastrophic Originalism: Jericho, Revolution, and the Future of the Original Situation
Ira Allen, American University of Beirut
Location: Cedar A
Forbidden Relations: South Korean Incest Dramas and the Crisis of Interrupted Kinship
Sandra Kim, University of Southern California
Politics of Friendship within the 1990s Japanese Literary Field

Maria Roemer, Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg
647. Compartments
Location: Leschi
131
Before the Research University: The Development of Academic Disciplines
Meredith Farmer, Wake Forest University
Network Narratives and the Discontinuities of Complexity
Regina Schober, University of Mannheim
Faith in Difference: Melville’s Riverboat Lacunae
Mark Noble, Georgia State University
Book Keeping with Borges
Nan Da, University of Notre Dame
Karl Marx Reading ”English”
Andrew Parker, Rutgers University

Location: Room 2728

“The History of the Future: Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Dystopia”

Arielle Zibrak, University of Wyoming
Movement Nostalgia and Reproductive Futurism in the Post-9/11 Novel
Patricia Stuelke, Harvard University
Flamethrowers and the Making of Modern Art
Myka Tucker-Abramson, Warwick University
On Failure in T.C. Boyle’s ’Drop City’
Madeline Lane, University of California, Santa Cruz
Location: Room 2828

The Books That Never Were: Seth and the Comics Canon
Matthew Levay, Idaho State University
“Minority Mind:” Reconstructing an Ironic Charles Ives in the Postmodern
Philip Rice, Michigan State University
Modeling Canon Formation: Postcolonial Writing about Art
Cameron Bushnell, Clemson University
132
Location: Cirrus
’The Book is a Killer!’ Writers as Murderers in Crime Films

Jan Wilm, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
Poisoned Jewelry. On E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ’Mademoiselle de Scudéry’

Rebecca Haubrich, Brown University
’Tickle the keys lasciviously’ - Music in Raymond Chandler’s Novels and Short Stories
Annika Eisenberg, Goethe-University Frankfurt
Location: Juniper
D.H. Lawrence and FW. Taylor: The Logic of Economic Efficiency in Women in Love
Evelyn Cobley, University of Victoria
Money and Metaphor in Henry James’s ”The Beast in the Jungle”

Hannah Wells, Drew University
Oulipo and the economies of the constraint: literary and economic models of predictability
Agnieszka Komorowska, University of Mannheim
Serialization and Literary Production in Balzac

Aimee Fountain, University of California, Davis

Fragmentation in Modern Arab American Fiction

Terri DeYoung, University of Washington
Imagining Beyond the Nation: Magical Realism in Arabic Literature

Alexandra Chreiteh, Yale University
133
The War on the Maristan: An Inmate’s Narrative
Boutheina Khaldi, American University of Sharjah
Identity, Language, and Exile in Moroccan Diaspora Writing
Bouchra Benlemlih, Ibn Zohr University
Meanwhile, in Cairo, Tokyo, Calcutta: Finance, Renaissance, and the Novel of the Nation in Early
Twentieth-Century Arabic
Elizabeth Holt, Bard College
Location: Room 3028

The Price of Freedom and Constraint of (In)visibility. Thesis on Fernanda Laguna

Djurdja Trajkovic, University of Michigan
Forms of Politics
Charles Hatfield, The University of Texas at Dallas
The Freedoms of Realism, the Constraints of Modernism, the Autonomy of Literature and the
Legacy of José Donoso Today
Stephen Buttes, Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne
The Constraints of Freedom: Writing and Illiteracy at the US/Mexico border
Abraham Acosta, University of Arizona

Location: Ravenna B
Rescoldo, the deep layers of radicality

Yuri Herrera, Tulane University
Abbey’s Overrated Cowboys: Masculinity and the Spatiotemporal American West
Charles Fournier, University of Wyoming
Narrative voice and authority in Brazilian novels of the cangaço
Victoria Saramago Padua, Stanford University
Martín Ramírez’s Mysterious Riders
Robert Irwin, University of California, Davis
134
The Limits of Narrative Representation at the Site of Gendered and Historical Trauma in Michelle
Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven
Jenny Odintz, University of Oregon
Post-Coloniality and the Feminine of Paulina Chiziane in ’O Alegre Canto Da Perdiz’
Aurea Santos, State University of Piauí/Federal Institute of Piauí
Colonial Castration and the Fight for Puerto Rican Independence in ”Twenty Centuries after the
Homicide”
Samuel Ginsburg, University of Texas at Austin
Gender, Trauma, and Learning in Li Ang’s Visible Ghosts
Yenna Wu, University of California, Riverside
Location: Room 2502

Unfinishable Genre: Narratives of Postcolonial Nationalism

Fiona Lee, National University of Singapore
Genres of Oblivion: Nation, Migration and Solitude in Rana Dasgupta’s Solo
Tania Roy, National University of Singapore
The Migration Narrative: The Politics of Race, Language, and Subjectivity in Adiche’s Americanah
and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names
Jack Taylor , University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Nuevo Muntu Novels: The History of Slavery in Works by Latina and Latin American novelists
John Maddox, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Location: Room 3128

Failed Circumnavigation as Foreign Policy

Kevin Riordan, Nanyang Technological University
135
Re/constructing a Lost Localism: Albion Tourgée’s Failed Towns
Dan Farbman, Harvard Law School
Readers, Censorship and Literature: Reading J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country
Sunayani Bhattacharya, University of Oregon

ture
Of Pregnant Abbesses and Cannibals: French and Ethiopic Medieval Marian Tales
Wendy Laura Belcher, Princeton University
Okot p’Bitek’s Ecologies: Nature metaphors as empowered mourning in Song of Lawino and Song
of Ocol
Meredith Shepard, Columbia University
Arabic Literature in the Horn of Africa: Code-switching as a Literary Strategy?

Xavier Luffin, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)
Location: Madrona
Gaze and Power in Latin America’s Cold War: The Writer & the Spy
Daniel Noemi Voionmaa, Northeastern University
Disjointing art and politics in the film El mural (2010)

Marcelino Viera-Ramos, Michigan Tech University
“Truth of Another Kind”: Totality and Knowledge in Roberto Bolaño’s La Literatura Nazi en
América
William Welty, Rutgers University
Revision of History and Politics of Affect

Cristina Hung, Cornell University
136
Location: Ravenna C
The Rules of Abstraction

Leigh Claire La Berge, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York
Up in the Cloud: Financialization, Contemporary Poetry, and the Capitalist Cosmos

Christian Haines, Dartmouth College
”It’s so confusing...”: Complexity, Narrative and Planet Money

Michelle Chihara, Whittier College
Phantom Objectivities: The Reification of the Value-Form in Finance Capital in Don DeLillo and
David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis
Alden Wood, University of California, Irvine

Archive
Decolonial Borderland Narratives: Mapping Sovereign Genealogies of Thought Within and Across
the U.S./Mexican Borderlands
Cuauhtemoc Thelonious Mexica, University of Washington, Seattle
Rice, Ritual, and Performance: Thai Identity in the Green Field

Sirithorn Siriwan, Miami University
Permission To Perform, Native Ethnography and the Living Archives in East Jerusalem
Samer Al-Saber, Davidson College
Location: Room 2602

Caribbean Voices and Literary Value: West Indian Networks of Authorship and Publishing
Julie Cyzewski, The Ohio State University
137
Networks in the Cultivation of Culture and the Nation Cultural nationalism and the letters of C.C.
Rafn and Rasmus Rask 1825-1864
Kim Simonsen, University of Amsterdam
Social Versus Spatial Networks: Balzac’s Human Geography

Melanie Conroy, University of Memphis

Location: Room 3328

Academic knowledge and aesthetic experience: uneasy relations

Dan Russek, University of Victoria
Museum Envy in the Avant-Garde Latin American Novel

Patrick O’Connor, Oberlin College
Scholarship or Just an Artsy Game?: Developing a Digital Non-linear Reading Interface

Allen Jones, University of Puget Sound
“Still, the profound change/ has come upon them” : Rewriting the Limit
Irene Artigas-Albarelli, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras- UNAM
Location: Room 2802

Religion, State, and Institutions: The Case of U.S. Disestablishment

David Weimer, Harvard University
The Asymptomatic Enthusiast: Henry More Reads David George

William Miller, Johns Hopkins University
Lost Tribes in a New Nation: Elias Boudinot and the Politics of Prophecy
Elizabeth Fenton, The University of Vermont
Medieval Jew, Contemporary Spaniard: Church, State, and Individual in Spanish Inquisition Dra-
mas Today
Stacy Beckwith, Carleton College
138
States

Eastern Europe Writes Back: Post-Socialist Voices in US Literature

Ioana Luca, National Taiwan Normal University
Beyond Self-Orientalization: The Refusenik in Russian American Jewish Fiction

Sasha Senderovich, University of Colorado Boulder
Staging the Post-Socialist Woman: Saviana Stanescu’s Alternative Trans-nations

Oana Popescu-Sandu, University of Southern Indiana
Gary Shteyngart and Immigration as Politics of Self-Identity

Laura Ceia, California State University, Long Beach
Location: Room 2928

Melancholy, Solitude, and Symbolic Vision in Oscar Milosz’s Poetry

Augusta Valevicius, Université de Sherbrooke
From Symbolism to the Signifying Chain: The Irrelevance of Understanding

Natalie Strobach, University of California, Davis
The Artists of the Soul in France: between Charcot’s New Psychiatry and the Aesthetics of Mal-
larmé
Cassnadra Sciortino, University of California, Santa Barbara
Location: Richmond
”divers times he asked her questions”: Writing, Hearing, and Circulation in and of The Book of
Margery Kempe
Stacie Vos, Yale Divinity School
139
Globalizers: Networks in In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc.
Meg Weisberg, Yale University
A Way in the World

Nyasha Chiundiza, Yale Divinity School
Modernity, Enchantment, and World Literature

Bina Gogineni, Skidmore College
Location: Diamond B
Tomás González, Juan Gabriel Vasquez and the Curse of Violence in Colombia
Juanita Aristizabal, Pitzer College
On not saying: representations of violence in Tomás Gonzalez’s Abraham entre bandidos (2010) and
William Vega’s La sirga (2012).
Norman Valencia, Claremont McKenna College
Post-conflict Narratives: The Break of the Violence Master Narrative in Colombian Contemporary
Novel
Carlos Mejia, Gustavus Adolphus College
Violence, Emotion and Social Justice - A hauntological view of Jose Padilha’s Onibus 174, Tropa de
Elite and Robocop
Arno Argueta, University of Texas at Austin
Location: Seneca
Pater’s Houses: The Afterlives of an Image

Jonah Siegel, Rutgers University
The Novel in the Longue-Durée: Veselovsky and Bakhtin’s Competing Origin Stories
Kate Holland, University of Toronto
Historiography and the Problem of Language in De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana
Joel Calahan, University of Chicago
140
Location: Aspen
Dating ”Ulysses”
Eric Bulson, Claremont Graduate University
Hard-Boiled Badiou: Mass, Number, and Ontology in Detective Fiction
Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young University
Counting America: Continuity and Commonness in Roberto Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América
Scott Challener, Rutgers University

America
Location: Room 2702

The Figure of the Hotel as Object and Form in Latin American Travel Narratives.
Maria Cisterna Gold, University of Massachusetts, Boston
The transportation of affects in Selva Almada’s novels
Karina Miller, University of California, Irvine
Collectors of Skins
Javier Guerrero, Princeton University
Have I Got the Thing for You: People, Goods, and the U.S.-Mexican Border
Rebecca Biron, Dartmouth College

2)
Location: Ravenna A
Permutations of Desire in Persian Literature: The Exacted Product of Politicizing the Female Li-
bido
Danielle DiCenzo, Georgia College and State University
141
Reading Sexual Difference: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Love in Contemporary Iranian-American
Literature
Leigh Korey, University of Michigan
A Theatre of Sacrifice: A Levinasian Reading of Ta’ziyeh
Aidin Keikhaee, York University, Social and Political Thought
Heterotopic Spaces in Ebrahim Golestan’s “Esmat’s Journey”
Claudia Yaghoobi, Georgia College and State University
Location: Everett
Emergence, Complexity, Beauty: Susan Howe and John Taggart

Kevin Holden, Yale University
LANGUAGE with/out scripts
Maria Muresan, Bader International Center, UK
The Ends of Poetic Distance: Hejinian and Dragomoshchenko in the 1990s
Kevin M. F. Platt, University of Pennsylvania
Language after Socialism: Radical poetics and St. Petersburg’s Translit
Marijeta Bozovic, Yale University

Engagement
Location: Room 3202

“When those two towers fell, we fell with them” ,

Reem Elbardisy, Ain Shams University
Acquiring Status, Enacting Prejudice: Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land and the Myth of
American Exceptionalism
Suzanne Roszak, Yale University
Multicultural Resolutions to Postcolonial Problems in South Asian Diasporic Literature
Surbhi Malik, Creighton University
American Studies and Empire in an ”Age of Comparison”
Jay Garcia, New York University
142
Location: Room 3002

Untimeliness, Queerness, and Spectacularity

Amber Jamilla Musser, Washington University in St. Louis
Tom Ripley, Queer Exceptionalism, and the Anxiety of Being Close to Normal
Victoria Hesford, State University of New York at Stony Brook
”Cocksucking and Democracy”: Walt Whitman and the Neoliberal Literary Imagination
Elisabeth Windle, Washington University in St. Louis
The Deadly Imperative: Queer Times in the Shadow of AIDS

Sean Grattan, Gettysburg College

Location: Columbia
Towards posthumanist reading? How to do things with (mere) words from text
Sayan Bhattacharyya, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Geometries of Desire: Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory as a Narrative Generation Mechanism

Graham Sack, Columbia University
Generative vs. Reconstructive Philology: Folklore study and Textual Criticism

Jessica Merrill, Stanford University
The Temporal Aspects of Processual Text

Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara
676. Rising Asia
Location: Ballard
Rethinking “Asia” in the Wake of Its Ascent: Anxiety, Aspirations, and Complexity
Yu-yen Liu, Huafan University
143
Dear Enemy: Gender, Nation and the Pursuit of Happiness in Contemporary Chinese Romantic
Comedy
Aijun Zhu, New College of Florida
Speculations of Ascendency: Imagining China’s Rise Through Science Fiction

Cara Healey, University of California, Santa Barbara

Location: Pacific
Remapping América: Maps, Map-making and the Invention of Jesuit New World Imaginaries,
1767-1810
Luis Ramos, New York University
Geographic and Narrative Boundaries in Las Casas and Gómara

Glen Carman, DePaul University
Spaces of translation, D’Herbelot reader of Kâtip Çelebi

Filippo Screpanti, Duke University

Real Men Wear Beards: The Rise of the New Masculinity after the Fall of Patriarchy
Russell Cobb, University of Alberta
Authenticity, Commitment, and Other People: Charles Larmore’s The Practices of the Self
Rachel Cole, Lewis & Clark College
The Jargon of Neoliberalism

Geordie Miller, Dalhousie University
Location: Diamond A
144
Speculations on Silver Gelatin: Photographic Indeterminacy in Cristina Rivera-Garza’s Nobody
Will See Me Cry
Ilka Kressner, University at Albany, SUNY
Sound and spirits, by way of Dib’s ”Si diable veut”

Jonathan Adjemian, York University
Spectral Corporeality and Carnal Knowledge in Dona Flor e seus dois maridos
Bruce Dean Willis, The University of Tulsa

Turkish Context
Location: Kirkland
Ties that Bind: State and Heritage in Literature of Bureaucracy

Elizabeth Nolte, University of Washington
The Rewriting of The Epic of Gilgamesh in Contemporary Turkish Fiction

Halim Kara, Bogazici University
Appropriating the Faust Figure: Modern Individual in Halit Ziya’s Mai ve Siyah
Zeynep Uysal, Bogazici University
Télémaque Recycled: The Many Translations of Les Aventures de Télémaque by Ottoman Bureau-
crats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Burcu Karahan, Stanford University
Thinking in French, writing in Persian: aesthetics and intelligibility in modern Ottoman literature
Zeynep Seviner, University of Washington
Authenticity
The new human and the vernacular

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University
Popular Knowledge and the Vernacular in Contemporary French Urban Exploration Narratives
Jen Hui Bon Hoa, Yonsei University
145
Vernacular Cosmopolitanism. The Writing of Local Cultures in 20th Century Swedish Proletarian
Fiction
Paul Tenngart, Lund University
Argotography: Origin Stories of the French Vernacular

Eliza Jane Smith, University of California, Santa Barbara
Location: Room 3302

Graphic Re-Worlding: The Radical Literacies of Global Comics

Kate Kelp-Stebbins, Palomar College
@rchive and @history in the Caribbean: Reviewing the Online World of Tourist Reviews
Julia Michiko Hori, Princeton University
Orhan Pamuk’s “The Museum of Innocence” as an Aesthetic World: Affirmative Ethics in Posthu-
manism and Nomadic Theory
Carolyn Lau, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
”World” in Tagore’s Vishwa Sahitya

Pushpa Acharya, University of Toronto
Cosmopolitanism at World’s End: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Caitlin Charos, Princeton University
Location: Greenwood
Science Fiction and the Anthropocene

Ursula Heise, University of California, Los Angeles
Crowded Conditions: Global Biorisk, Radical Unpredictability, and H5N1

Kathleen Woodward, University of Washington
A Certain Anthropocentrism: Utopian Politics, Epics of Evolution, and the Future of the Anthro-
pocene
William Katerberg, Calvin College
146
tions
Location: Room 2902

The Villain in the Hero: Post-Apocalyptic Super(Anti)Heroes

Angela Becerra Vidergar, Stanford University
Beyond the Superhero: The Human’s Dialogic Relation to the Superhuman in Neil Gaiman’s The
Sandman
Fan Wu, University of Toronto
The Uncanny X-Men: Superhero as Exile

Nolen Gertz, Pacific Lutheran University
The Secret Lives of Model Minority: The Asian American Superhero in Gene Yang’s Shadow Hero
Haerin Shin, Vanderbilt University
Location: Room 3228

’Singulative Birth, Singulative Slips’: Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake and the Technology of Per-
sonhood
Shannon Finck, University of West Georgia
The Principle of Critical Juxtaposition in Media Archaeology

Lai-Tze Fan, York University
Masochistic Mediation: The Orthotic Self in Crash and Trials: Evolution

Kyle Carpenter, Simon Fraser University
Location: Room 2628

Theatrical critique and politics under the Portuguese dictatorship: António Ferro’s background,
role and political action, 1924-1939
Paulo Baptista, New Lisbon University
147
Towards a New Canon: Censorship and Aesthetics in the Theatre of Franco’s Spain
Diego Santos Sánchez, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Foreign Policy and Cultural Opportunism: José Tamayo and the Francoist Theater Industry
Carey Kasten, Fordham University
Excitable Speech in Exile? Cuban Theatre in the Hands of the Spanish Censors under Franco
Omar García-Obregón, Queen Mary University of London
Location: Virginia
”Each will obedient”: Self, Soul, and Subjection in the Poetry of Eliza Keary
Amanda Paxton, Trent University
Consent, Command, Confession

Karmen MacKendrick, Le Moyne College
Whose Will Determines Who’s Willing and Who’s Willful: Consent, Law, and the Critical Limits of
False Consciousness for Feminism
Jordana Greenblatt, York University
Disorders of the Will and Willful Disorders

Keja Valens, Salem State University
148
Chapter 8
Stream D (5:00 – 6:40)

Location: Greenwood
Migrant (M)others: Crafting neoliberal multiculturalism through the art of reproduction

Maya Smorodinsky, Shoreline Community College
Illicit Motherhood: Recrafting Feminist Resistance in Edna O’Brien’s “The Love Object” and Jhumpa
Lahiri’s “Hell-Heaven”
Dibyadyuti Roy, West Virginia University
Una maestra norteamericana in the ’South’

Thomas Genova, University of Minnesota, Morris
“My Mother is a Daffodil”: Mothering, Migration, and Memory in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes,
Memory
Raquel Kennon, California State University, Northridge

tated Economy
Location: Fremont
A Solvent for ’Poetry’s Sticky Temptation’

John Ricco, University of Toronto
149
Movement Politics: Acephalic, Apocalyptic, Apophatic
Kent Brintnall, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
The Acéphale and Its Double

Jeremy Biles, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Making More (of Waste)

Stuart Kendall, California College of the Arts
841. Art & Accident
The Accidental Aesthetic in Dreiser’s Naturalism

Anthony Manganaro, University of Washington - Seattle
Modernism’s Haunted Pens

Emily James, University of St. Thomas
Accidents of Scale: Hooke, Butler, and Aesthetic Microscopy

Lili Loofbourow, Liliana M Loofbourow
“a shadow shaped like a tadpole”: Early Cinema and Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics of Contingency
Boosung Kim, Texas A&M University
Subsuming Fictions: Accidents and Narrative in Pamela and Its Afterlives

Bridget Donnelly, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Accidental Subject in Sheppard Lee

Daniel Clinton, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Location: Room 2502

Defining “Literature” in Pre-May Fourth China

Carlos Yu-Kai Lin, University of California, Berkeley
Modern Chinese Literature and Eileen Chang

Sijia Yao, Purdue University
Boundaries of ”Literature” in Japan’s Meiji 20s

Miyabi Goto, Princeton University
150
“Uses of Literature”: Discussions on the Function of “Literature” in the Ottoman-Turkish Context
Olcay Akyildiz, Bogazici University

Location: Richmond
Absent Temple
Pablo Pérez-Wilson, Cornell University
Intimate Crimes: Anomie, Impunity, Political Violence

Talia Dajes, Westminster College
Immunity and Melancholia: Bourgeois Failure and Negative Identity in the Work of Luis Loayza
Fernando Velasquez, St. Joseph’s College, New York
The Un-Subject of Memory: Spectres of Violence and Impunity in Doris Salcedo’s Plegaria Muda
Catalina Esguerra, University of Michigan

Location: Ravenna B
In Search of a New Canon: Nineteenth Century French Universalism and its Influence on Israeli
Literature
Deborah Gruber, CUNY Graduate Center
The Cockroach and the Poet: the Case of Kornei Chukovskii and Osip Mandelstam
Lusia Zaitseva, Harvard University
The Added Value of Art: Relations between Intellectuals and the Regime as Reflected in Iraqi Com-
munist Literature
Hilla Peled-Shapira, Bar-Ilan University
Writing Out the Regime: Papers/Awraq of the New Syrian Writers Collective
Alexa Firat, Temple University
151
Location: Room 3028

Armed Maidens of the Nation: Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction Between Greece and Ireland
Etienne Charriere, University of Michigan
Borrowed Legacies & Appropriated Histories: The Influence of Leon Cahun In Turkish National-
ism
Ali Bolcakan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Imagining Bharat: Bankim Chattopadhyay’s Challenge to British Historiography in Anandamath

Monika Bhagat-Kennedy, University of Pennsylvania
Jicoténcal (1826) and Alternate Genealogies of the Historical Novel in Spanish America
Dustin Hixenbaugh, The University of Texas at Austin

erature)
Location: Seneca
De-sexualization of the Female Espionage in Female Discourse

Ningning Huang, Duke University
Space of Production and Space of Femininity: Wang Anyi’s Treatment of Body, Sexuality and Space
in Her Shanghai Stories
Dandan Chen, SUNY Farmingdale
Boys’ Love Novel and Female Reading Space

Qianyue Liu, Fudan University
“Eat, Drink, Man, and Woman”

Jin Feng, Grinnell College
Embodying the Nation: Collective Trauma and Female Sexuality in Lust Caution and Flowers of
War
Rong Cai, Emory University
152
Location: Pacific
Comparative Literature Today: An Indian Perspective

Nilanjana Bhattacharya, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan
The ”Act” of Comparison

Sandra Bermann, Princeton University
Location: Everett
The Conservatism of Emoji: Affect and Labor in Informational Capitalism

Luke Stark, New York University
Intertextual Postmodernism through WWW.com: Reading Dick’s Scanner Darkly and Linklater’s
Adaptation
Azra Ghandeharion, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Deep Web, Deep Structure: The Allure of the ”Dark Internet”

Michael Hessel-Mial, Emory University
Palo Mayombe Online

Manuel Abreu, Texas State University
Location: Room 2802

Touch – : Samuel Delany’s Sexual Ecology

Sarah Ensor, Portland State University
Wall Street Containment: Bartleby’s contagious language

Brett Brehm, Northwestern University
Disease Surveillance in Real Time

Lindsay Thomas, Clemson University
153

Textual Aid for a Post-Counsel Age: Advice in Mohsin Hamid and Zadie Smith
Beth Blum, University of Pennsylvania
Diet Advice and the Disease of Civilization
Adrienne Rose Johnson, Stanford University
The Ethics of Aphorism
Simon Reader, Harvard University
The Modern Transmutation of an Ancient Art: The Reincarnation of Chinese Remonstration
Clint Capehart, Harvard University
Location: Room 2828

Debt Communes and Adjunct Universities

Kyle McKinley, University of California, Santa Cruz
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Confessions of the Academic Memoir
Christopher Findeisen, University of Illinois at Chicago
When English Studies Teaches the University
Ian Butcher, Duquesne University

Diasporic and Fractured inside the Homeland: Black Yemenis and the Power of Exilic Imagination
in Ali Al-Muqri’s Taste Black… Smell Black.
Ammar Naji, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Sites of Resistance in Je Prendrai les armes s’il le faut by Dalila ben Mbarek Msadak
Rania Said, SUNY Binghamton
154
Active Forgetting, Active Forgiving: Trauma and Affirmation in Nietzsche, Frankl, and Gobodo--
Madikizela
Chet Lisiecki, University of Oregon
The Painful Lives of Army Wives: The Gendered Structures of Trauma in You Know When the Men
Are Gone
Brian Williams, Tennessee Tech University
Gendered Trauma and the Spanish Civil War in La plaça del Diamant by Mercé Rodoreda
Wan Tang, Boston College
Translating the Implied Reader: A Study of Gender and Sexuality in Arabic to English Translation
Rama Hamarneh, The University of Texas at Austin
Claiming a Third Space: Negotiating the Self Through Body in Lucía Puenzo’s XXY
Ximena Keogh, University of Colorado at Boulder
Malleable Manic Matilda: Modernizing Mexico through

Sylvia Morin, University of Tennessee at Martin
Elasticity or the Sentimental Phenomenology of Skin and Love

Catalina Florina Florescu, Pace University
Location: Room 2602

The Iranian Cyber-Disbelief: an overview

Ahmad Arbaboun, The University of Chicago
GenX-ing the Globe: Constructing Generational Identity Across Cultures and Ideologies
Valerie Anishchenkova, University of Maryland
155
The Bonds of Anarchy: Global Affinities of 1930s Literature in China and Argentina
Aleksander Sedzielarz, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Location: Room 3302

Old Conflicts, New Dramaturgies: Authority and Dissidence in the Theater and Performance of
Patricia Ariza
Bibiana Díaz, California State University, San Bernardino
Revolutionary Theatricality and the Algerian Novel

Neil Doshi, University of Pittsburgh
Teatr.doc and the Russian ‘Theater of Witness’

Maksim Hanukai, University of Notre Dame
Revolutionary Theater in Central and Eastern Europe: Intertextuality, Re-writing, Adaptation

Ileana Orlich, Arizona State University
Location: Room 3102

Negotiating Social Visibility in Graphic Fiction from Brazil.

Edward King, University of Bristol
’Why Are You Taking Their Picture?’: Looking, Reading, Feeling Like An American in the Art of
Andy Warhol
Carmen Merport, University of Chicago
Graphiating Resistance: Remediation, Abstraction and the Politics of Adaptation in the Work of
Alberto Breccia
Aarnoud Rommens, The University of Liege, Belgium
Literally graphic: The pleasure of reading erotic graphic novels

Julia Ludewig, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Reading in Crisis: Queer Hermeneutics in Samuel Delany’s Para-Academic AIDS Fiction

Tyler Bradway, State University of New York at Cortland
156

Cooler Climes for Posthuman Times, and the North as New Refuge
Michaela Brangan, Cornell University
Friday, the Whore of Babylon, and the Post-Apocalyptic Posthuman

Heather Hicks, Villanova University
The Bionic Body: Technology, Disability and Humanism

Magda Romanska, Emerson College
On Worms and Nurdles: Amorphousness and the Nonhuman

Sarah Chihaya, Princeton University
Location: Dashpoint
Josephine Baker, Latin America, and “Vulgar” Cosmopolitanism

Jason Borge, University of Texas at Austin
The Avant-Garde from the South

Jose Luis Venegas, Wake Forest University
The Flâneur in Paris and Mexico City: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s Trans- and Intranational Search
for Modern Beauty
Kelly Comfort, Georgia Institute of Technology
Aesthetics, Idealism, and Nation, From Barcelona to Buenos Aires: Noucentisme and the Maestros
de la Juventud.
Tania Gentic, Georgetown University

Archive, Group 2
157
Inscribing Women Into Time: Sevim Burak’s Yanık Saraylar as a Counter-discursive History of
Turkish Modernity
Merve Tabur, Pennsylvania State University
Contemporary Syrian Poetry: the Voice of the Masses

Manar Shabouk, University of South Carolina
I, Rigoberta Menchu: Subaltern Testimony as History

Reshmi Mukherjee, Boise State University
Writing her story, making History: alternate feminist historiographies

Jacinthe Assaad, University of Washington
Location: Leschi
The New Transnational Immigrant in Wang Ping’s Poetry

Sharon Tang-Quan, Westmont College
”Needing Yellow”: Transpacific Identity(ies) in Sawako Nakayasu’s Poetic Work

Marta Mancelos, University of Coimbra (Portugal)
Location: Virginia
Neither Western Opera, Nor Old Chinese Theater: The Modernist “Integrated Art-Form” and the
Chinese “New Music-Drama”
Max Bohnenkamp, New York University
From New Typography to New Topography. Studies of avant-gardes and the denied spirit of mod-
ernism.
Karolina Pawlik, University of Silesia, Shanghai University
Pan Jinlian as Nora: Modernity Manifested through Shrew’s Mouth

Shu Yang, University of Oregon
Pearl Buck, American Orientalism, and East Asian Modernity

Swan Kim, City University of New York at Bronx Community College
158
Location: Room 2728

Wouldn’t it be better to bring our small audiences something from our own literature?: Y.H. Brenner
against Translation
Danielle Drori, New York University
Thou Shalt Not Speak my Language Well: Linguistic Acquisition/Imposition in the Colonized Space
Sheera Talpaz, Princeton University
Reflections on Negation in Nawal El Saadawi’s ”The Innocence of the Devil”

Sean Geraghty, Collin College
Metaphor and the Negation of Negation: A Return to Ghassan Kanafani’s “Return to Haifa”
Liron Mor, Cornell University
Location: Boren
Transversal Critique in the Age of Neoliberalism

Mark William Westmoreland, Villanova University
”Writers, by nature, have to oppose things:” Literary Contestations in Control Society

Frida Beckman, Stockholm University
“Something here dominates the diversity of systems”: Micro-aggressions as New Political Materials,
Feminism, and Bergson
Iris van der Tuin, Utrecht University
Animating Idiocies: On the Proposition of Slow Media

Adam Nocek, University of Wisconsin
Realism Unbound: Conceptual Writing, Objects, and Post-Postmodern Capitalism

Jeffrey T. Nealon, Pennsylvania State University
Location: Room 3328

159
Engineering Bodies of War
Jessica Behm, University of California, Riverside
State of Fantasy: Shani Boianjiu and Feminist Militarism
Itay Eisinger, University of Texas at Austin
Fallout Country: The Reservation and the Space-Time of War in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
Mai-Linh Hong, University of Virginia
Serial Killers and Serial Wars: Regeneration and Reproduction of Violence in American War/Crime
Narratives
Ji-Young Um, Scribbs College
Savages, Rapists and Whores: Metaphors of Allies and Italians in Representations of World War II
Italy (1943-45)
Marisa Escolar, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Location: Room 2702

Mapping Amiskwaciwâskahikan: Situating Indigenous Digital Topographies

Dallas Hunt, University of British Columbia
Indexical Maps: Teresa Margolles and Francis Alÿs
Craig Epplin, Portland State University
”Poor Person’s Cognitive Mapping”: Paranoid Spatiality in The Crying of Lot 49
Dalglish Chew, Stanford University
Mapping the Map
Milton Laufer, New York University

Location: Kirkland
Internal Outsiders: Difference within and without in early modern English drama
Douglas McQueen-Thomson, American University of Sharjah
The Abrahamic in Shakespeare’s Venice
Harry Kashdan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
160
Othello: the Eastern and the Orient Others in Shakespeare’s Venice.
Tulin Ece Tosun, Purdue University
Imagining Ethnicity in The Knights of Malta and The Spanish Gypsy

I-Chun Wang, Kaohsiung Medical University

Digital (Group 2)
Location: Columbia
Réalisation, Circulating Reference, and Peter Handke’s Project of Note-Taking

Jacob Haubenreich, Southern Illinois University
The Phenomenology of Digital Text

Steven Syrek, Rutgers University
Embodied Reading in Print and Digital Media

Nikolaus Fogle, Villanova University
Location: Diamond B
Nadia Myre’s ”Indian Act”: communal beading, sovereign landscapes, and radical re-mappings.
Julie Burelle, University of California, San Diego
Beading and Walking Sovereignty: Dene sovereign practices against the Canadian State
Kelsey Wrightson, University of British Columbia
Yoik and dåajmijes vuekie: A Sámi articulation of the ethical-aesthetic

Troy Storfjell, Pacific Lutheran University
Ainu Rebels and Contempporary Stage Performance of Sonic Soverignty

Yurika Tamura, Rice University
Location: Ballard
161
Metaffective Fiction
Ralph Clare, Boise State University
“Try For a Moment to Feel This”: New Sincerity and the New Democrats
Ryan M. Brooks, Washington University in St. Louis
The Legend is Sincerity: Utopian Coordinates in George Saunders’ ”Corporate Compounds”
Melinda Robb, Emory University
Location: Ravenna C
The Birth of a New God: Artificial Intelligence and Islam in Ahmad ‘Abd al-Salám al-Baqqáli’s
”The Blue Flood”
Ian Campbell, Georgia State University
“Insufficient and Unceasing”: Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” and the Problem of Per-
fected Political Discourse
Douglas Fisher, University of California, Los Angeles
The Future of Sleep in Argentine Speculative Fiction
James Cisneros, Université de Montréal
The Ordinariness of the Extraordinary in Daniela Tarazona’s The Kiss of the Hare
Kyle James Matthews, State University of New York at Geneseo

Turkish Context
Location: Juniper
Literary Neo-Ottomanism: Worlding the Turkish Novel

Fatma Tarlaci, University of Texas at Austin
”Localizing” the European Dime Novel: The Roots of Detective Fiction in Turkish
Veysel Ozturk, Boğaziçi University
Heterogeneous Rootedness: Gezi Protests as a Critique of the Nation-state
C. Ceyhun Arslan, Harvard University
A Carriage Affair as Assemblage
Fatih Altug, Istanbul Sehir University
162
Location: Room 3002

Situating Ecophobia in Landscape Aesthetics: The Tussle between “Cosmological Oneness” and
“Psychological Distancing”
Xinmin Liu, Washington State University
Ecopoetic View in the Dagong Poetry in China, the Case of Zheng Xiaoqiong
Haomin Gong, Case Western Reserve University
Social Ecological Disruption and Reconstruction of Post-Socialist Chinese Subject

Zhen Zhang, Union College
Beyond the Human? A Reading of Zhang Wei’s ”Song of the Hedgehog”

Todd Foley, New York University
Rescuing Nature from the Nation: Eco-critical Historiography and Modern Chinese Literature
Hangping Xu Xu, Stanford University
Authenticity
Location: Cedar A
Chamoiseau’s Literary Creolization: The Stylistic Potential of a Vernacular

Amanda Mazur, Princeton University
The travels and travails of the vernacular in Selvon and Gurnah

Erik Falk , Dalarna University
Vicissitudes of the Vernacular: Herder, Plaatje, Ngugi

Stefan Helgesson, Stockholm University

163
Writing Out of North American Time: Adrienne Rich’s Performance of Durational Address
Talia Shalev, CUNY Graduate Center
Toward a Poets’ International: Langston Hughes and Jacques Roumain

Sarah Ehlers, University of Houston
From/To: Poetic Communications in the Age of Fascism

Anne Donlon, Emory University
The Anarchism of Time: Comparative Temporalities in Yiddish and English-Language Sacco--

Vanzetti Poems
Anna Elena Torres, University of California, Berkeley

Location: Room 3228

Traversing colorblind neoliberalism through border thinking, decolonial love and the decolonial
attitude
Yomaira Figueroa, Michigan State University
The Return of Trouble with Race or Cartographies of Shifting Perceptions

Luz Angélica Kirschner, Bielefeld University
Critical Confrontations with European Identity in Jamal Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes
Yasemin Mohammad, University of Iowa
Writing Arab Bodies in(to) Bolivian Spaces: Writing and National Identity in Contemporary Arab-Bo-
livian Texts
Zoya Khan, University of South Alabama
Location: Room 2628

The Textuality of the Self in the Neoliberal Memoir

Daniel Worden, University of New Mexico
Is There Such a Thing as Post-Symptomatic Fiction?

Katie Muth, University of St Andrews
164
”The Law of Genre”: Theory, Neoliberalism, and the Contemporary Genre Turn
Andrew Hoberek, University of Missouri
The Contemporary Art Novel

David Alworth, Harvard University
Location: Room 3128

Pynchon vs. PRISM: Narrative Technologies at America’s Bleeding Edge

Andrew Ferguson, University of Virginia
America Seen Through the Foreign Lens

Yu-Yun Hsieh, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Location: Cedar B
Persistent Objects of Memory: Imagining PosthumanMaterialities of Memory in Evelyn Reilly’s

Styrofoam
Maria Ioana Zirra, Stockholm University
Chernobyl at Half-life: Towards a Posthumanist Memoryscape

Jessica Rapson, King’s College London
‘Forget what it means to be human’ (Ferris 2010): memory, subjectivity, and representation in con-
temporary fiction and theory.
Lucy Bond, University of Westminster
Climate Change Fiction and the Future Anterior

Rick Crownshaw, Goldsmiths, University of London

Communist Space
Location: Room 2928

165
Post-Communist Legacy of Closet Art: Lena Constante ’s Silent Escape
Ileana Marin, University of Washington
Transgenerational Reading of Totalitarian Legacy

Hana Waisserova, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Family Portraits and Blind Dates: Expanding Cultural Memory in Georgia

Mary Childs, University of Washington
Institutional Memories and Transgenerational Conflicts: The House of Terror and the Memorial of
the Victims of Communism and of Resistance
Simona Livescu, University of California, Los Angeles

The literary production of Bulgarian immigrants in the late 20th and early 21st centuries
Roberto Adinolfi, Plovdiv University ”Paisii Hilendarski” (Bulgaria)
Double authorship. Translingual literature in East-Central Europe

Adam Kola, Nicolaus Copernicus University
Zinaida Lindén’s Depiction of the Life of a Diplomat’s Wife: Migration, Language-Switching, and
Nomadic Theory
Julie Hansen, Uppsala University
Location: Chelan
Virtual Witnessing at the National 9/11 Museum

Sarah Senk, University of Hartford
Digitally Queer: Time in Social Networks and the Affect of Trans-Subjectivity

April Durham, University of California, Irvine
(W)rite of Spring: Teju Cole’s Twitter Flower Reports 2014

Vivian Halloran, Indiana University
166
Location: Medina
Mana Neyestani and the Problem of Interpretive Community

Amir Khadem, University of Alberta
Writing for Translation?: Hanān al-Shaykh and the Question of Audience

Jennifer Pineo-Dunn, New York University
Autobiography and its Absent Audience: Education and Readership in Moroccan Literature
Erin Twohig, Georgetown University
Philological Upset
Jeffrey Sacks, University of California, Riverside
Location: Madrona
The Political Economy of State Formation and Rubber Extraction in Amazonia

Esteban Rozo, Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia)
Entangled temporalities in the Colombian Amazon

Ivan Dario Vargas Roncancio, Duke University
“Killing the Water” and Other Tales of Development

Tracy Devine Guzmán, University of Miami
The Amazon as Wilderness and Other Tales: Just how Wild is ”Wild”?
Candace Slater, University of California, Berkeley
167
Part III
Sunday, March 29th
168
Chapter 9
Stream A (8:30 – 10:10)
Location: Seneca
Rethinking “Trafficking”: The Central American Migrants’ Trail in the Literary Journalism of The
Beast and the Photojournalism of En el camino
Thelma Jimenez-Anglada, University of Chicago
Moving On: State of Literary Journalism in Korea

Ann Kim, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea
Reporting the Umwelt: Literary Journalism, Ecological Justice , and the Felt Life of Animals
Robert Alexander, Brock University

eign Cities
Location: Diamond A
The corporate visual representation of the city in Woody Allen’s European sojourn
Ana Paula Bianconcini Anjos, University of São Paulo
7 días en La Habana: The (Dis)-Enchanted City

Enrique Gonzalez-Conty, Ithaca College
Reading in Paris: Literature as Reconciliation in Eduardo Lalo’s La inutilidad

Paula Park, Ohio University
169
Location: Kirkland
“I Can Quote Chapter and Verse”: Whence Comes Critical Authority?

Sarah Salter, The Pennsylvania State University
The Origins of African American Literature: A Comparative Focus

Phillip Richards, Colgate University
Spatial Form, in Time; The American Novel, Joseph Frank, and Modernist Poetics
Michael Benveniste, University of Puget Sound
After Sedgwick
Location: Room 3002

Making the Non-Reproductive Mother ’M’een’: Re-thinking Kinship through Race and Class
Maureen Curtin, State University of New York-Oswego
Abominable Systems: Narrative and the Family at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Rachel Gaubinger, Princeton University
The Cousin Next Door: Sideways Kin and the Specter of Racial Integration in the Civil Rights Fic-
tions of Harper Lee and Truman Capote
Jenny James, Pacific Lutheran University
731. Breakdown
Breakdown Perspective and the Second Act Rupture: District 6, District 9, Man on Ground
Valorie Thomas, Pomona College
History and Disaster: Imagining Theodor Adorno’s ‘Permanence of Catastrophe’

Miles Link, Fudan University
170
From Babel to Babel: Drawing out social disorder in R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis, Illustrated
and David B.’s Babel
Theresa Tensuan, Haverford College
”A Remedy for this Evil Time”: Breakdowns and the Relics of History in Walter Pater and Villiers
de l’Isle-Adam
Dennis Hogan, Brown University
Americanah and “Hafiz”: Communication, Community and Border Crossing in the Digital Age
Daphne Lamothe, Smith College
782. Childish Forms
Location: Room 2802

The Family Romance of American Communism: Incestuous Histories in ”The Book of Daniel” and
”Burger’s Daughter”
Marissa Brostoff, CUNY Graduate Center
Pictures of Anxiety: Girlhood and the Modern American Horror Film
Hans Staats, Stony Brook University
Runt Salvation Tales: Porcine Children and Adolescent Pigs in Stories of Redemption
Samantha Pergadia, Washington University in St. Louis
Relegated to the Nursery: Magical Thinking and Pre-Modern Literary Forms
Maria Cecire, Bard College

Tragic Death and its Alternatives

Gabriela Basterra, New York University
Hoc Est Enim Corpus Meum: Bodies, Desires, and the Religious Imagination in the Dramas of
Federico García Lorca and Tennessee Williams
José Ignacio Badenes, Loyola Marymount University
Pink Elephant in a Critical Room: Resistance to Lorca’s Queerness in Criticism
Harry Vélez-Quiñones, University of Puget Sound
Deconstructing Lorca, Thinking Lorca Studies
Melissa Dinverno, Indiana University Bloomington
171
Location: Cirrus
Following Agatha Christie: Contemporary Bulgarian Crime Fiction

Mihaela Harper, Bilkent University
Detecting Gossip in Ana Teresa Torres’ La fascinación de la víctima
Ana Rodriguez Navas, Loyola University Chicago
Sherlock’s Queen Bee Apprentice
Theo D’haen, University of Leuven
Huns and Lovers: Early Espionage Fiction and the Dangers of Multilingualism
Emily Hayman, Yale University / Yale-NUS College

Location: Room 2702

Inspiration for the Development of Chinese Comparative Literature from the Theory of “the Other”
Wei Liu, Anhui University in China

Zhuangzi’s Dream of the Butterfly in a Western (Dis)course
Xuefei Bai, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Epistemology and Ethics: Comparative/World Literature Pedagogy in Korea
Kelly Walsh, Yonsei University
Location: Virginia
On the Ideological Manipulation Inherent in Japanese Anime

Hisaaki Wake, Bates College
Integrating Eco-criticism into the Asian Studies Curriculum
Ronald Loftus, Willamette University
172
Japanese, Caribs and Nature in Jean Rhys’s ”Temps Perdi”
Kazue Nakamura, Meiji University
“There’s No Help Coming” in Dead Space: The Horror of the Ecological Imperialism in the Game
Experience
Nicolette Lee, University of Southern California
Location: Room 3202

Imagining (Un)Common Belonging in the New Europe

Natasa Kovacevic, Eastern Michigan University
Positioning the Other: postcolonial criticism and Mikhail Bakhtin
Irina Gugushina, SUNY-Binghamton
Europe and the Multicultural Society
Yasser Derwiche Djazaerly, Fitchburg State University
Location: Columbia
Plague: Text and Body in the Performance Texts of Antonin Artaud

Marianne DiQuattro, Point Park University
Letter to the World Literature Industry: African Fictions of Circulation
Meri Bauer, University of Washington
Circulating Bodies, Circulating Texts in the Short Fiction of Ivan Bunin
Elizabeth Geballe , Indiana University
Location: Room 3228

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and the Construction of a Commercial Self

Guy Risko, Bard High School Early College Cleveland
173
Irreducible Intimacy in the Philosophical Text
Darius Lerup, University of Cambridge
Writing toward Personality: On the Collapse of Abstraction in Late Eliot

Stephen Thompson, Cornell University
Reassessing Realism: Institutions and Anachronisms

Mary Mullen, Texas Tech University
The Forms of National History in A Grain of Wheat

Robert Colson, Brigham Young University
History, Temporality, and Form in Hugo’s Les Misérables

Virginia Piper, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Realism, Architecture, Totality

Anna Kornbluh, University of Illinois at Chicago

The ”Word” (and other beloved neologisms)

Jan Mieszkowski , Reed College
Soulful: The Movement of the Soul in Hölderlin’s ”Andenken”

Rochelle Tobias, Johns Hopkins University
Boreas
Thomas Schestag, Brown University

Literature
Location: Room 2628

174
Walking Through the Past: Forgotten Wars in Sebbar’s The Seine Was Red and Sansal’s The Ger-
man Mujahid.
Priscilla Charrat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Recovery of Memory in James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head

Emily Perez, University of Maryland, College Park
A Visit to the Past: the Cultural Memory in Zeelandia- Return to Formosa

Shu-Yu Yang, Shih-Chien University, Kaohsiung Campus
Location: Leschi
This is the language I should’ve been thinking in all my life

William Heidenfeldt, University of California, Berkeley
Constructing identity through multilingual practices: New York City and the Senegalese cultural
imaginary
Maya-Angela Smith, University of Washington
From bozal to mulata: a sociolinguistic analysis of the Black African domestic slave in early modern
Spanish theater
Antonio Rueda, Colorado State University

“To raise the fiend with flyting”: metalinguistic reflexivity in “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie”
Richard Bauman, Indiana University
Real Talk: Ephemeral Style in Lamb & Hazlitt

Tristram Wolff, Northwestern University
The Poetry of Sound and the Sound of Poetry: Punning, Linguistic Relativity, and the Navajo Poetry
of Rex Lee Jim
Anthony Webster, University of Texas at Austin
The Blacksmith’s Feet: Embodied Entextualization in Northern Italian Vernacular

Jillian Cavanaugh, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center CUNY
175
Location: Room 2902

Death in Real Time: Depicting Grief in West African Film

Molly Klaisner, Harvard University
Staging Mexico’s Conflictive and Precarious Attachment to Modernity: An Analysis of Lagartijas
Tiradas al Sol’s El rumor del incendio’s Visuality Aspects
Lilia Adriana Perez Limon, University of Wisconsin Madison
Reading the Invitation of Intimacy and the Mediation of Violence in Zanele Muholi’s Difficult Love
Helen Frost, University of Alberta
742. Mimeses
Location: Cedar B
Putting the Polis into Cosmopolitan

Alexander Beecroft, University of South Carolina
European Philology in Exile: Orientalism, Western anti-Semitism, and Auerbach’s Figura
Andrew Rubin, Georgetown University
Understanding Triviality: Auerbach’s Investigation of Reality in Turkey
Moritz W. Meutzner, University of Minnesota
Location: Diamond B
The Poetics of Hoarding: a Set of Paper Chances

Kimberly Adams, New York University
“Encounters with Structure”: Matter, Mind, and Collection in the Novels of Tom McCarthy
Jesse Bordwin, University of Virginia
“I Am Quietly Waiting For The Catastrophe Of My Aesthetics”
Cameron Williams, New York University
Novel Reading and New Materialisms
Chi-she Li, National Taiwan University
176
Location: Madrona
Writing Fiction in the Margins of Philosophy

James Wallen
Longinus, Heidegger, and the Rhetoric of Democracy

Henry Bowles, Harvard University
Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge: Destabilizing Literature and Philosophy
Nozomi Irei, Southern Utah University
Beyond Deference: Fiction and Philosophy in Michel Foucault

Nicole Ridgway, University of the Western Cape and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Location: Ballard
And There I Am: Counting the Steps in Thomas Hardy

Daniel Wright, University of Toronto
The Erotics of Large Numbers

David Kurnick, Rutgers University
The Multitude and the Event in Scott and Austen

Yoon Sun Lee, Wellesley
”To describe the life of humanity or even of a single nation...”: Representing Crowds in Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
Chloë Kitzinger, University of California, Berkeley
686. On Personhood
Location: Aspen
How to Love Like a Corporate Person

Lisa Siraganian, Southern Methodist University
177
“All the Law Wants to Know”: Transgressive Texts and Truths in The Known World and Johnson
Sarah George, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Uncaused Causers and the Question of Legal Responsibility

Jason Potts, St. Francis Xavier University
Poetic Immortality and Personal Identity

Oren Izenberg, University of California, Irvine
Location: Room 2928

Poetic Lists, Commentary, and the Bird’s Eye Vision: Al-Jahiz’s Poetic Commentaries as a Struc-
turing Device
Jeannie Miller, University of Toronto
Let’s be Udabāʾ! : a handbook for beginners by Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī

Kelly Tuttle, Earlham College
Rereading a Safavid Khamsa of Nizami: Placing Painted Commentary

Matthew Gillman, Columbia University
Location: Chelan
Multiculturalism in the Early Modern Mediterranean: A History of Globalization Through Em-

manuel d’Aranda’s Captivity Narrative
Nicole Horne, Tulane University
History, Ideology and Estrangement in Mercier’s ”L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais”
Andrew Billing, Macalester College
Literary Landscaping: ”L’Astrée” and the Environment

Sara Wellman, University of Mississippi
178
Literature
Location: Ravenna A
Minstrels and Wordsmiths: More Lyrics in the Romance

Cameron Cross, University of Chicago
Spiritual Love and the Water of Life: A New Paradigm for Understanding Narrative Digression in
the Masnavi
Amin Sadr, Independent Scholar
Intratextual Laughter: Humorous Permutations of Desire in Sa’di’s Tarji’band
Fatemeh Keshavarz, University of Maryland, College Park
Location: Richmond
Speak, if you Dare: Challenge and Evasion in Trans-American Poetics

Julia Leverone, Washington University in St. Louis
The (Self-) subversive poetics of the Arabic prose poem.
Sayed Elsisi, University of Maryland
The Motion and Emotion of Radical Language: The Poetry of the Last Russian Avant-Garde
Kristina Syvarth, University of Toronto
The Trauma of Conquest: Abu Tammam and the Battle of ‘Ammuriyyah
Kimberly Canuette Grimaldi, University of Texas at Austin
Location: Ravenna B
Andric and Morrison: Writing the ”Unlived” Past

Anja Jovic, Brown University
Signs of Love: Missives and Misreadings in the Romantic Southwest of Krazy Kat and Caballero
Cathy Thomas, University of California, Santa Cruz
179
Transnational Narration and Necropolitics: The Interstitial Authorial Voice of What Is the What
Nelson Shake, Texas A&M University
Narrative Form and Gender and Racial Politics in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly
Wanlin Li, The Ohio State University
631. Relatedness
Location: Room 3128

Breaking up is Hard to Do: Fichte vs. Schelling

William Davis, The Colorado College
The Woman Who Married A Bear

Jason Wirth, Seattle University
Biting the Hand: Our Dogs, Vicious Dogs, and their Relatively Related Relations
Martin Wallen, Oklahoma State University
Suicide and Relatedness in Derrida

Anna Vitale, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location: Room 2828

Lars Von Trier’s Camp Sadism

Len Gutkin, Harvard University
Aggressions/Digressions: Sadean Suspension in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Vol. II

Michelle Rada, Brown University
K. WITH SADE: Figures of desire in The Castle

Alessandro Brunazzo, Yale University
Location: Room 3328

180
Space Patrol or Space Explorer? Fairy Tale or Captain’s Log? Identity and Identification in Raumpa-
trouille Orion and Star Trek.
Gerrit Roessler, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
The Spatial Significance of Stars: Delany, Ontology, Utopian Possibility, and Identity
Jordan Stone, University of Georgia
/ : Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and the Tesseract in Science/Fiction

Shari Sanders, University of California, Santa Barbara
(A)moral Androids? Artificial Moral Agents.

Soeren Steding, Luther College
Location: Room 2502

Vigilant and Vulnerable Collaboration: Writing Decolonial Poetry in Hawaii

Aiko Yamashiro, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Japanese and Chinese Settler Drama in Hawaiian Theatre

Kimberly Jew, Washington and Lee University
Being Ethnic on Indigenous Ground: Towards a Definition of Minor Settler Literature

Yu-ting Huang, University of California, Los Angeles
“Being Nobody” as a Socialist Pursuit, and the Novels by Austen, Steinbeck, and Selimović
Gordana Crnkovic, University of Washington
”Who was to save us from western civilization?” Socialism after Socialism, and the Contradictions
of Anti-Imperialism
Russell Berman, Stanford University
Of Soft Socialists, Mushy Marxisms, Fellow Travelers, and the End(s) of Literature: Faulkner, Gar-
cía Márquez, Morrison, and “Post-Socialist” Literary Value
Dane Johnson, San Francisco State University
Promethean v. Epimethean Socialism: Insights for Today

Benjamin Robinson, Indiana University Bloomington
181
Location: Room 3302

Scream: Yoko Ono’s Instruction Poetry and the Sounds of Reading

Gregory Laynor, University of Washington
Black Dada: Amiri Baraka and the Historical Avant-Garde
Kathy Lou Schultz, University of Memphis
Dialect and Hispanized English in Gertrude Stein’s Mexico
Nat Zingg, University of Texas at Austin
Distance Listening
Serena Le, University of California, Berkeley
Location: Dashpoint
Like a Leper Messiah: The Return of Rhetoric in Twentieth-Century Theory

Anthony Reynolds, New York University
Unlikely Saints: The Hagiographic Turn in Postwar French Literature
Alison Howard, University of Pennsylvania
A Terrible Masterpiece: Wittgenstein, Badiou and the Lure of the True
Cameron MacKenzie, DeVry University
Location: Room 2728

The Idiot Stone: George Oppen’s Geological Imagination, or The Undoing of Speculative Realism
Rob Halpern, Eastern Michigan University
The Undone Business of McClure’s “Beat Surface”: Science, Ecology, New American Poetry
Jonathan Skinner, University of Warwick
Ecopoetics and the Ideology of Colorblindness
Evie Shockley, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
182
Toxic Recognition: Coloniality and Ecocritical Attention
Matt Hooley, Texas Tech University
Location: Room 3028

Cries of Thunder: politics of resistance in Herrera and Joron

David Lau, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Irreducibly Disordering, Absolutely Indispensible”: Form in the Case of Blackness

Amy De’Ath, Simon Fraser University
The Politics of Form and the Poetics of Identity After the Canon Wars
Chris Chen, University of California, Santa Cruz
Location: Everett
Photography’s Antecedents: Jelinek’s Jackie as a Model of Remediation

David Nelson, University of Pennsylvania
Layers of Codes and the Intimacy of Strangers in Michael Ondaatje and Chang-rae Lee
Serena Fusco, Università degli Studi di Napoli ”L’Orientale”
Graphic Texts and Intertexts: The Case of Morton Feldman

Kurt Ozment, Bilkent University
Word in the Age of Image: (Re-) Mediation and the Poetic Form in Globalizing Taiwan
Chun-yen Chen, National Taiwan Normal University
Location: Ravenna C
Schlingensief’s Animatograph as Nightmare: Becoming-Sick in Public

William Morgan, University of Michigan
183
As Persons: Literature and Real Power
Robert Cowan, Kingsborough Community College, CUNY
The Freedom of Humour: Hamed Abdel-Samad

Odile Heynders, School of Humanities Tilburg University
Liberalism, Camp Irony, and the Howl Trial

Jordan Carroll, University of California, Davis
Location: Medina
Mimetic Phonocentrism in Gu Wenda’s Forest of Stone Steles

Lorraine Wong, University of Otago
José Emilio Pacheco’s Approximations—Rights and Reciprocity in Latin American Translation Prac-
tice
Isabel Gómez, University of California, Los Angeles
When Translation Meets Bilingualism

Chen Wang, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Lines of Flight: Marcel Bois translates Waciny Laredj translates Tahar Ouettar
Jill Jarvis, Princeton University

ies
Location: Juniper
Relationality and Sinophone Studies: Zhang Dongsun and Wang Wenxing

Nicolas Testerman, University of California, Los Angeles
Across the Tian Shan: Shadows of China in Eurasian Turkic Cultures

Anna Oldfield, Coastal Carolina University
Sinophone Epistemes of Habitat and Home in Xinjiang Eco-Literature.

Robin Visser, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
184
658. Transparency
Location: Boren
Translation and Transparency

Brian OKeeffe, Barnard College
On Meillassoux’s “Transparent Cage”: Theory, Finitude, and Speculative Realism

Zahi Zalloua, Whitman College
The Tyranny of Transparency: Academia’s Auto-immunity

Ingrid Hoofd, National University of Singapore
Location: Fremont
The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz: An Urban Palimpsest

Sanna Alas, University of California, Los Angeles
Between My Kinsman and Myself: Modernity and Rupture in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Hungry
Stones and Other Stories
Samuel Lagasse, Kenyon College
Shattered Against My Very Ground: An Examination of the Psychological Nature of Space in The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Mrs. Dalloway
Amelia Ribbens, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Magic Galoshes”: A Search for Being

Olan Munson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location: Room 2602

Buñuel’s Phantoms
Patty Keller, Cornell University
Postcolonial Spectrality and Italian Film

Rhiannon Welch, Rutgers University
185
Haunted by the Living: Ivan Vladislavić’s Johannesburg
Andrea Spain, Mississippi State University
Spinning Theory. Arachne’s Traces and the Entanglement of Zoopoetics

Matthias Preuss, European University Viadrina
Uncovering the Living Bodies in Zoopoetics: On Humanimal Entanglement in Nightwood by Djuna

Barnes
Peter Meedom, University of Oslo
Humanimal Metamorphoses: Naked Beings in Mo Yan and Su Tong

Xingzhou Hu, APSI, Duke University
Microbial Zoopoetics in Octavia Butler’s ”Clay’s Ark”

Sophia Magnone, University of California, Santa Cruz
186
Chapter 10
Stream B (10:30 – 12:10)
Location: Cedar B
Agamben and the Allegory of Invention

Joshua Winchester, Northwestern University
Allegory and History in Roa Bastos’s Contravida

Patrick Dove, Indiana University
Solidity and Solidarity, Matter and Allegory

Marco Dorfsman, University of New Hampshire
Anthropomorphism, Allegory, Anthropocene

Sara Guyer, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location: Virginia
After the Arctic Sublime: Aesthetic Categories in the Anthropocene

Benjamin Morgan, University of Chicago
Posthumous: Regionalism as a Registrar of Natural History’s Casualties

Juliana Chow, University of California, Berkeley
The Work of Art in the Anthropocene

Thomas Ford, University of Melbourne
187

Third Worldist Littérature Engagée: Afro-Asian Resonances and the Journal Lotus
Hala Halim, New York University
Anti-Imperialist Struggle and the Production of Third-Worldist Solidarity in the Political Theatre
of Yusuf al-Ani and Kateb Yacine
Elizabeth Benninger, New York University
The Constituent Assembly of Negritude: Culture and Geopolitics at the First Congress of Black
Writers
Christopher Bonner, New York University

and the State
Location: Ravenna B
Pass the Test: Literary Ideologies on the Brazilian College Admission Exam
Jonathan Fleck, University of Texas at Austin
The Lady and Her Detractors: Umm Kulthum in the Egyptian Literature of the 1960s
Zeina G. Halabi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
tury
Location: Fremont
Mitleid Between Genres: From Tragedy to Novel

Anita Lukic, Indiana University Bloomington
Satirizing Sentimentalism. Towards a Narrative Staging of Sympathy in Jean Paul
Corinna Sauter, Tübingen University
When Sympathy Becomes Painful: An Attempt on German Tragedies
Friederike Schlaefer, Indiana University Bloomington
188
Location: Greenwood
Strange Fruit in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

Jessica Miller, Independent Scholar
Growing Pains: Examining Puerto Rican and Dominican Bildungsromane

Violeta Lorenzo, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Self-construction, Critique and Orientalism in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog I
Miriam Muccione, University of Oregon

tive Perspective)
Location: Seneca
The Individually Defined Female Reproductive Self – Bing Mugua’s Not-Married: Living a Happy
Single Life
Li Wang, University of Oregon
Questioning Nationalism: Beijing Queer Movement in the Early 1990s Chinese Avant-Gardes
Yu Wang, Duke Asian/Pacific Studies Institute
Ch’iu Hai-t’ang: A Win-Win Narrative Strategy Survived in Semi-Colonial Shanghai

Wei Zhao, Tsinghua University
Location: Leschi
SECRET: Classifying and Declassifying Stories

Joseph Slaughter, Columbia University
Copyright Rivalries and the Passions of Plagiarism in Venezuelan Modernismo

Nathalie Bouzaglo, Northwestern University
189
(Un-)Globalizing South Asia: Parody, Property and Comparitivism in Aravind Adiga’s The White
Tiger
Auritro Majumder, University of Houston
Greyhound Samizdat: Jack Spicer and the Poetics of Pacific Secessionism

Avery Slater, University of Texas at Austin
Re-writing Europe or Re-righting Turkey? Copyright and Authorship in Post-Ottoman Turkey

William Stroebel, University of Michigan
Location: Juniper
Our Technosexual Condition: Queer Temporalities and the Time of the Machine
Alla Ivanchikova, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
“Temporal Drag” Ballet

Selby Wynn Schwartz, St. Mary’s College of California
Queer Survival: The Ever-After of Ira Sachs’s Last Address

Roshaya Rodness, McMaster University
Traversing the Fantasy of Reproductive Futurism in The Virgin Machine

Chris Coffman, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Location: Room 2802

Mothernist Communities: María Moreno’s Apocryphal Cosmopolitanism

German Garrido, New York University
”They Don’t Know What To Make Me”: Cold War America and Minor Feeling in Susan Choi’s The
Foreign Student
Kalyan Nadiminti, University of Pennsylvania
Peripheral Subjects in the Cosmopolitan Mediterranean

Gretchen Head, University of California, Berkeley
190
Location: Ballard
Grace Under Fire: On Being Human in Time of Extremity

David Lloyd, University of California, Riverside
“Who Will Write the History of the Moss?”: 1948, 1971, 1982, 2002, 2008, 2014
Dina Al-kassim, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Committed to Palestine: John Berger and A Place of Weeping

Salah D Hassan, Michigan State University
Teju Cole and the Mainstreaming of Solidarity with Palestine

Maimuna Islam, The College of Idaho
Location: Cirrus
Four Generations, One Crime

Michaela Bronstein, Harvard University
Contemporary Crime Fiction as World Literature: the Problem of Sovereignty in a post-Sovereign

World
Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University Belfast
On How the Concept of ‘World Literature’ Calls Its Very Own Sub-Genres to Life: A Case Study
on the Ethnic Detective Novel Set in Crime-Ridden Cuba
Alexandra Sanchez, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels, Belgium)
Holmes Away from Home: The Great Detective Character in the Transnational Literary Network
Michael Harris-Peyton, University of Delaware
Location: Room 2502

Winnipeg’s Civic Auditorium and the Settler -Colonial Exhibitionary Apparatus

Timothy Maton, University of Manitoba
191
“It was the Wild West”: Settler Narratives from British Columbia’s Okanagan
Renée Jackson-Harper, York University
Genocidal Reading: Marianna Burgess’s Indian Boarding School Stories and Post-Emancipation
Settler Colonialism
Elizabeth Brown, University of Washington
From acculturation to equivocation: the contest over the notion of culture in South American in-
digenous studies
Jamille Pinheiro Dias, University of São Paulo
Location: Room 3328

Lifelike representations in wax in the photographs and projects of Hervé Guibert

Liliane Ehrhart, Princeton University
Latin American mangled dummies and the destruction of the narcissist fascist fantasy
Marcela Romero Rivera, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Location: Room 2702

Original Translation: A Paradox?

Mary Helen McMurran, University of Western Ontario
”Double consciousness and dissonant residues: translation as a motor of critique and invention in
Xiaolu Guo’s I Am China”.
Fiona Doloughan, The Open University
Forging Bhakti: Translation, Conversion and Fraud in the Ezourvedam

Tara Menon, Yale University
The omphalos of Original Translation. Fiction, Creation, and Imagination

Brigitte Rath, Freie Universität Berlin
192
797. Ecstasy
Location: Room 3202

Grotecstasy: Flannery O’Connor’s Ecstatic Grotesque

Rebecca Clark, University of California, Berkeley
Toxic Spaces, Empty Bodies: Productive Masturbation in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
Sarah Huddleston, Portland State University
A Born Somnambule: Ecstasy and Thrill of Disorientation

Samantha Carrick, University of Southern California
The Flat Ecstatic: Relative Non-Fulfillment in Margery Kempe and Dodie Bellamy
Hannah Manshel, University of California, Riverside
Location: Room 3028

Great Depressions: Character Studies of Economic Collapse

Laura Hudson, Independent Scholar
Concrete Violence: the Financialization of Urban Space in American Psycho.

Laura Finch, University of Pennsylvania
Every Generation Gets the Revolution It Deserves: The Fordist Imaginary in Kurt Vonnegut’s
Player Piano
Sean O’Brien, University of Alberta
Location: Room 3228

The Poetry of Velleity: Keats’s Anaesthesia

Lily Gurton-Wachter, University of Missouri
Enchanted Evasions: H.D., Mina Loy, and the Ends of an Imaginary

Rebecca Ariel Porte, New York University
193
747. Forms of Talk
Location: Room 3128

Forms of Feminist Talk: Performance Art and CR

Christopher Grobe, Amherst College
What’s in a Question: Gertrude Stein Talks

Mary Kim, Stanford University
Teetotal Talk and Temperance Tracts

Susan Zieger, University of California, Riverside
Birthing Wars: The Contest of Narratives in the Natural Birthing Movement

Jennifer Rich, Hofstra University
“Industrially Redeemable”: Labor, Disability and Gender in the U.S., 1920-1950

Jessica Waggoner, Indiana University Bloomington
An alien element mingled in her nature: Maternal Impressions in Nineteenth-Century Medical Case
Histories and Elsie Venner
Karyn Valerius, Hofstra University
Incarnating Klein’s Maternal Body: Psychosomatic Medicine and the Resignification of Reproduc-
tive Femininity
Rachel Greenspan, Duke University
Planning the Future: Science Fiction, Scenario Planning, and South Africa
Matthew Eatough, Baruch College, City University of New York
The Cyb-ogre Manifesto: Futurity, Technoscience, and Globalism in Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow
Ian MacDonald, Wittenberg University
194
Photo-trace and Travelling Plays: Photography, Yorùbá Popular Theatre, and the Advent of the
Photoplay.
Olubukola Gbadegesin, Saint Louis University
Location: Richmond
Oregon Experiments: Vernacular Landscapes and the Built Environment of Science Fiction
Joan Lubin, University of Pennsylvania
“’Life is Like a Box of Chocolates’: Affect, Accident, and Historical Revisionism”

Tara Fickle, University of Oregon
The Contemporary Realist Floor Plan

Kate Marshall, University of Notre Dame
Fugue States: Urban Space and Racial Form in Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren
Jessica Hurley, University of Pennsylvania
Location: Diamond A
Objectless Love, Self-Writing, and Reliance in Kristeva

Andrea Pitts, Vanderbilt University
Inner Experience and Worldly Revolt: Arendt’s Bearings on Kristeva’s Project

Noëlle McAfee, Emory University
Julia Kristeva and the maternal

Elisabeth Paquette, York University, Toronto
Globalisation and the necessity of Revolt in the works of Julia Kristeva

Henriette Korthals Altes, University of Oxford, UK
Location: Room 2928

195
On The Good Work of the Slave: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Obsessional Politics
Duane Rousselle, Trent University and European Graduate School
Death Drive as Immobile Time

Daae Jung, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Desire at Work from Dora to Lygia Clark and Bracha Ettinger

Fernanda Negrete, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Location: Room 2628

Governing Fanatical Devotion: The Power of Aesthetics and the 21st Century Anglophone Novel
Jerilyn Sambrooke, University of California, Berkeley
In/compatible Devotion: God and the Nation in Colonial East Asian Literature
Inhye Han, University of California, San Diego
Art History as a Form of Religious Devotion: Wackenroder, Tieck, Schlegel

Peter Erickson, Oakland University
Devotion to the Fragment in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Eleanor Craig, Harvard Divinity School
Location: Ravenna C
Taking Care: The Filmic Labor of Subsistence in José María de Orbe’s ”Aita”
Philip Anselmo, University of California, Irvine
Maintenance and the Clones of Capitalism in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl
Sabine Kim, Mainz University
On the Impossibility of Not Saying ’I’: Jean Toomer’s Ethics of Double-Consciousness

Ingrid Diran, Cornell University
196
Location: Room 2728

Disjoining the Future: a Genealogy of Spanish Experimental Film

Steven Marsh, University of Illinois at Chicago
Virtuality and the Messianic Question in José Lezama Lima
Juan Pablo Lupi, University of California, Santa Barbara
Violence or the Fetish of the Messianic
Marta Hernández Salván, University of California, Riverside

Attention
Location: Medina
“Things overlooked before”: Dickinson’s Details and the Issue of Scale

Keith Mikos, DePaul University
Simple Marks: Moments of Punctuation in Twentieth-Century Poetry
Jasmine Kitses, University of California, Davis
Nanotechnology, Poetic Form, and the Critique of Structural Idealism
Nathan Brown, Concordia University
Location: Diamond B
Urban and Colonial Movement Control and the Production of Space(s) in E.M. Forster’s Howards
End
Harrington Weihl
“Wary Movement: The After-Image of Social Hierarchy and Re-Placing in Post-Disaster Urban
Life”.
David Callenberger, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Travel, Hybridity, and Revolt in James Branch Cabell’s The First Gentleman of America”
Bob Coleman, University of South Alabama
197
Location: Room 2828

Multi-ethnic Lisbon: from Foreign Land to Global City

Sonia Roncador, The University of Texas at Austin
Beur-French Romances in French comedies: Post-colonial mimicry or a challenge to essentialist
identities?
Colleen Hays, Tennessee Tech University
Re-mapping contemporary Italian identity: Igiaba Scego’s My Home Is Where I Am.
Silvia Caserta, Cornell University
Literature of Immigration as a Local Literature of Europe
Annedith (Aninne) Schneider, Sabanci University

Literature
Life of a Formalist: Vitalistic Imagery in Shklovsky’s Autobiographies

Anastasiya Osipova, New York University
Representing Mimesis: The Worlds of Prose
Adrian Renner, Yale University
Glimpsing at Signs and Things. On the Virtual Creation of Reality by Combining Elements
Steffen Niclas Bodenmiller, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Absence through presence
Beate Fricke, University of California, Berkeley
Location: Cedar A
After Postcolonialism? Literary Aesthetics and the Arab Spring

Michael Allan, University of Oregon
198
Kafka, the Caribbean, and the Holocaust: From Postcolonial Studies to the Rubric of World Liter-
ature
Jason Frydman, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Sounding: Postcolonialism and Precarity in The Hungry Tide

Sarah Lincoln, Portland State University
Location: Aspen
Humor as a Strategy of Protest: Reading Hisaye Yamamoto’s Newspaper Writings on Japanese

Internment
Joan Chiung-huei Chang, National Taiwan Normal University
Costumbrismo in a Shadowed World: Anxiety in Josefina Niggli’s Step Down, Elder Brother
Dora Ramirez-Dhoore, Boise State University
The Poem as Environment: Hybrid Forms and Promiscuous Biology in the Nature Poetry of Aracelis
Girmay
Meg LeMay, The Ohio State University
Location: Room 3002

Circum-Atlantic Anxieties: Inhospitality, Security and the Global “Homeland” in Michael Haneke’s
Caché
Susana Araújo, University of Lisbon
Hospitality and Dataveillance

Jeffrey Clapp, Hong Kong Institute of Education
Insecure Cosmopolitanism: Intimacy and Auto-immunity in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fun-
damentalist
Lindsay Balfour, University of British Columbia
Cosmopolitan Abjection, Cosmopolitan Testimony in an Age of War and Terror

Terri Tomsky, University of Alberta
199
769. Seeing Animals
Location: Room 2902

Recording “ooze, slyme, murk”: Peter Greenaway’s Ethology of Creaturely Putrefaction in A Zed
and Two Noughts
Sarah Bezan, University of Alberta
Dogs and Red Herrings: The Animal in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and The Childhood of Jesus
Eleni Philippou, University of Oxford
Welcome to the Jungle: Framing the Tiger in Postcolonial Texts
Supriya Nair, Tulane University
Visions of Race in Du Chaillu’s Gorilla Country
Brigitte Fielder, University of Wisconsin-Madison
904. Sex/Comedy

Girls and the Feminist Mystique

Zarena Aslami, Michigan State University
Embarrassed Laughter
Jennifer Spitzer, Ithaca College
That’s Not Funny: Feminist Killjoys, Old Women, and Other Scorned Subjects
Melanie Micir, Washington University in St. Louis
The Legitimacy Project
Joseph Lavery, University of California, Berkeley

Location: Kirkland
Conceptualizing Baroque Networks and Complexity

Monika Kaup, University of Washington
200
Impossible Harmonies: Jazz, African-American Literature, and the Neobaroque
Franklin Strong, University of Texas at Austin
Location: Room 3302

The Sectarian Imagination: Fatalism, Extremity, and Apocalyptic Resistance in Contemporary Mid-
dle Eastern Literature
Jason Mohaghegh, Babson College
Response to disasters: creating fictional worlds
Reiko Tachibana, The Pennsylvania State University
The Nation and the Father or When tragedy and trauma collapse. On V. Consolo’s last novel.
Walter Geerts, Antwerp University
Representation as Repetition and Novelty: Reenactments of State-Violence in Si te dicen que caí by
Juan Marsé and Kar by Orhan Pamuk
Basak Candar, Appalachian State University
Ghost Sickness: Beads, Spirits, and Trauma in Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife
Amy Novak, California State University, Fullerton
Location: Boren
There is Neither Accounting for Privilege nor Calculating for Loss

Sharareh Frouzesh, University of California, Irvine
But Do the Musicians Want to Play It? Charles Rosen’s Economics of Culture
Matthew Lau, Queensborough Community College
The Economic Uncanny
Anne Shea, California College of the Arts
201
Entre la hospitalidad y la hostilidad: Inmigración e identidad en dos novelas de Najat El Hachmi
Ana Cornide, University of Arizona
Abreu Adorno’s Gift: Hospitality and the Inhospitable

John Waldron, University of Vermont
Anfitrión perverso en medio de las ruinas: Miro la tierra de JEP

Berenice Villagomez, University of Toronto
Poéticas y meta-historia del Toltecáyotl: Hacia una re-lectura “Antigüedades mexicanas” de José
Emilio Pacheco
Tamara Reed Williams, Pacific Lutheran University
José Emilio Pacheco, Human Rights and the Transnational Perils of Universality
Cynthia Steele, University of Washington
Location: Columbia
Anselm on Nonsense as Proof

Jordan Kirk, Pomona College
Hölderlin’s Entäußerung, or a Kenotic Oscillation

Eric Foster, Brown University
Sentencing God through Metaphor: The Sufi practice of Love

Hicham Kharroub, American University of Beirut
Location: Dashpoint
Nation and Institution vis-à-vis the “Avant-Garde” – Remapping the Storm Society (1932-1935)
Xiaoqing Zhu, Harrisburg Area Community College
Bunker Art/World Car: Cai Guo-qiang’s Global Parataxis

Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
Avant-Garde Sources in the Here and Then: Gao Xingjian’s Wild Men and Cao Yu’s The Wilder-
ness
Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Washington University in St. Louis
202
Location: Room 3102

Art as Event or Practice: The Ethical Unsaid in the Work of Jacques Rancière
Joel Strom, University of Washington
Art as the Occurrence of Political Intervals and Gaps

Eunha Choi, California State University, Long Beach
When Art Doesn’t Happen: A (Contentious) Dialogue between Jacques Rancière’s Esthètique et
Politique and Roberto Bolaño’s Nocturno de Chile
Rebecca Saunders, Illinois State University

The Irreducible Kernel of the Other: A New (Methodology for) Imagining of the Vernacular
Gautam Basu Thakur, Boise State University
Charting An Alternative Memory of the Neoliberal Present: ’Social Movement’ Art in Early Twenty
First Century Calcutta, India
Nandini Dhar, Florida International University
Equal and Separate? ‘Bengali’ and ‘Muslim Bengali’ Literature in the Nineteenth Century
Rini Mehta, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Where in the World is Modern Sanskrit? Locating Language outside the Global/Local Divide
Matthew Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Location: Ravenna A
In the Aftermath: Vulnerability and the Impossibility of Justice in Joshua Oppenheimer’s ’The Look
of Silence’
Alexandra Moore, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
203
Locating the Subject of Torture
Crystal Parikh, New York University
Juridical Sites of Reparative Violence: Ellison and Fanon in Dialogue

Audrey Golden, University of Virginia
Human Rights Doxa: Vulnerability, Ontolology and Epistemology in Normative Human Rights
Belinda Walzer, Northeastern University
Location: Chelan
“Welcome to America’s Second Civil War”: DMZ and the War on Terror
Najwa Al-Tabaa, University of Florida
Drone Visions: Staring Back at the Gorgon

Claudette Lauzon, Ontario College of Art and Design University
Gambing as Warfare: How Hellblazer: Pandemonium Represents the Destruction of the Iraq War
Spencer Chalifour, University of Florida
Bubblegum Depictions of the “Horrors of War”

Gary Mills, United States Air Force Academy
Between Words and Worlds: Poetic Representations of Animal Lives

Ann Marie Thornburg, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
’Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and the Bad Wolf’: Charlotte Mutsaers’s ‘animal’ response to Walt
Disney’s popular animal representation
Barbara Fraipont, Université catholique de Louvain
The Animal, the Aura, and the Politicization of Zoopoetics

Annie Dwyer, University of Washington
204
Location: Madrona
Landscape, National History and Exile: Severo Sarduy, Ramón Alejandro and the Yearning of
Cuban Nature
Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, Boston University
Arborglyphs and the Counter Archive

Thomas Van Camp, Portland State University
The Edible Cabeza de Vaca: Temporalities of Sustenance and an Eco-Feminist Politics of Embodied
Matieralism in Argentina´s Yerba Mate Country
Jennifer Bowles, University of Michigan

Issues in Critical Theorisation : Feminine Voice in Arabic-Islamic Literary Tradition

Amidu Sanni, Lagos State University
A Study in Abstraction: Hassān Ibn Thābit’s Panegyric Elegy for the Prophet
Jamila Davey, University of Texas at Austin
The Spirituality of Humor in Romanian Mythology on Death

Gabriela Vlahovici-Jones, University of Maryland Eastern Shore
Modernity and Religion

Leena Eilitta, University of Helsinki
American Missionary Novels on China: The 1920s

Yi-ling Lin, Tunghai University
205
Chapter 11
Stream C (3:00 – 4:40)
206
Chapter 12
Stream D (5:00 – 6:40)
207
Part IV
Seminar Descriptions
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Chapter 13
Stream A
Organizes:
◦ Rob Alexander, Brock University
This session takes as its central concern an examination of the prominent place which a commitment to
social justice has occupied in the global history of literary journalism, that is, of journalism as literature.
From Nellie Bly’s “undercover” exposé of the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum to Henry Mayhew’s
artful documentation of the lives of the London poor, as well as Svetlana Alexievich’s record of the voices
of the victims of the Chernobyl disaster, and Elena Poniatowska’s influential accounts of the oppressed
and marginalized in Mexico, literary journalists around the world have demonstrated a consistent desire
to address with their stories the unfair distribution of wealth, rights, opportunities, and power. A key
question to be considered is whether literary journalism’s combination of reportorial rigor with the narrative
techniques of fiction make it a uniquely effective vehicle not only for delivering the facts of the lives of
those marginalized because of class, race, gender, sexuality, or ability but of doing so in a way which
provides readers with the possibility of an empathic engagement with those lives and with that engagement,
the opportunity to change attitudes.
Possible topics include but are not limited to
* from Rachel Carson to John Vaillant: the literary journalist as environmental activist * literary journalism
as alternative media * crônicas and the quest for social justice * talking back: literary journalism and the
activist critique of mainstream news * literary journalism: ethics, empathy, and change

eign Cities
Organizes:
209
◦ Paula Park, Ohio University
◦ Ulrich Bach, Texas State University
Colombian author Santiago Gamboa’s last novels are set in major cities such as Jerusalem, Bangkok and
Madrid. Internationally acclaimed directors Wong Kar-wai and Wim Wenders have produced films that
take place in Buenos Aires and Havana. Unlike local artists, foreigners have the freedom of not having
to deal with familiarity. By depicting cities as visitors, they create an aesthetics of the foreign. Moreover,
they confirm that as Borges once proposed, we perceive ourselves best when we are outside our own
culture. What methods do authors and film directors like them employ for works set in cities abroad?
What motivates them to embark on such projects? Are their productions homages to these cities? Do they
dialogue with historical archives and/or fall into reinforcing clichés of these geographical areas? How do
audiences around the world receive their work? We invite proposals on films, visual arts and literary works
that take an alien approach to any city. Please send Ulrich E. Bach (ub10@txstate.edu) and Paula C. Park
(parkp@ohio.edu) a title and a 200-word abstract of your paper.
Organizes:
◦ Bradley King, University of Texas at Austin

◦ Kevin Modestino, Howard University
Americanist Criticism, Back and Forward
For at least the past thirty years, the dominate mode of engaging one’s critical predecessors has been
disavowal: Robyn Wiegman has called it a “refused identification” with a critical past figured as corrupt.
Recently, a handful of Americanists have called on us to reexamine how we think about disciplinary history.
No longer content with simply repudiating the work of past generations for their complicity with hegemonic
power structures, critics including Winfried Fluck, Chris Castiglia, and Jennifer Fleissner, have asked us
to consider how doing so threatens to foster a “self-congratulatory” disciplinary myth of “progress towards
the present moment,” and they have challenged us to devise new ways conceptualizing critical history. This
work has appeared in prominent publications, but it is not yet clear what its implications are, or whether
any lasting disciplinary shift has taken place. Heeding these calls for cultivating new relationships with
the disciplinary past, this seminar aims to scrutinize and seek alternatives to the denunciatory mode of
engaging our critical predecessors.
We are interested in how we might engage with foundational, but now disreputable, figures from mid-
century criticism like F.O Matthiessen, Newton Arvin, Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase and Leslie Fiedler
without either condemning or celebrating them. The New Americanists of the 80s and 90s exposed their
complicity with various hegemonies—patriarchal, imperial and racial. But these older critics also wrote
beyond familiar Cold War concerns with communism and U.S. Hegemony. Indeed, they engaged several
global politic concerns that continue to animate Americanist criticism, including: increasingly homopho-
bic legal and professional pressures, the rapid globalization of capital, decolonization, and the growth of
religious fundamentalism. We also want to consider the critical contributions of figures who have written
about American literature and engaged with Americanist critics, but who have been neglected in our criti-
cal histories—figures such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, C.L.R. James, and Hannah Arendt, to name
210
a few.
In an effort to extend and reanimate the project of critical self-reflexivity, we invite panelists to explore the
following questions:
- What is at stake in how we narrate the history of criticism?
- What might be gained from returning to forgotten, dismissed, or neglected critics?
-How might returning to them help us to cultivate less denunciatory critical identities?
- What was gained through the political critique of older critical formations? What might be lost in calling
this critique into question?
- What could be gained from reading our critical predecessors in terms other than critique?
- What new critical practices and attitudes might emerge from acknowledging the deep genealogies of our
textual attachments and of our political desires as critics?
- How have the relationships between critic and text and critic and audience changed over the last century?
What is at stake in these changes?
- What would it look like to read criticism as a “primary” rather than “secondary” text?
- Can we read criticism as a “literary” genre?
After Sedgwick
Organizes:
◦ Jenny James, Pacific Lutheran University

◦ Olivia Gunn, Pacific Lutheran University
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick begins her early essay “Tales of the Avunculate” (1990) with the following line:
“Let’s begin – but only because everyone else does – with the Name of the Father” (52). After Sedgwick,
might we begin elsewhere? Sedgwick’s seminal concept of the “avunculate” resisted redemptive interpre-
tations of literature and the family, opening up “some alternative approaches” to understanding desire and
subjectivity outside the norms of reproductive heterosexuality. More than twenty years after its publica-
tion, Sedgwick’s queries and concerns remain relevant, as we persist in the mode with which she closes her
essay: how can we stop redeeming the family? We seek to return to the question of the queer “avunculate,”
as we identify new avenues, themes, and structures for understanding the extra-nuclear, non-reproductive
family in literature and culture. Uncles – in the tradition of Uncle Tom – can serve, in their emasculated
tenderness, to normalize pernicious racial divides. Unmarried aunts can appear as the apotheosis of femi-
ninity, their clean morality making them both desirable, and terrifying. Cousins, whether kissing or twice
removed, can challenge the very basis of blood family, and its taboo against incest and intermarriage.
What roles do aunts, uncles – and cousins – play in pedagogies of not simply gender and sexuality, but
race, ethnicity and citizenship? How might a return to early debates around kinship and subjectivity help
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us to readdress the redemption/repair and anti-futurity/utopianism conflicts that haunt queer studies? We
welcome work on aunts and uncle from all disciplinary, generic, and critical persuasions.
Organizes:
◦ Sarah Townsend, University of South Dakota

◦ Meltem Gurle, Bogazici University
What is the fate of the Bildungsroman in late modernity? While some scholars claim that the genre is
defunct, too entrenched in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European bourgeois ideals to speak to the
conditions of late modernity, many others have argued forcefully for its continued relevance. As authors
from disparate corners of the world return to the model of human and societal development emplotted in
the Bildungsroman, they modify the genre in ways that expand, critique, and upturn its original tenets.
Recent scholarship has shown how world literary texts call upon the Bildungsroman for varied purposes:
to articulate human rights, to challenge statist and neoliberal development, and to forge alternative local
and transnational solidarities.
This seminar proceeds from the renewed critical interest in the Bildungsroman, seeking to generate a com-
parative conversation about the persistence of the genre within world literature. Our central concern will
be to investigate the diverse forms and contexts through which the concept of Bildung is reimagined in the
late nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. We welcome both specific case studies and broader theoret-
ical and/or literary considerations. Potential panelists might consider, but are not limited to, the following
questions:
–What forms of political engagement or critique has the Bildungsroman facilitated? How do authors rec-
oncile the genre’s Enlightenment and state-oriented foundations to its latter-day political allegiances?
–What literary modes does it employ? Has the genre advanced formally from its realist origins?
–How does the genre accommodate forms of uneven and/or under-development? The Bildungsroman has
been described, alternately, as teleological and tautological. Can it successfully narrate contexts wherein
development halts, regresses, or proceeds in fits and starts?
–Which specific traditions have coalesced around the Bildungsroman? Can we identify a body of post-
colonial, peripheral, immigrant, minoritarian, feminist, and/or queer Bildungsromane?
–How does the Bildungsroman, well-traveled as a companion narrative to imperialism, participate in and/or
challenge newer routes of global capitalism? In particular, what is its role within the global literary mar-
ketplace, the educational marketplace, or the tourism industry?
–To what extent can the human-oriented Bildungsroman speak to forms of posthuman inquiry?
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731. Breakdown
Organizes:
◦ Cynthia Dobbs, University of the Pacific

◦ Daphne Lamothe, Smith College
The papers in this seminar explore artistic responses to ”breakdown” in its most capacious sense: the
fracturing, dissolution, or collapse of the political, psychological, corporeal, temporal, spiritual, economic,
technological, narrative, and/or linguistic order. Our panel ponders art in the face of trench warfare, botched
executions, dissent, impasse, aphasia, broken bodies, the dissolution of the human and/or the humanities,
and toppled monuments signaling the end of dominion. Some presenters examine representations of the
conditions that catalyze disruptive events, others ask under what conditions might the crisis of ”breaking
down” produce slippages or openings that allow breakthrough.
782. Childish Forms
Organizes:
◦ Natalia Cecire, University of Sussex

◦ Julian Gill-Peterson, Rutgers University
Childish Forms
This seminar takes stock of the peculiar investments in form that collect under the signs of the child,
childhood, and childishness. A certain concept of plasticity and potentiality gives form to the modern
child both as a cultural figure and a material body, but this seminar aims to experiment with doing more
than only identifying that metonymy. How can we understand “form,” through the child, in terms that are
simultaneously aesthetic, political and material? What does the accusation or affirmation of childishness do
to form? What are the forms that children take in response to that accusation, or in ignoring it? How does
form become childish? What are childish forms of literature, media, or film and, conversely, what forms
are proscribed for children? How does the plasticity of childish forms participate in neoliberal regimes of
flexible labor, technological change, or reproductive futurity?
Papers in this seminar might explore, but are not limited to: concepts and affects associated with child-
ishness (e.g., precociousness, innocence, cuteness, mischief, naiveté, rebelliousness, “formlessness”); for-
malism in literatures and media dealing with the child; specific forms that children take (e.g., through race,
gender, sexuality, class, disability); children’s and YA genres; pedagogy and education; childhood and
performance; and biopower as formation.
Organizes:
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◦ Travis Landry, Kenyon College
This seminar invites paper proposals that reconsider the time and place of Federico García Lorca’s work.
From poetry to theater to the visual arts to cinema, Lorca’s creative output drew from a range of periods,
traditions, and disciplines. It also had an impact both in and beyond Spain that should provoke us to
reimagine the same Spain within new networks of cultural production. Of particular interest, therefore, are
papers with transnational or multilingual focus, as well as those that are not limited to the twentieth century.
Likewise, it will be important to address the many ways in which such approaches might complicate or
enhance the broad corpus of scholarship that already exists on this canonical figure. Can certain theoretical
positions, for example, become more meaningful with shifts in the context from which we examine Lorca’s
concerns? Can his personal history or afterlife in the popular imagination raise questions about the way
Spanish literature is studied or taught more generally? Has his importance overshadowed less-known
artists of his circle or issues that do not conform to traditional narratives about Spain’s literary history? In
sum, this seminar aims to model emerging trends in comparative world literature through a conscientious
privileging of how and why we read. At the same time, because Lorca’s complex legacy makes him a
natural fit for such inquiry, we might also find that he confounds these very methodologies in unforeseen
ways.
Organizes:
◦ David Damrosch, Harvard University

◦ Louise Nilsson, Uppsala University
Crime fiction is one of the most widespread of all literary genres. Crime novels are read worldwide, and
crime writers around the world inspire each other. Further, crime fiction also gives a fascinating case of a
genre that crosses the borders from elite works (Sophocles, Dostoevsky, Pamuk) to popular fiction closely
intertwined with the development of today’s consumer society. The point of departure for this seminar
is the question of world literature in relation to society, for which crime fiction offers a particularly rich
area of inquiry. The aim is to discuss how the crime genre opens up exciting new ways to think about
globalized literary production, quite beyond common understandings of the diffusion of the novel from
European centers to nonwestern peripheries. By bringing crime fiction into the sphere of world literature,
the seminar will open up discussion about the transnational flow of literature in the globalized mediascape
of contemporary popular culture, in a global genre brought to bear on local settings, histories, and markets.

Organizes:
◦ Jennifer Reimer, Bilkent University

◦ Michael Subialka, Oxford University
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This seminar emerges at the intersection of pedagogy and research to explore how the teaching of com-
parative literature outside the cartographies of the US academy enriches, challenges, informs, and perhaps
transforms our own work as scholars. We are interested in work that explores how working in a transna-
tional or international context challenges scholars to re-think pedagogy and cross borders in the classroom,
but also how these challenges and innovations have led to new epistemologies. This framework poses a
series of questions we seek to explore. What is the difference between the transnational and international
in comparative literary studies and how does this become part of our pedagogy and scholarship? In what
ways do the personal and academic aspects of international scholarship interact: how do the everyday
(daily life) personal experiences of working, living, and teaching in foreign institutions challenge scholars
to move beyond comparing texts from different traditions, and actually translate (or not) those different
traditions in the classroom and in their research? Is scholarship created outside the US academy by US
scholars always already international, and what kind of comparative framework is needed to contextualize
it? What kinds of international networks, created through circulation, travel, the technologies of moder-
nity can help to sustain international solidarity amongst scholars working abroad? How can we facilitate
better connections with international institutions that can lead to productive collaborations? How then, do
we as comparative literature scholars working in transnational or international contexts, ”translate” those
experiences into our research? Thus, our central research question is: how can the teaching comparative
literature outside the USA create new forms of knowledge that push the boundaries of comparative literary
studies?
Organizes:
◦ Hisaaki Wake, Bates College

◦ Keijiro Suga, Meiji University
This seminar introduces ecocriticism and ecocritical studies prominent in Japan. Historically speaking,
American ecological movements have provided significant inspiration for equivalent movements to take
root in modern Japan, but language and cultural barriers have impeded the introduction of Japanese ec-
ocritical studies to English-speaking audiences. We believe that the fear and anxiety stemming from the
recent nuclear power plant accidents of Fukushima can be empathetically shared among global citizens,
and that such local considerations of ecocriticism can inspire new critical and expressive discourses in a
globalized context. Questions to be asked include: Are there Japan-specific aspects of ecocriticism? What
is the effect of ecocriticism as a driving force of ecology movements and environmental activism? Why
do borderlines between humans and non-humans seem to be blurred particularly in representations of na-
ture prevalent in Japanese works of art? What is the danger of translation in circulating ecocritical texts
translated into English, and not in the original language?
Organizes:
◦ Hiroki Yoshikuni, University of Tokyo
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Although it was significantly eclipsed by the United States and the Soviet Union in the last century, Eu-
rope was once a name for total domination of the world, a name that not only commanded cultural and
political authority but also was—and still is—tied up with memories of its violence and crime. Frantz
Fanon famously declared, “leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men
everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.”
On the other hand, however, there is a sense of incompleteness about this name. Jacques Derrida noted
that retaining “a virgin body” the name of Europe might “mask something that does not yet have a face.”
In philosophy, especially in the tradition of phenomenology, as Rodolphe Gasché has recently pointed out,
the name has been thought as the “infinite task” of thinking and accomplishing universality, and because
the task is infinite, Europe is also a project that is yet to be finished, or perhaps begun. We do not know yet
what Europe is and will be. At the risk of being anachronistic, and in an effort to avoid being Eurocentric
as well, this seminar seeks to examine critically the concept of Europe in philosophy, literature, and other
areas of humanities. Seminar topics are not limited to those which directly concern Europe but also include
responses it has evoked outside Europe, as well as its relations and interactions with other concepts that
bear geographical names, such as the Americas, Asia, Africa, Oceania, or the Third World as declared
in the Bandung Conference. As Europa was not a European but, according to Herodotus, “an Asiatic,”
Europe has its origin(s) in its others.
Organizes:
◦ Gretchen Busl, Texas Woman’s University
Over the last twenty years, a considerable amount of scholarship has focused on the idea of world litera-
ture as a function of transmission and reception, rather than a body of canonical texts. This focus on how
literature moves across boundaries - geographic, linguistic, and cultural - through the processes of trans-
lation and publication, often on a macro or global scale, is often understood as a rejection of close reading
methods. This seminar, however, challenges scholars to find the global in the particular. We begin from
the assumption that authors are well aware of the multiple potential audiences a text may enjoy, and of the
processes through which the text may circulate. Therefore, we seek papers that explore self-conscious and
meta-fictional representations of the processes of translation, publication, and reception. We are particu-
larly interested in texts that fictionalize the circulation of texts across borders - that are, in essence, clear
manifestations of the world literature phenomenon. What can we learn about the movement of texts from
any one particular text? If we may consider world literature to be a mode of reading, how can a text that
presents itself as a ”fiction of circulation” demonstrate that world literature is a mode of writing, as well?
Organizes:
◦ Stephen Tardif, Harvard University

◦ Stephen Thompson, Cornell University
216
Form and its Function: the Practices of Literary Production
The intersection between literature and its various contexts has been at issue since the beginnings of insti-
tutionalized criticism, becoming a special focus for scholarship since the 1980s. But, although it is often
read as a witness to the conditions of its own production, literature itself is seldom seen as a part of the
conditioning which produces it; the work implicit in the literary work of art is often ignored. Our seminar
invites participants to explore the neglected formative dimension of literary production, and to investi-
gate the processes and the practices which the creation of literature produces and requires. Participants
might contribute reflections on the formation enacted by established institutions, disciplines, and genres;
the techniques of self-formation deployed by individual authors; or the relationship between the practice
of literature and specific places, publications, or regimens of self-care. Questions which participants might
address include:
— What are the historical arenas of literary self-formation? (The university, the writers’ colony, the café,
the reading group, the salon, the boulevard, the garret?) How might these sites influence the practices that
writers deploys?
— How might literary form itself entail techniques of self-formation? What role would an artist’s adherence
to (or deviation from) an accepted form play in such practices?
— How might academic disciplines or public institutions influence artists’ strategies of self-formation?
How might they, in fact, limit such strategies?
— In what ways might the exigencies of serial or periodical publication offer authors regimens of self-
formation?
— How have strategies of public self-fashioning overlapped (or conflicted) with the practices of self-
formation?
— Do practices of literary self-formation amount (or aspire) to self-therapy? Alternatively, can the pro-
duction of literature be seen as self-destructive? And can the writing of literary criticism participate in
either of these modes?
Organizes:
◦ Tom Eyers, Duquesne University

◦ Mary Mullen, Texas Tech University
Panel Proposal: Form As/Against History
Anglophone literary criticism of the last 60 years or so can be understood as having revolved around two
fundamental centers of concern: history and form. Upon the ascendency of the New Critics in the 1950s, a
telescoped attention to the modulations of figural language held sway, one then radicalized and decentered
by deconstruction in the 1970s. During the 1980s, the creative reinvention of the notion of historical context
occupied those loosely grouped as New Historicists. The New Critics wrote about history, of course, and
the New Historicists had much to say about textual composition, but history and form have too often been
217
arranged largely in opposition. The late essays of Paul de Man promised a radical articulation of the two,
albeit one premised more on the reinvention of textuality itself as a kind of non-empirical, non-teleological
instance of historical shock; notwithstanding the work of a committed few, this particular angle hasn’t been
pursued. This seminar will plot a new course, one that will hold to both formal and historical truths while
refusing to collapse the one into the other.
With the proliferation in recent years of niche methodologies and the rise of the digital humanities, there is a
danger that the fundamental and productive difficulty of the articulation of history and form will be covered
over in favor of the quicker and easier results of ever-more dazzling technological solutions. In turn, the
increasing support for the politics of formlessness by certain strands of affect theory, the anti-social thesis
in queer theory, and the universalizing methodologies of object-oriented ontology, risk relegating form to
the past by presenting it as an obsolete and politically backward methodology. Any contemporary critical
approach to this age-old dilemma must first define its terms: what, after all, is literary form, and why do
we tend to think of it in separate terms to the historical time within which, and upon which, it acts? There
may well be ample grounds for maintaining an analytical separation between the two, not least so that we
may then plot the impact of one upon the other, but what is the nature of that distance, and what are the
consequences of its precipitous collapse in neo-empirical and digital methodologies – if, indeed, this is
what results from the latter? How might we make use of the creative avenues opened up by the digital turn
while remaining skeptical of its claims to disciplinary salvation?
Conversely, what is history, and why do we so often overlook the means by which literary form can itself
create its own historical time, its own center of temporal gravity? These questions will be the focus of this
ambitious seminar, even as it will ravenously take in many cognate issues besides. We will pursue ways in
which to hold history and form productively in tension, while nonetheless questioning their arrangement in
any absolute dichotomy. Just as importantly, we will investigate how a political focus, far from inevitably
neutralizing the knotty intractabilities of literary form in favor of a model of causality passing simply from
context to text, may in fact find in those very textual inscrutabilities symptoms that point to an ever-richer
model of political and literary understanding per se.
Organizes:
◦ Rochelle Tobias, Johns Hopkins University
Few poets have devoted as much of their work to rivers as Friedrich Hölderlin, who consistently turns
in his work to rivers to explore the relationship between Germany and Greece, modernity and antiquity,
and finally Hesperian pathos and “Junonian sobriety.” (Hölderlin introduces the latter two categories in
a now famous letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff from December 1801.) Yet the rivers poems need
not be interpreted solely within this historical-philosophical scheme, which began with Winckelmann and
culminated in Heidegger, especially in his lectures on “Germania” and “The Rhine.” Rather the figure of
rivers provides Hölderlin with an occasion to reflect on the relation of part to whole that dominated much
of his theoretical writing on poetry as well as his thoughts on the being, or nature, of nature. Drawing on
Heraclitus’ famous dictum “Everything flows” (panta rhei), Hölderlin traces the course of rivers to show
how a body can change and still remain the same—how it can be unified in spite of the differences that
divide it, which is as much a condition of rivers as of the world. This panel invites contributions that
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consider the significance of Hölderlin’s notion of part and whole as well as identity and difference for
German Idealism in general and Schelling and Hegel in particular. Further questions include: How can the
unity of what is divided be represented? To what degree does its representation depend on what Hölderlin
called “the streaming word”? The panel also invites contributions on Hölderlin’s theory of voice, tone, and
melody, as developed in his essays. Of particular interest are papers that address the link between rivers in
Hölderlin’s poetry and the Platonic notion of enthusiasm or madness, itself described in fluid terms in the
Phaedrus. Further topics include: the problem of origins; tragic prosody; the temporality of poetry; and
finally the importance of Hölderlin’s rivers for such modern works as Ponge’s The River Seine and Rilke’s
Tenth Duino Elegy.
Organizes:
◦ David Fieni, SUNY College at Oneonta

◦ Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki, Occidental College
This seminar explores the ways that racism, understood as both a discourse and a commodity, operates as
a fungible good that is traded within political economies on the global scene. Racist concepts and images
have long shaped physical objects, such as toys and games, that circulate in national and transnational
markets; such objects facilitate the consumption of racism, but can also introduce racial concepts and
images to emerging markets: children, for example, or societies with little or no history of racialization.
How, then, have racist concepts in other modes (e.g., literature, philosophy, and film) been exported to, and
naturalized within, societies where such concepts had not previously taken hold? How might we account
for cases where proactive interest in actively importing racist ideas is exercised? How do foreign ideas
and images of race graft onto local ones, and how does foreign racism become internalized (naturalized)
to the point of becoming a core part of an essentialized version of the society into which it was imported?
We are also interested in thinking about how anti-racist activism, thought, and cultural production respond
to the shifting markets of racialization in transnational space.
We seek papers that attend to the mutations of racial theories and images in the half-hidden hegemonies
of the so-called ”marketplace of ideas.” Especially welcome are contributions that consider the economic
function(s) of racial discourse, and/or the modes in which racism gets bought and sold in different kinds
of economic systems in different stages of economic development.

Literature
Organizes:
◦ Yu Min Claire Chen , St Mary’s College of Maryland

◦ Juyoung Jin, Sogang University
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“And when, in the city in which I love you,� even my most excellent song goes unanswered,� and I mount
the scabbed streets,� the long shouts of avenues,� and tunnel sunken night in search of you...” (Li Young
Lee)
At the turning of the twentieth century, with the rapid rise of modern industrial nations utilizing military
power and sea exploration, the east encountered the west more fully than ever before. Within the backdrop
of modernization, globalization, internal strife and international wars followed by colonization among
nations; competition, conflict and influences across nations became evident. Social, economic structure,
and traditional values had been confronted, challenged, and overturned. The panel solicits papers to explore
literary works from the list below:
• The impacts of international/ internal wars, such as life changing events, changes of values, identities,
languages. Perspectives from different nations on the same war. • The destruction and construction of
cities. City as a symbol of loss, nostalgia toward the past, uncertainties toward the future, decadence,
energy. City as a space of heaven/ infernal, a space that conjures up the past in ruins, making stories and
dreams turn real. • Tragedy, trauma, and memories between the collective and the individual. Different
literary genres that depict narratives of memories.
Organizes:
◦ Maya-Angela Smith, University of Washington

◦ Livi Yoshioka-Maxwell, Pomona College
Operating in liminal spaces, multilingual figures, in literature as in history, represent the quintessential
marginality of subjects operating between languages and cultures. For instance, La Malinche, the sixteenth-
century Nahua woman who would become Hernán Cortés’s slave, interpreter, and mother to his son in
Mexico, occupied the fluid spaces of the contact zone, a position that has rendered her a deeply ambiguous
figure in the Mexican imaginary. But while her biography is familiar to many critics in the fields of early
modern literature and cultural studies, she–like other historical multilingual subjects–has elicited relatively
little interest from linguistics scholars. In this seminar, we hope to bring together papers from many dis-
ciplines in order to explore questions of legitimacy as it is constructed through narratives of multilingual
subjects. We define subject as “a symbolic entity that is constituted and maintained through symbolic sys-
tems such as language. It is not given, but has to be consciously constructed against the backdrop of natural
and social forces that both bring it into being and threaten to destroy its freedom and autonomy” (Kramsch,
2009, 17). In exploring identity construction through language use, we are interested in questions such as
the following: What does it mean to be a legitimate speaker of any language? How does the act of narra-
tivizing a subject’s life offer opportunities for critical self-reflexivity? The interdisciplinary dimensions of
this seminar respond to the need for new categories for understanding the relationship between linguistics
and literature, a problematic that crystallizes around the question of linguistic legitimacy.
• urban centers as multilingual spaces
• language classroom as liminal space
• figure of the translator and / or interpreter
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• translation as transgression
• intersections of linguistic, cultural, and national identity
• interdisciplinary approaches to narrative analysis
• linguistic prestige (perceptions of different linguistic codes)
Organizes:
◦ Michael Lucey, University of California, Berkeley

◦ Tristram Wolff, Northwestern University
This seminar proposes to explore how the concept of language-in-use, as developed in the field of linguis-
tic anthropology, might enliven the study of literary and other cultural texts. Linguistic-anthropological
studies of language-in-use have developed precise ways of thinking about context not so much as usually
invoked in literary studies (e.g. situating a work in “historical context”), but as a dynamic, on-going pro-
cesses of contextualization or entextualization. Seeing literature as language-in-use will entail readings
focused less on the realm of text-artifacts themselves (e.g. readings about the relations between one text
and another, or between a text and accounts of its historical and cultural surroundings), and more on the
interactivity of literary texts within a broad range of cultural processes. It may also involve shifts in at-
tention from solidified text-artifacts to ongoing interactive processes of utterance and uptake, or from the
semantic or representational to the pragmatic and social indexical. It may involve imagining various kinds
of socio-textual arrays in which to suspend literary texts in order to view their interactivity. These arrays
could allow something different from what we usually think of as reading: they might enable us to capture
a moment of process that helps shape what a text comes to mean. We imagine that participants in the
seminar will share a sense that to grasp the relation between a work’s meaning and the history of its use by
various readers and institutions will require accepting that meaning is never simply in things; it happens
to them in their use.
Organizes:
◦ Kaitlin Murphy, University of Arizona
In the wake of decades of dictatorship, civil war, and conflict in countries across the Global South, the
question of how to reconcile with past violence and move toward a more peaceful future has often focused
on the role of testimony. And yet, trauma and testimony theory has tended to focus almost entirely on
verbal testimony and its inescapable limitations, without a consideration for the other ways in which tes-
timony, witnessing, and communicating about trauma might productively emerge in other mediums, such
as documentary film, theater, and so on. Thus, this seminar aims to explore how affect, haunting, place,
memory, and testimony in diverse forms both trouble and offer new insights into the relations between
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these concepts and practices more broadly. We hope to explore questions such as: What is the relation-
ship between affect and the visual? Between affect, bodies, haunting, and practices of remembering? What
might we discover by theorizing together about these diverse intersections in disparate moments and times?
We welcome papers engaging with these questions or, more generally, with questions of memory, visual
culture, affect, and bodies.
742. Mimeses
Organizes:
◦ Eric Hayot, Pennsylvania State University

◦ Christopher Bush, Northwestern University
In the closing pages of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach laments the increasing standardization of culture on a
global scale: “There are no longer even exotic peoples [. . .] an economic and cultural leveling process
is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be
visible.” The famously melancholic tone of the book’s conclusion reflects not only Auerbach’s exile and
the self-destruction of European culture during the Second World War, but also the loss of distinctly national
literatures –the very theme he will more famously take up in “Philology and World Literature” a few years
later.
And yet common life –in a different but perhaps related sense—is the hero of Auerbach’s book: the emer-
gence of the iridisch (“secular”) the becomes the subject of literature and the mixing of genres that was the
precondition for “the representation of reality in Western literature.”
How does the common whose emergence Auerbach so meticulously tracks over the course of his critical
epic relate to the common world culture he envisions at the end? How is this world present throughout the
work? Does thinking of Mimesis this way reinforce the conventional reading of it as a Eurocentric work
or does it open new possibilities for world literary historiography? How does realism as a literary mode
rely on or subvert the national?
Organizes:
◦ Rebecca Falkoff, New York University

◦ Kimberly Adams, New York University
“More Things Theory” continues the dialogue that began at the 2014 ACLA “Things Theory: Accumula-
tion and Amassment” seminar to reflect on the recent emergence of a marked cultural interest in hoarding.
We will consider the contemporary invention of the hoarder within a broader literary and cultural context
that encompasses other figures defined by their attachments to things (collectors, fetishists, misers), and/or
by a horror of wasting and/or subsistence on waste (ragpickers, gleaners).
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The seminar will also address theoretical questions about the aesthetics of hoarding: What narrative and
stylistic features suggest the act of hoarding, and/or the hoard? What temporalities are implicit in or pro-
duced by the collection, archive, or hoard, and what are the narrative implications of such temporalities?
What aesthetic or ideological work is performed by the representation of a multitude of objects? What
ideas about uselessness, waste, ruination, decay, and squalor are at stake in contemporary hoarding dis-
course? We also welcome papers that consider hoarding in relation to digital technologies, and reflect on
the possibility of digital hoarding.
We welcome new papers from participants in last year’s seminar and new submissions.
Organizes:
◦ Mark Freed, Central Michigan University

◦ Doris McGonagill, Utah State University
Negotiating the Complementarity of Literature and Philosophy
We hope to use the occasion of this seminar to sketch a genealogy of appeals to the literary as complement
to/completion of philosophy, particularly with the intention of thinking past antithetical confrontations of
these terms. The investigation might initially be organized around two questions: what aspects of the
philosophical become problematic from the perspective of the literary, and what specific features of the
literary allow it to complement/expand/augment philosophy?
Ideally presentations will be simultaneously critical and theoretical reflections drawing on specific his-
torical examples to illustrate the possibilities they make available beyond their own historical moments.
In particular we welcome contributions that identify exemplary paradigms of a symbiotic/complementary
relationship between the literary and the philosophical.
We are seeking an historical range of treatments that might include but not be limited to such efforts as
Montaigne’s, Jena Romanticism, Dilthey’s broadening of the Kantian framework, Nietzsche’s promotion
of the literary, as well as more recent reflections (e.g., Blanchot, Blumenberg on metaphorology).
Rather than the reading of formal papers, we are hoping to conduct the seminar as a series of conversa-
tions initiated by short presentations. To facilitate this organization, we anticipate pre-circulating abstracts
and/or primary readings among seminar participants.
Organizes:
◦ David Kurnick, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

◦ Yoon Sun Lee, Wellesley College
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Until recently, criticism of the novel has assumed that what counts in the novel is the unit of the individual
character. Yet even in the classic accounts of the novel’s individualism, fictional character counts and is
counted because it is always more and less than itself: representative, typical, a concrete universal, etc.
Meanwhile, fiction’s intimate, sometimes antagonistic relation to the sciences of the social has guaranteed
the novel’s charged negotiation with statistics, social typology, and the idea of the multiple.
Convinced that the literary-aesthetic dimensions of these questions are all the more urgent in the era of
big data, we invite a range of approaches to the numerical and the quantitative in the history of the novel.
Among the questions we hope to address: How, and what do novels actually count? Do novels want us to
keep count? Is counting a form of abstraction, a link to the empirical, a disciplinary technique, the very
form of politics itself? How is the social quantified by fiction, if at all? What multifarious assemblages
does the novel set in play and how do they function? How do distinct genres—romance, sci-fi, mystery,
“literary” fiction, realism (magical, social, and otherwise)—think and feel multiplicity?
We welcome considerations of novels from all periods and languages from a variety of theoretical ap-
proaches, including but not limited to narrative theory, affect theory, queer theory, Marxism, ethnic and
minority studies, post-colonial studies, and digital humanities.
686. On Personhood
Organizes:
◦ Shari Goldberg, University of Texas at Dallas

◦ Daniel Stout, University of Mississippi
Formulations like “the modern subject” or “the liberal subject” belie the many alternative and competing
forms of personhood that have emerged over the past 200 years. This seminar is interested in chronicling
and exploring some of these alternatives.
A provisional list of formations that require us to rethink the person would include: the modern corporation
(both for- and non-profit); theories of public feeling, group psychology, collective action, and popular
representation; as well as recent work in cognitive science, moral and political philosophy, and the critical
humanities.
Topics that might be addressed include • affect • agency • anthropocene-ism • law • liberalism • materialism
• neoliberalism • psychology • responsibility • sociology
We will be particularly interested in papers that can put current theoretical interests (e.g. the anthropocene)
or recent political developments (e.g. corporate personhood) in historical context or in relation to questions
of aesthetic/literary form.
Organizes:
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◦ Matthew Keegan, New York University
◦ Kelly Tuttle, Earlham College
The pre-modern Islamicate traditions produced vast amounts of commentary on poetry, prose, literary
criticism, scripture, law, philosophy, prophetic sayings, and more. However, these commentarial texts
practices, with the possible exception of Qur’anic exegesis, have received very little attention. The study
of pre-modern Arabic texts often remains implicitly committed to a romantic notion of authorial genius and
agency, which marginalizes commentary as derivative and decadent despite its centrality to adab culture,
intellectual production, and pedagogical practices. This seminar seeks to bring together scholars work-
ing on all forms of commentary with a special focus on pre-modern Arabic literature. While considering
questions of textual reception, this seminar aims to go beyond approaches that reinforce commentary’s
dependence on previous texts to consider the implications of ”extra-textual” practices as a dominant intel-
lectual mode. We encourage submissions on pre-modern commentarial practices, literary and otherwise.
Special attention will be given to Arabic and traditions broadly defined as ”Islamicate” (including Persian,
Turkish, Urdu, and Hebrew).
Possible topics include but are not limited to: - Examining the social and intellectual stakes and contexts
of commentary. - Textual reception and its discontents. - The concept of a classic and commentarial
practice. - The relationship between gloss, marginalia, and commentary on the one hand and notions of
authorship, audience, and textuality on the other. - Material culture, history of the book, and illustrations
as commentary. - The functions and formats of extra-textual material: Making information accessible
(indexes, summaries), obscuring text, and displacing text.
Organizes:
◦ Anna Rosensweig, University of Southern California

◦ Joy Palacios , Simon Fraser University
This seminar investigates how literature contributes to our understanding of early modern France as a
historical period. Departing from the conviction that literature does more than merely register and re-
flect historical events, we explore how literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries
complicate historical records and create their own histories. Bringing together scholars whose research
addresses a range of genres and sites of expression, this seminar seeks to foster methodological conversa-
tion and debate. Our key questions include: How do literary texts “perform” historically. In other words,
what do these texts preserve or transfer that might otherwise be lost? What kinds of archives do literary
texts constitute? How might these archives inform perceptions of the early modern as such? We welcome
proposals that engage with genres such as theater or the novel, as well as genres less often read for their
literarity, such as political pamphlets or sermons. Participants are invited to consider how literature takes
up concepts that have long shaped historical accounts of the early modern, from absolutism to libertinage.
Participants might also explore how literary texts and archives imagine forms of change and continuity.
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Literature
Organizes:
◦ Matthew Miller, Washington University in Saint Louis

◦ Fatemeh Keshavarz, University of Maryland
Desire—from its mundane forms to its sublime varieties—has played a central role in Persian literature
from its inception to the modern period. It drives the plots of romantic epics, animates the imagery of
amatory lyrics (ghazal) and the introits (nasib) of panegyrics, and is undoubtedly one of the most impor-
tant theoretical topics for both Islamic mystics (sufis) and legal scholars alike. This seminar will seek to
bring together a range of scholars from the different time periods of the Persian literary tradition to analyze
the wide variety of ways in which desire has been represented, imagined, and discursively constructed in
Persian literature. Seminar participants will be strongly encouraged to address the implications that these
“permutations of desire” have for larger theoretical debates on gender, sexuality, “modernity,” mysticism,
intertextuality, etc., or bring their papers into conversation with other bodies of scholarship on patronage
relationships, genre theory, or other relevant political, theological, or legal issues. Papers that critically
assess the application of Euro-American theory to premodern and modern Persian literature are also wel-
comed. This seminar will be open to scholars of all time periods of Persian literature with the hope that
chronological diversity will produce some (preliminary) insights on the genealogies of different forms of
desire in the Persian literary tradition.
Organizes:
◦ Jeannine Pitas, University of Toronto

◦ Aga Bijos, University of Toronto
Poetry is the language of subversion. It is a linguistic mode where rules are broken and foundations are
shaken, where reality twists and changes its shape, where metaphors startle and confound us. As linguist
and philosopher of language Ivonne Bordelois comments in her essay La palabra amenazada (The threat-
ened word), “When Plato expels the poets from his city, he is recognizing the capacity for subversion that
poetry carries. The contemporary city certainly is not platonic, but still patriarchal and authoritative; it
remains suspicious of the poetic word’s disruptive powers, and it thus confines poetry to the catacombs”
(29).
Nevertheless, since the time of Plato, poets have dared to challenge the rules and norms that govern our
language and, as a consequence, our thought. At times, this challenge is direct and explicit; on other other
occasions, the rebellion is much more subtle; it does not seek to make its voice loud, to be heard over the din
of chanting crowds and political speeches. Rather, it works through a quiet subversion, often at the level
of ambiguous metaphors and implicit alternate meanings. This seminar seeks to explore the relationship
between poetry and politics – particularly when that relationship is not immediately apparent. How does
poetry constitute a discourse of resistance? Can we legitimately make a case that poetry is unique among
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other arts in developing this subversive discourse? If so, how? Open to scholars working in all languages
and historical periods, this seminar seeks to explore the subversive potential of poetry from a wide variety
of perspectives.
Organizes:
◦ Brandon Manning, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

◦ Brad Freeman, Ohio State University
As Henry Louis Gates Jr. articulates in Signifying Monkey, the relationship between form and race are
inextricably bound to historical ways of verbal and authorial resistance. The increased rhetoric and defini-
tions of post-racialism both inside and outside the academy bring new ways of understanding the relation-
ship between race and form in literature and other cultural productions. This panel seeks to illuminate and
interrogate the relationship between form, race, and resistance in narratives from the mid-20th to late 20th
century. This seminar is interested in understanding how different forms help to construct or erase racial
boundaries. In addition, we seek to interrogate the potential for these forms to serve as type of narrative
resistance, both within the larger matrix of American literature, as well as to highlight the ways that authors
narrate moments of resistance in their works.
631. Relatedness
Organizes:
◦ Brian Price, University of Toronto

◦ Martin Wallen, Oklahoma State University
In recent years, relationality has come under dispute in critical theory and comparative literature/media.
Object oriented ontologists and network theorists have criticized the anthropocentrism of the “for us”
relation that has dominated not only categorical determinations between humans and animals, but also
metaphor and representation, restricting aesthetic experience to models of mimesis. Relatedness is also
been a focus in critiques of political economy and mediation in Nancy and late Derrida. At the other ex-
treme lies relation as democratic participation in the work of art; of art as something inseparable from its
perceiver. Rather than giving in to the assumptions of the correlationist thesis, or to facile conceptions
of participation, this seminar wants to recast the question of relation, or relationality, beyond synthesis,
interrogating “relatedness” in such terms as fabricated comparison, interest, judgment, and un-relatedness.
A starting point might be Stanley Cavell’s statement, “Interestedness is already a state—perhaps the basic
state—of relatedness to something”; this claim may be interrogated through literature, media, theory, and
otherwise, to ask about relatedness, and what would be lost in giving up a need for relatedness. This sem-
inar will interrogate consequences of letting go of comparison as degree or distinction. Is it possible, for
instance, for a performative engagement between two beings to avoid relatedness? Can a relatedness occur
in discord? What sense does it make to speak of an aneconomy if we cannot also demonstrate instances of
relatedness?
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Organizes:
◦ Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University

◦ Simon Porzak, Columbia University
Sadism after de Sade
This seminar explores the legacies of the Marquis de Sade in the age of modernism and postmodernism.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, Sade’s ideas and style have constantly resurfaced in literature, philos-
ophy, and cinema. Most recently, they have become prominent in fields such as affect theory or queer
theory. We hope to study many points in this constellation of ongoing critical and aesthetic turns, and to
explore how contemporary Sade-isms relate to those of a hundred years ago.
Seminar papers might take up several strands of twentieth and twenty-first century Sade-ism. We hope
to explore the important ethical dimension of Sade’s thought, perhaps following Jacques Lacan’s readings
of Sade, and in conversation with contemporary theories of vulnerability. Another strand of Sade-ism
that may be considered is the Marquis’s impact–first posited by Maurice Blanchot–on confessional non-
fiction. Contributors might also examine Sade’s relationship to religion and love, highlighted by Roland
Barthes, or the ongoing influence of Sade’s peculiar style on contemporary films, poems, and novels. We
hope to compare the various inflections re-readings of Sade have taken after the Enlightenment: to ask,
for example, how Rachilde’s (per)version of Sade relates to Carl Phillips’ or to Lars von Trier’s. We also
want to ask how literary and cinematic practices of Sadeian inheritance relate to the definitions of ”sadism”
constructed by practitioners of sexology, psychology, or BDSM.
Organizes:
◦ Gerrit Roessler, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)

◦ Stefan Hoeppner, University of Calgary
Science fiction has often been considered to be a narrative genre that is particularly well suited to ex-
plore alternative realities and speculative scenarios. Authors such as Darko Suvin (1979), Fredric Jameson
(2005), and, most recently, Seo-Young Chu (2011) have suggested that these scenarios are much less inves-
tigations of our possible future or alternative past, as they are about an interrogation of the readers’ present
conditions and the present’s utopian potential. What can the present be, other than what it is? Placed firmly
in this tradition of SF scholarship, we would like to propose a session that focuses on the specific question
of how SF imagines alternative forms of identity and how it explores alterity’s transgressive impact on the
status quo. Such a focus is as necessary as it is timely: Recent movies such as Her (2014), novels such as
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2011), and television shows such as Almost Human
(2013 – present) bring the idea of SF as a mode of critical reflection and possible intervention of the status
quo into the popular mainstream. Our panel seeks to revisit and refine the theoretical tools for discussing
these cultural phenomena on a wide basis, as it deliberately looks outside of the canon of SF or popular
culture. Explorations of non-English language and non-canonical texts are particularly welcome.
228
Organizes:
◦ Yu-ting Huang, University of California, Los Angeles
This seminar explores how settler colonial studies contribute to our study of comparative literature, both
within and beyond Anglophone settler spaces.
Recent scholarship has re-conceptualized settler colonialism as a distinct structure of domination. Despite
inherent heterogeneity within settler and indigenous societies, structural opposition between the two con-
tinues beyond invasion. As such, ethnic minorities in white settler countries may participate in indigenous
dispossession, and third-world postcolonial nation states may have untold histories of settler colonialism.
Settler colonial history in the global scale thus entails particularly complex flows of power and structures
of relation, whereby one moves vertically (structurally) from being indigenous to being settler (or vise-
versa) along the horizontal global flows of migration, invasion, and settlement. In this framework, it may
also become possible to examine migrants in Australia, the USA, Canada, and New Zealand for their par-
ticipation in the settler order, and to query how much settler colonial domination has given legitimacy to
states like Taiwan or Japan’s many islands and contributed to the ongoing conflicts in Israel or the Chinese
borderlands.
In response to these complex networks of relation brought to light by settler colonial studies, this seminar
examines the particular challenges and new possibilities in reading literatures comparatively across settler
colonial conditions and structural positions, between postcolonial, indigenous, and ethnic literary studies.
What may be our new ethos and strategies of reading and how can we engage with the particular temporal
and spatial juxtapositions and scaling in settler texts? In what sense may it be productive to study literatures
outside of the Anglophone settler colonies as settler colonial? Then, do settler literatures in Chinese,
Japanese, or other tongues, invoke distinct literary traditions to narrate settlement and do these narratives
produce divergent structures of relation? Perhaps even more importantly, can literary texts effectively
narrate and envision the decolonization of settler colonialism?
We welcomes theoretical and methodological explorations of comparative settler colonial literary studies,
close readings of specific sites of settler colonial heterogeneity, or comparative works that investigate
relations across locations, languages, or political systems.
Organizes:
◦ Gordana Crnković, University of Washington

◦ Bejamin Robinson, Indiana University Bloomington
The seminar “Socialist Texts in Post-Socialist Times” will consist of the contributions that could be more
narrowly focused on the “first take” readings of this topic. In other words, the papers could examine,
for example, the contemporary life of literary texts from now defunct socialist countries like the former
Yugoslavia (“Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia”) or the USSR. On the other hand, the seminar
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invites other readings as well, whereby all of its concepts could be taken more broadly or challenged. In this
manner, the “texts” could include a variety of non-fictional, theoretical, or visual texts, “socialist” could
refer to any texts that could be seen as such in any possible way (e.g., early Steinbeck but also his late The
Winter of Our Discontent, or a selection of John Cage’s writings), the potential art-inspired redefinitions
of the main starting terms could be proposed to engage or try to direct the changing conceptual field, and
so on.
Organizes:
◦ Julia Bloch, University of Pennsylvania

◦ Janet Neigh, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
This seminar considers the role of sound and performance in poetry of the Americas across a range of pe-
riods and movements. We are interested in case studies and theoretical discussions that consider musically
inflected texts; archives of performance; graphical representations of sound on the page; uses of creoles
and vernaculars; and methodological inquiries into the intersections of sound studies, performance studies,
distant reading, close reading, and hemispheric studies.
In his 1996 essay “Poetics of the Americas,” Charles Bernstein laid the groundwork for a hemispheric
approach to modern and contemporary poetry that undermines American exceptionalism and illuminates
how poetic language facilitates cultural intermixture. We are particularly interested in studies that take a
cross-linguistic approach and that consider how sound or performance based works decenter the dominant
sound of US English in the Americas, in dialogue with scholarship by Fred Moten, Nathaniel Mackey,
Susan Gingell, Carolyn Cooper, and Paul Gilroy.
We will consider such questions as: How does poetry engage both specific musical traditions and discrete
elements of sound, from lexical acts to nonverbal cues? How do certain texts insist on alternative under-
standings of space via their investment in performance? What contribution does performance poetry make
to our understanding of orality and literacy? Is it possible to read a performance poem? If so, how? How
does sound or performance analysis enable new comparative readings of texts? How do approaches to
sound or performance intersect with studies of subjectivity, history, or literary form?
Organizes:
◦ Kathleen Morris, University of Oxford

◦ Sarah Jane O’Brien, Georgia Institute of Technology
In the nineteenth-century Goethe described “zartre Empirie,” a delicate or tender empiricism. His ap-
proach provided an alternative to a purely scientific practice, insisting on the value of knowledge produced
through rigorous attention to experience. Such an epistemology valued ‘lesser orders’ of knowledge such
as emotion, affect, bodily experience and intuition. Similarly ‘weird science’ is a way of framing aesthetic
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practices that use constraints, rules, procedures and models of investigation. However, in the aesthetic
domain such protocols are called into the service of affect, offering alternative modes for its expression
and different avenues for considering the relationship between feeling and thought as they commingle in
cultural texts. These models of inquiry stage an encounter between the scientific and the affective, and are
a model that has been taken up by writers, artists, filmmakers and performers throughout history. Such
aesthetic projects begin with the belief that experiments produce knowledge, but they ultimately risk it in
speculating that any knowledge which lacks cognates such as intuition, feeling and affect is bound to be
short-lived. By softening the edges of the knowable, weird science and tender empiricism remind us about
things that matter (rather than those that just make sense) enabling kinds of understanding that require af-
fects, emotions and intuitions as much as facts and figures. We seek proposals for papers in any discipline
and across media that ’think’ through an aesthetics of weird science or model of tender empiricism.
Organizes:
◦ Concetta Principe, York University
Political theologist, Carl Schmitt, argued that enlightenment’s secularism was a failed project because it
did not erase religion from people’s thinking, but merely perpetuated its influence in public discourse
in a sublimated form. The divine authority that ordained the king’s rule in pre-modern times was not
undone by secularism, but was merely transferred in a different form to the elected official of a modern
state. The same trouble of sublimation can be seen in Marx’s re-envisioning of the Christian saviour as
the “new man”, which returns as a non-partisan inhuman principle of emancipation and redemption in
Walter Benjamin’s philosophy, as well as Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive projects. As if reacting to this
obfuscation, Lacanian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, identifies the messianic figure of our times as a decidedly
Christian Jesus. Messianic promise is not only a trope in theoretical works but is also dominant in cultural
projects of the twentieth century such as science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction projects. The
question is, what is motivating the use of this religious figure in our secular age? How does the messiah
return in twentieth-century intellectual and cultural projects: as a human being, an alien, or a principle? Is
it represented in positive terms or in critical terms? Proposals considering the messianic trope in twentieth-
century works of literature, film, theory, philosophy, and other formats, are invited.
Organizes:
◦ Lynn Keller, University of Wisconsin-Madison

◦ Angela Hume Lewandowski, University of California, Davis
While the critical study of ecologically concerned poetry and poetics, or “ecopoetics,” has gained trac-
tion in recent years, there has been relatively little interest among critics in challenging the conventions of
methodology—that is to say, the approaches and lines of inquiry that scholars bring to the growing ecopo-
etics archive. For this reason, we propose a three-day seminar that will explore new approaches to reading,
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thinking, and situating later-20th and early-21st century ecopoetics. The presentations in our seminar will
bring recent developments in such fields as critical race studies, environmental justice, new media studies,
posthumanism, sound studies, crisis theory, and materialist critique to the cross-cultural sites of ecopoetics,
theorizing ecopoetics in various social, historical, and environmental contexts.
In 2000, Jonathan Bate first used the term “ecopoetics” to describe practices within Romanticism that he
perceived as imagining more ethical relations between humans, non-humans, and their shared environ-
ments. A year later, Jonathan Skinner launched the journal ecopoetics, and in 2002, J. Scott Bryson edited
the first volume of critical essays on the topic, Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction, noting in his introduction
how little scholarship on contemporary nature poetry had been published at that time. While ecopoetics
has evolved over the past decade, and while several anthologies of ecopoetry have worked to reimagine the
field’s archive (e.g., Camille Dungy’s Black Nature [2009] and Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep’s The Ar-
cadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral [2012]), critical approaches that scholars bring to this
growing body of work have remained somewhat limited. Arguably, these approaches often fall back on
what Lawrence Buell has named “ecological holism,” ecocriticism’s “preferred model”; or, alternatively,
what Leerom Medovoi describes as a “thematic criticism” whose primary interest is in making ethical
judgments and imperatives. And while recent scholarship in ecocriticism more broadly offers promising
new avenues for scholars of ecopoetry and ecopoetics (as outlined by Buell’s The Future of Environmen-
tal Criticism), increasing apprehension of the ways environmental issues connect to a range of social and
political concerns as well as other cultural productions makes evident the continued need for further adap-
tations in scholarship. Our seminar intervenes by modeling innovative approaches to an expanding archive
that we think are representative of where the study of ecopoetics is going next.
The papers in our seminar will model a range of possible approaches to reading, thinking, and situating
ecopoetics and, more generally, facilitate conversation about the various theoretical apparatuses available
to us as critics of both environmental literature and discourse. The success of the first-ever Conference
on Ecopoetics, which was co-organized by Angela Hume and Margaret Ronda and held at University of
California, Berkeley in February 2013, was a testament to the present appeal of ecopoetics in and across
communities of scholars. Our seminar will bring the study of ecopoetics to ACLA, offering a timely
investigation of an emerging field that is changing as rapidly as it is growing.
Organizes:
◦ Tim Kreiner, Yale University

◦ Chris Chen, University of California, Santa Cruz
Recent debates within contemporary poetry continue to assume that literary forms possess a politics. That
such a claim is a virtual cliché today, across a range of otherwise disparate literary traditions, attests to the
tangled legacies of the 80s-90s “canon wars” and what has been called the cultural politics of form.
Even as the coordinates of older debates over formal experimentation versus a multicultural “poetics of
identity” have been scrambled, however, a politics of form continues to suture cultural production to
broader social phenomena — from political economy to gender and ethnic identity formation. Analo-
gies between formal techniques and economic or identity categories still pit literary movements against
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one another on the grounds that they embody opposed political critiques. This situation compels us to ask:
How useful (or useless) are models of the political drawn from the politics of form today? Conversely, what
aesthetic possibilities are foreclosed by existing conceptions of formal innovation or aesthetic autonomy?
What might be the limits of the figure of analogy itself for cultural analysis and/or political critique?
This seminar invites a plurality of approaches to rethinking the presumed analogical relationships between
culture, politics, and literary form. Such approaches may engage with specific cultural objects; trouble
the relationship between ethnic literary traditions and dominant frameworks of cultural representation or
resistance; take up the methodological import of symptomatic reading and/or its contemporary alternatives,
distant and surface reading; or proffer new modes of inquiry into relations between contemporary cultural
production and 21st century political movements.
Organizes:
◦ Nandini Ramesh Sankar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad

◦ Rajiv Krishnan, The English and Foreign Languages University
The historical moment within which works of art are found inscribed preserves also the interart relation-
ships and compulsions that sponsor production within particular art forms. These conditions of production
are not transhistorically given or natural, and lead to what may be described as a rhetoric of intermedial
relations which aims at justifying and elaborating existent or ideal relationships between the various arts.
Thus it is that the self-consciousness of art often emerges as a rhetoric of intermediality. An art is most
itself remembering others. The specificity of the arts relies on the adventitious support of siblings and
sinister relatives. Intermedial slogans such as “ut pictura poesis” and practices such as ekphrasis rely on
the trope of charitable neighbourliness and mutually beneficial care, sponsorship, and advocacy, for their
ability to persuade.
How does the rhetoric of intermediality mediate the self-presence of one art to itself and other arts? What
are the ideological pressures that bear upon such an aesthetic of otherness? Of what might the rhetoric
of an art’s intermedial status be persuading itself and its audience? Papers topics can include, but are not
limited to: inter-art genres including ekphrasis; Lessing’s Laokoön and its influence on subsequent art
and aesthetics; Romantic and Victorian aesthetics as negotiated by intermedial compulsions; the faltering
Modernist quest for a pure art; and the mixed-art aesthetic of Postmodernism. While we welcome analyses
of explicit theoretical statements about intermediality, we are particularly interested in readings of specific
intermedial artifacts that might constitute rhetorical acts of medial self-regard.
Organizes:
◦ Michiel Bot, Bard College

◦ Kirk Wetters, Yale University
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This panel invites proposals for papers that explore the idea, mentioned by writer and philosopher Michel
Surya in a 2006 interview with Daniel Bensaïd, that “the freedom of literature and of thought is at the
origin of all freedoms, including political ones.” (“La liberté de la littérature est au principe de toutes les
libertés,” Contretemps 15, February 2006)
Surya’s idea resonates with the following quote from Jacques Derrida’s Rogues: ”[i]s it not also democracy
that gives the right to irony in the public space? Yes, for democracy opens public space, the publicity of
public space, by granting the right to a change of tone (Wechsel der Töne), to irony as well as to fiction,
the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on” (91-2).
Possible topics for this panel include: Literature and democracy Literature, secularism, multiculturalism
The right to irony as a right to publicness The right not to be taken literally The right to offend The ex-
ceptio artis in free speech legislation and jurisprudence Scandalous texts, scandalous images, scandalous
performances, etc. Regimes of censorship Copyright struggles
Possible interlocutors are the members of Pussy Riot, Elfriede Jelinek, Mikhail Bakhtin, Fethi Benslama,
Jacques Rancière, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, and Christoph Schlingensief, but we also welcome pro-
posals for papers that explore the idea of the right to literature in dialogue with older works (Rabelais,
Erasmus, German Romanticism, etc.).
Organizes:
◦ Sandra Bermann, Princeton University

◦ Spencer Hawkins, Bilkent University
Across the spectrum of translation practices, rights are at stake. While authors and heirs grant rights to
translate texts, various policies and parties regulate the rights to translation. Those who do not speak a
state’s official language rely on translators and interpreters to access services to which they are entitled by
law. In the arenas of anticolonial struggle and international law and diplomacy, translation mediates the
rights of peoples to self-determination. Translators work within and against the “universal” logic of human
rights. How do translators win the rights to translation—and thereby enter into, even define, international
discourses, at times with significant risk to themselves? Besides linguistic competence, relevant factors
may include political affiliation, status as an author, and being in the right place at the right time.
This panel, sponsored by the ICLA Committee on Translation, will discuss the conditions under which
translation rights are distributed. Rights to translation include, among others: the right to translate texts, the
right to efficacious translation services, the right to access information and ideas mediated by translation,
and the right to request—and produce—different translations. We welcome papers on the translation-
dependent nature of human rights. A non-universalizing theory of the subject demands that we read rights
across gaps implicit in interlingual, intercultural, and interpersonal translation. The corresponding ethics
would replace universal rights with the right to demand new translations, the right to insist on the non-
equivalence of one’s words to another’s.
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ies
Organizes:
◦ E.K. Tan, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Over the past years, there is an increase interest among comparative literature scholars in relational studies.
From the array of papers at the ACLA seminars and MLA sessions that engage rigorously with concepts
by theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, André Gunder Frank, and Édouard Glissant, scholar
are seeking to expand their scope and methods of comparison in literary and cultural studies. In Rita Felski
and Susan Stanford Friedman’s 2013 edited volume, Comparison, Shu-mei Shih proposes a new paradigm
for comparative literature–– the practice of comparative literature as relational studies. Shih’s “relational
comparison” allows us to seek “a more integrated conception of comparative literature and world literature”
by engaging with the connectedness of our world through a focus on macrohistory in order to “[excavate
and activate] the historically specific set of relationalities across time and space” (2013: 80).
Sinophone studies as a critical field, advocates the approach to intervene and rupture the stability of es-
sentialism embodied by homogenous Han-centric Chinese identity and Chineseness. As “a network of
places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a his-
torical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for
several centuries” (Shih 2007: 4), the Sinophone is seemingly always already relational and comparative:
it evaluates and reflects on the discourses that constitute Sinophone identities and cultures by resituating
them in their relative historical processes within the larger scope of world history. This seminar seeks pa-
pers on Sinophone studies, which engage with relational comparison of issues significant to area, critical
race, ethnic, gender, migration, cultural, film, and media studies. It hopes to explore a new direction in
humanities that attempts to rethink postcolonial and global relations.
658. Transparency
Organizes:
◦ Zahi Zalloua, Whitman College

◦ Jeffrey Di Leo, University of Houston, Victoria
How are we to respond to the deafening call for transparency, which is seemingly coming from every
corner of our symbolic lives? Transparency is frequently evoked as a virtue, a corrective or even antidote
to obscurity and obfuscation. In politics, we demand transparency of our elected officials. Ideological
critique—at least in one of its iterations—takes up transparency as a goal, as a space beyond ideology. Yet
transparency is also clearly not immune from distortion or fantasy, from its own type of ideology. As Henri
Lefebvre famously put, “The illusion of transparency: Here space appears as luminous, as intelligible, as
giving action free reign. . . . The illusion of transparency goes hand in hand with a view of space as
innocent, as free of traps or secret places. Anything hidden or dissimulated—and hence is dangerous—is
antagonistic to transparency, under whose reign everything can be taken in at a single glance from that
mental eye which illuminates whatever it contemplates” (The Production of Space). This seminar seeks
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papers that examine the dream of transparency in a range of fields and discourses, from philosophy and
politics to academia. Who or what are today’s transparency’s antagonistic others?
Organizes:
◦ Milan Vidakovic, University of Washington
This seminar is for Undergraduates who wish to participate in the 2015 ACLA Annual Meeting.
Organizes:
◦ Patty Keller, Cornell University

◦ Rhiannon Welch, Rutgers University
As the widely circulated images from Ferguson, Missouri demonstrate, the present is haunted by vestigial
elements of the past–slavery and Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and the Bush and Obama wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, the daily dispatches from Ferguson call forth the unresolved nature of these
moments that many so often (and mistakenly) relegate to pastness, thereby eschewing neat distinctions
between past and present, the seen and unseen. In the streets of Ferguson, the materiality of the effects of
these unresolved histories is indisputable, as they take the form of assault rifles and armored tanks.
This seminar explores the relationship between spectrality, understood as both the visualization of an in-
visibility and the untimely return of the past, and visual media. Images, whether moving or still, provide
a unique medium from which to theorize spectrality, since at their root, both cinematic and photographic
forms are always indebted to the invisible: the capture of time and light. In addition to the ontological
conditions of photographic media, spectrality, as a presence both visible and invisible, is also inscribed
in the traumatic historical contexts—of wars and their aftermaths, colonial occupations, ecological disas-
ters, genocides, etc.—that image media trace. Situated at the threshold of materiality and immateriality,
specters are not so much pitted against the material world as aligned with regimes of vision and structures
of belief that reveal our entanglement with such a world. Specters also play an important role in how we
understand not only the visual as such, but also the symbolic systems of value–whether social, economic,
psychoanalytic, or semiotic–that underlie it.
We invite abstracts dealing with the relationship between spectrality and the visual arts, and in particular
those submissions with an emphasis on film and photography from any period or geographic location.
Papers that address the intersection of spectrality and image media in the following theoretical and/or
historical contexts are especially welcome:
● Racial regimes and their afterlives (colonialism, slavery, etc) ● Nationalisms and their others ● Constitu-
tive absence vs. traumatic loss ● Surveillance and new technologies of vision ● Biopolitics and apparatuses
of capture ● Spectrality, technological reproducibility, and aura ● Derridean hauntology ● Marxism and
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globalized commodity culture ● The spectral turn and (post)modern media ● Experimental cinema and
fetishism
Organizes:
◦ Kári Driscoll, Utrecht University

◦ Eva Hoffmann, University of Oregon
What can the study of animals contribute to literary studies and vice versa? What can literary animal
studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might otherwise be blind to? Although
animals abound in the literature of almost every geographical area and historical period, traditional literary
criticism has been marked by the tendency to disregard this ubiquitous animal presence in literary texts, or
else a single-minded determination to read animals exclusively as metaphors and symbols for something
else, in short as “animal imagery,” which, as Margot Norris writes, “presupposes the use of the concrete
to express the abstract, and indeed, it seem[s] that nowhere in literature [are] animals to be allowed to be
themselves.” What does it mean for literary theory and criticism to allow animals to “be themselves”? How
can we as scholars of literature resist the tendency to press animals “into symbolic service” as metaphors
and allegories for the human, whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal?
The pervasive uneasiness regarding the metaphorical conception of the animal within recent scholarship in
animal studies stems from a more general suspicion, by no means unjustified, that such a conception serves
ultimately to assimilate the animal to a fundamentally logocentric discourse and hence to reduce “animal
problems to a principle that functions within the legibility of the animal: from animal to ani-word,” as
Jonathan Burt writes in response to Derrida’s ‘animot’. The question of the animal thus turns out to have
been the question of language all along. Conversely, however, we might also posit that the question of
language has itself also always been the question of the animal. What would it mean for literary studies
if we were to take the implications of this involution seriously? How can we be attentive to the specific
way animals operate in literary texts as “functions of their literariness” (to borrow a phrase from Susan
McHugh)? In other words, not merely as one trope in an author’s poetic arsenal that could easily be
replaced by any other, but rather as a speciﬁc problem to and for language and representation as such. This
seminar seeks papers dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study—i.e. texts from
any tradition or period that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language
and representation—and as a methodological problem for literary animal studies.
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Chapter 14
Stream B
Organizes:
◦ Jacques Lezra, New York University
The eclipse of studies of allegory is taken to accompany a general disciplinary turn away from linguistically-
driven criticism, and toward more politically-inflected ways of writing about culture, whether based in
identitarian paradigms, in versions of hegemony theory, or in critical philosophy. (This description is
not uncontroversial, of course, and the derogation of allegory has a number of different causes and conse-
quences. Jameson’s analysis of ”national allegory” has a peculiarly leavening and enraging effect, painting
studies of allegory with a eurocentric, first-wordly brush.) This seminar wants to engage once more with
allegory, taking on the so-called political turn and asking what sorts of politics the figure, or the mode,
makes possible. Does a return to allegory allow us to rethink how universalist claims are made, according
to what logics, to what ends? What is to be gained by rethinking allegory from the sphere of politics–that
is, from the domain of force, institutionalization, distribution, administration, and so on? What sorts of
political representation become possible, if we take on the long history of allegorical representation, as
well as the critiques of the representationality of allegory that we find in rhetorical deconstruction? The
scholars who have already expressed their desire to participate in this seminar come from diverse literary
fields (Latin American, Spanish, English, Slavic).
Organizes:
◦ Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington

◦ Tobias Menely, University of California, Davis
Historicist reading practices have been premised on the separation of human from natural history. That
divide is the bedrock of the humanities, but with the advent of the Anthropocene, we are forced to recog-
238
nize that it can no longer hold. In this seminar, we are interested in what a comparative literary history
of the Anthropocene might look like. We are primarily interested in methodologically and theoretically
oriented papers rather than isolated close readings. The questions that motivate us in this inquiry include
the following:
How must the methods and theoretical presuppositions of literary and intellectual history change in the An-
thropocene? How does the Anthropocene refigure the relationship between literary history and the history
of science? How do we re-read developments in geology, meteorology, chemistry, and evolutionary theory
alongside the concomitant emergence of human beings as geological agents? How do we incorporate new
archives, such as ice core data or pollen records?
How do the dialectical reading practices we inherit from historical materialists (Lukács, the Frankfurt
School, Althusser, Jameson, Williams), with their specific attention to the problem of literary form, ap-
ply, or not apply, when we turn to the “environment,” “nature,” or “climate”? How does the symbolic
domain mediate a history that exceeds class antagonism and the mode of production and encompasses
contradiction, as absent cause, that is environmental? What does it mean to read environmental history
symptomatically? How does the history of energy production intersect with the history of capital? How
might historical materialism inform the “new materialism,” systems theory, and emergence theory?
As a framework for re-imagining literary periodization in the Anthropocene, we propose to focus the semi-
nar on the age of coal, a period running from the invention of the Newcomen engine in 1712 to the first atom
bomb test in 1945. The steam engine marks the beginning of the fossil fuel era, which in turn undergoes
another major transition with the unleashing of nuclear power, coupled with the “Great Acceleration” in
fossil fuel use in the second half of the twentieth century. Part of the motivation for this seminar is to main-
tain an explicitly historicist approach to the Anthropocene as an alternative to both the presentism rampant
in the environmental humanities and the largely ahistorical bent of object-oriented ontology. Thus, this
periodization provides a means for maintaining a historical orientation.

Organizes:
◦ Hala Halim, New York University
The year 2015 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Bandung, or the Asian-African Conference convened
in Indonesia in April 1955. Bandung was the first in a series of conferences that unfolded in the Cold
War period and that fostered anti-colonial, Third-Worldist solidarities—signal forums for the unfolding
“of the main arguments within the Third World project,” as Vijay Prashad puts it in The Darker Nations.
These conferences included: the Afro-Asian People’s Conference (Cairo, 1957-1958), the Conference of
Non-Aligned Countries (Belgrade, 1961) and the Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian and Latin
American Peoples (Havana, 1966). This seminar will examine that Third-Worldist trajectory in relation to
cultural production, in particular Comparative Literature.
Presentations addressing, among others, the following questions will be particularly welcome: how might
we flesh the cultural history of the period if we scrutinize forums such as journals published by these
239
Third-Worldist forums, for example Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings (published by the Afro-Asian Writers’
Association from 1968 until the early 1990s)? What issues and debates on translation does that moment
yield? If we attend to that trajectory, how might we interrogate the history of postcolonial theory, which is
generally dated to the publication in New York in 1978 of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism? Has “postcolonial
theory” occluded/undermined an earlier “Third Worldist” discourse or is it, rather, a product of Third
Worldist movements? Can we postulate a mode of cosmopolitanism that emerges from and is fostered by
that trajectory? What, if any, resonance does “Third Worldism” have in today, for example in the so-called
Arab Spring? In what way can a study of Third-Worldist movements undermine Eurocentric constructions
of feminism? Can we draw from the legacy of Bandung and associated movements anti-Eurocentric forms
of comparatism, as in Global South, or South-South comparatism?

and the State
Organizes:
◦ R. Shareah Taleghani, Queens College-City University of New York

◦ Alexa Firat, Temple University
Decades before the uprisings that have been taking place across the Arab world since December 2010,
intellectuals, writers, and artists have consistently challenged the status-quo of authoritarian regimes in
Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere. At the same time, state agents and cultural institutions have attempted
to dictate and limit the terms of literary, artistic, and intellectual engagement not only through sponsorship
and patronage but also through censorship, and other directly repressive acts such as surveillance, detention
and forced exile.
How and to what effects do writers and intellectuals engage in opposing the politics of a given state both
directly and indirectly? How do they work to challenge undemocratic state policies and the politics of
authoritarianism both individually and collectively? What types of aesthetic interventions do different
authors produce in order to contravene the directives of the political regimes under which they live, and
how are these interventions transformed in a revolutionary context? How do writers’ and intellectuals’
engagements with the state challenge traditional concepts of authority, authoritarianism, and authorship?
Simultaneously, how do writers and intellectuals negotiate with the issues of state co-option of dissidence
and critique, state patronage, and state censorship?
In this panel, we hope to develop comparative discussions across world literature, and papers address-
ing these questions by focusing on various national literatures and intellectual traditions are welcome.
For more information, please contact R. Shareah Taleghani (rtaleghani@qc.cuny.edu) or Alexa Firat (afi-
rat@temple.edu).
240
tury
Organizes:
◦ Tove Holmes, McGill University

◦ Ellwood Wiggins, University of Washington
‘Sympathy’ is a key term in two of the liveliest discourses of the eighteenth century. On the one hand it
provides the underlying foundation of influential moral philosophies from Rousseau to leading figures of
the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which traces all human
morality back to sympathy, is the culmination of this trend in the moral sense tradition. On the other hand
it is a principal term of contention on the battleground of theatrical practice and theory. From Lillo and
Steele in England to Diderot and Beaumarchais in France, bourgeois drama was meant to elicit sympathy
with the internal feelings of its protagonists as a distinguishing characteristic over and against the external
affect of older baroque tragedies. The clearest enunciation of this new theatrical ideal comes from Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, whose famous maxim, “the most compassionate person is the best person,” embodies
his defense of sympathy as the chief edifying aim of all tragedy. While sympathy provides the initial
keystone of human morality for sentimentalist philosophy, it represents the final telos for sentimentalist
theater. This seminar will investigate the debt of philosophers to dramatists, and vice-versa, in the rhetoric
and mechanics of sympathy throughout the long eighteenth century.
Contact: Tove Holmes (tove.holmes@mcgill.ca) and Ellwood Wiggins (wiggins1@uw.edu).
Organizes:
◦ Qingyuan Jiang, University of Notre Dame

◦ Sarah Townsend, University of South Dakota
What is the fate of the Bildungsroman in late modernity? While some scholars claim that the genre is
defunct, too entrenched in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European bourgeois ideals to speak to the
conditions of late modernity, many others have argued forcefully for its continued relevance. As authors
from disparate corners of the world return to the model of human and societal development emplotted in
the Bildungsroman, they modify the genre in ways that expand, critique, and upturn its original tenets.
Recent scholarship has shown how world literary texts call upon the Bildungsroman for varied purposes:
to articulate human rights, to challenge statist and neoliberal development, and to forge alternative local
and transnational solidarities.
This seminar proceeds from the renewed critical interest in the Bildungsroman, seeking to generate a com-
parative conversation about the persistence of the genre within world literature. Our central concern will be
to investigate the diverse forms and contexts through which the concept of Bildung is reimagined in the late
nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. We welcome both specific case studies and broader theoretical
and/or literary considerations.
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Organizes:
◦ Yumi Pak, California State University, San Bernardino

◦ Lindsey Andrews, Duke University
This seminar seeks to examine the historical and conceptual relationship between Black thought and the
popular. Whether exalted as a space of democratic participation or denigrated as a vapid construction of
consumer culture, “the popular” is rarely equated with rigorous intellectual and political thought. However,
scholars working on Black traditions – along with Black writers, artists, performers and thinkers – have
long argued that the construction of Black theory does not fit neatly into a Western episteme of theoretical
history. How, then, has the popular figured within and as the history of Black thought? We hope to consider,
for example, Black popular literature, from the slave narrative to genre and pulp fiction, as well spaces of
popular exchange, from street corners to kitchens, churches to concert halls. How has Blackness been
relegated to the realm of the popular, and, simultaneously, how has Blackness made use of the popular,
the public, the common? How is Black thought coded as popular from without, or how has it coded itself
as popular in order to live a fugitive life, insinuating itself (to paraphrase Cedric Robinson) in the most
unexpected spaces of Western thought? We invite papers that focus on Black thought and the popular as
offering theoretical underpinnings and ideas for understanding our contemporary moment. Paper topics
may include the formation and maintenance of the carceral state, the rhetoric and reality of globalization,
immigration and expatriation, and the homogenizing of queerness.

tive Perspective)
Organizes:
◦ Leihua Weng, Pacific Lutheran University

◦ Paul Allen Miller, University of South Carolina
Taken in a Foucauldian vein, this seminar operates on the assumption that body is more than a physical
entity; it is a cultural and social presence. As a cultural construct, sexuality is constantly and heavily
contested in its respective social context. By bringing together a set of research papers in different genres,
this seminar aims at exploring various literary expressions of and reflections on the body and sexuality in
different literatures. Parallels and contrasts will be drawn between the literature of East and West, both
Ancient and Modern. Attention will be directed to how social norms and discourses on the body and
sexuality are constructed, modified, de-constructed, and/or reconstructed.
Comprising papers on the classical and the modern, of the West and of the East, this group aims at bringing
a comparative and anthropological perspective to the issue of body and sexuality.
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Organizes:
◦ Joseph Slaughter, Columbia University

◦ Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania
Literature and literary study are enmeshed in intellectual property: its customs, its laws, and the massive
inequities in its distribution. At the turn of the millennium, 97
Organizes:
◦ Chris Coffman, University of Alaska Fairbanks
This Seminar is sponsored by the ICLA Comparative Gender Studies Committee. In the introduction to
GLQ’s special issue on “Queer Temporalities,” Elizabeth Freeman argues that “If we reimagine ‘queer’
as a set of possibilities produced out of temporal and historical difference, or see the manipulation of
time as a way to produce both bodies and relationalities (or even nonrelationality), we encounter a more
productively porous queer studies, one shaped by and reshaping not only various disciplines but also the
studies of race, nation, migration, and postcolony” (159). Freeman’s gloss of recent queer scholarship
on temporality offers at least two points of connection between it and comparative work in queer studies:
attention to the implications of “temporal and historical difference”; and concern with their imbrication
in the spatiality of “nation” and “migration.” How might an explicitly comparative approach to queerness
affect our understanding of the connections between gender, sexuality, and time? For this seminar, we (the
ICLA Comparative Gender Studies Committee) invite papers that compare queer temporalities—and their
impact on queer spatialities—in literature and the other arts from any culture and any historical period.
Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) synchronic, cyclical, and linear time; anachronism,
futurity, and the present; repetition and spectrality; women’s time, men’s time, and trans time; indigenous
and postcolonial time; rural time and metropolitan time.

Organizes:
◦ Kalyan Nadiminti, University of Pennsylvania
When Immanuel Kant challenged the reach of the state in “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” he
imagined a cosmopolitan subject that could feel at home anywhere in the world. While Kant critiqued
empire as biopower, his vision of sympathy and parity as universal values did not anticipate the regime of
the nation-state. At the end of the twentieth century, Pheng Cheah articulated a potent amendment to the
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model—to account for the rise of nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cosmopolitanism
had to become “cosmopolitical.” The revival of interest in cosmopolitanism in the last decade has interro-
gated the framework of “world feeling” through Kwame Anthony Appiah, James Clifford, and Nico Slate,
giving rise to articulations like “actually existing,” “rooted” and “colored” cosmopolitanisms.
This seminar diverges from ethical exhortations of the model and, instead, focuses on forms of uncer-
tainty, perversity, and ”bad” transnationalisms to query the minor affects of cosmopolitanism. How do
“ugly feelings” like melancholy, paranoia, and disgust disrupt the flow of global capital and the narration
of multicultural difference? Can cosmopolitanism produce a set of unsentimental engagements that turn
away from exemplarity and universality? Furthermore, as Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih ask about
transnationalism, can cosmopolitanism look away from the metropole towards a horizontal and neutral
relationship between “minor” affective communities? We invite a range of interdisciplinary readings of
structures of feeling and dissonances that emerge from interrupting a global metropolitan imaginary, one
that remains both an energizing influence and a searching question in literary, visual, and aural representa-
tions. The seminar seeks to address the impasse that cosmopolitanism continues to pose for mid-nineteenth
to early twenty first century renderings of (inter)national feeling.
Organizes:
◦ Salah D Hassan, Michigan State University
In an article that appeared in the London Review of Books (June 1, 2000), Edward Said tells a story that
begins when he received the following telegram in 1979: “You are invited by Les Temps modernes to attend
a seminar on peace in the Middle East in Paris on 13 and 14 March this year. Please respond. Simone
de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre.” The invitation and Said’s ensuing recollection of the Paris meeting
in “the home of Michel Foucault” serve as exemplary instances of this seminar’s topic: “cosmopolitan
Palestine.” The seminar will explore how intellectuals (scholars, authors, artists, filmmakers, public figures
and activists) have engaged with Palestine from beyond its borders, especially in the period following
the 1948 creation of Israel. Papers presented will address a range of cosmopolitan positions that aim
to represent Palestinians, criticize Zionism, or question the role of international bodies, such as the UN,
or nation states, such as the US. Other papers will explore positions that have sought to justify Zionist
settlement and rationalize Israel’s policies in an effort to undermine international solidarity with Palestine.
Palestine, like few other places in the world, has been subject in the contemporary era to a cartographic
erasure as a result of an ongoing modern project of colonial settlement, that contrasts significantly with the
mid-20th century trend toward decolonization and the advancement of an international discourse on ending
colonialism. For example, in 1960 the United Nations’ adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Inde-
pendence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, affirming “All peoples have the right to self-determination;
by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social
and cultural development.” Against the current of the global decolonizing trend, Palestine was anachro-
nistically subject to Israel’s policies of colonial settlement as illustrated by Maxime Rodinson in Israel:
A Settler Colonial State? (1973). Recognizing the uniqueness of Palestine and asserting international re-
sponsibility, the UN General Assembly declared in 1977 that November 29 is “the International Day of
Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” And UNGA “resolution A/68/12 (November 26, 2013) proclaimed
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2014 the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The official summary of Resolution
A/68/12 calls for “mobilization of global action towards the achievement of a comprehensive, just and last-
ing solution of the question of Palestine in accordance with international law and the relevant resolutions
of the United Nations.”
Engaged cosmopolitan intellectuals committed to the principles of international justice, even many liberal
thinkers who are apologists for Israel, have long recognized the historical anomaly that is the question of
Palestine. Over the last decade, and notably in the last 5 years, as the conditions in Palestine have become
ever more precarious in the face of Israeli violence, increasing numbers of intellectuals in Europe and
North America have taken a stand in solidarity with Palestinians, moving markedly into the public sphere
a critique of Israel, which was once a position expressed only on the margins. The focus of this seminar on
cosmopolitan nature of solidarity with Palestinians seeks to provide a broader perspective for understanding
the histories, projects, and personalities that have shaped the growing international movements in solidarity
with the Palestinian people. The seminar sessions will explore therefore the intellectual statements (past
and present) in the context of campaigns allied with Palestinians under occupation and also pro-Israeli
responses aimed at countering, undermining or discrediting Palestinians and their international allies.
Organizes:
◦ Louise Nilsson, Uppsala University

◦ David Damrosch, Harvard University
Crime fiction is one of the most widespread of all literary genres. Crime novels are read worldwide, and
crime writers around the world inspire each other. Further, crime fiction also gives a fascinating case of a
genre that crosses the borders from elite works (Sophocles, Dostoevsky, Pamuk) to popular fiction closely
intertwined with the development of today’s consumer society. The point of departure for this seminar
is the question of world literature in relation to society, for which crime fiction offers a particularly rich
area of inquiry. The aim is to discuss how the crime genre opens up exciting new ways to think about
globalized literary production, quite beyond common understandings of the diffusion of the novel from
European centers to nonwestern peripheries. By bringing crime fiction into the sphere of world literature,
the seminar will open up discussion about the transnational flow of literature in the globalized mediascape
of contemporary popular culture, in a global genre brought to bear on local settings, histories, and markets.
Organizes:
◦ Bruno Cornellier, University of Winnipeg
Our seminar wishes to return to some of cultural studies’ earlier, formative insights about culture and hege-
mony, but this time in conversation with current developments in Indigenous and settler colonial studies,
two complementary fields that offer us ways to dialectically connect postcolonial concerns over movement
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(conquest, migration, diaspora, etc.) with the anchoring violence of settlement and occupation. Most re-
cently, Mark Rifkin momentarily went back to Raymond Williams’ work on hegemony and the everyday
life in order to argue that settler colonial occupation is indeed supported by culture enabling one’s readiness
to assume and enjoy the experience of occupation as one of banality and certainty. We are complementarily
led to observe how settler state policies are often predicated on the belief that the State can and must reform
and monitor Indigenous lives at the level of their everyday banality and mundane occurrences, for instance
in kinship, labor, housing, family life, sexuality, etc. This seminar seeks critical contributions to the study
of settler cultures and settler cultural texts as they “document” (deliberately or not) their conditions of pro-
duction as colonial texts (or as text imbued with a specific coloniality). We are also interested in how acts
of reading, viewing, or producing cultural texts likewise constitute an event during which the (conflicting)
modes of occupancy and personhood of settlers, Natives, and arrivants are felt, asserted, and/or contested,
sanctioned and/or unsettled, naturalized, reformed, or made to feel strange to themselves.
Organizes:
◦ Christophe Kone, Williams College
This seminar offers to investigate the recurrent presence of dolls and dummies in literature, visual and
performing arts, and explores the ongoing fascination these anthropomorphic life-size replica have held
for artists since the 19th century. How come our modern and postmodern cultures have been haunted by
these lifeless creatures ever since? Why do these inanimate, man-made artifacts invariably come to life in
literary texts, paintings, photographs and films, operas and ballets, sculptures, art installations and fash-
ion shows? What is it about these humanoid objects that hits a raw nerve and strikes a chord with us,
human subjects? With a real intent to move the discussion beyond the traditional Freudian discourse of
fetishism and death drive, this cross-disciplinary seminar seeks to examine dolls and dummies in their var-
ious incarnations (automaton, sex surrogate, artist’s model, mannequin, etc...) and thus welcomes original
papers from all disciplines that engage creatively and innovatively with: - German Romanticism (E.T.A.
Hoffmann, Achim von Arnim) - Symbolism (Villiers de l’Isle Adam) - Expressionism (Oskar Kokoschka,
Max Beckmann, Rudolf Schlichter) - New Objectivity (Otto Dix) - Surrealism (Hans Bellmer, Giorgio
De Chirico, Salvator Dali, Man Ray, Pierre Molinier, Felisberto Hernandez) - Dada (Hanna Höch, Raoul
Hausmann, John Heartfield, George Grosz) - Ballet (Leo Delibes) - Opera (Jacques Offenbach) - Cinema
(Fritz Lang, Ridley Scott, Pedro Almodovar) - Contemporary visual arts (Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sher-
man, Laurie Simmons, Denis Savary) - Fashion design (Alexander McQueen, Viktor & Rolf, Jean Paul
Gaultier) - Real Dolls made in Japan - Pop Culture (Björk, Nicki Minaj)
Organizes:
◦ Brigitte Rath, Freie Universität Berlin

◦ Beatrijs Vanacker, University of Leuven
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Writing a text as if it were a translation creates a specific kind of fiction: it overlays the act of authorship
with an invented author, and the original text with an invented original in a different language, aimed at
a different audience. Original translation does not (only) invite readers to imagine a fictional world, but
to imagine a fictional original version of the very text they read. Examples of such ”translations without
an original” (Apter), ”pseudotranslations” (Toury), ”fictitious translations” (Bassnett) or ”original transla-
tions” span centuries and literatures: among them Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, a 12th century
history of the Kings of Britain, purportedly translated from an ancient book, Cervantes’ Don Quixote
(1605/1615), mostly a supposed translation from an Arabic manuscript, Macpherson’s hotly discussed
Fragments (1760), Merimée’s Guzla (1827), a collection of ”authentic” folk songs from the Balkan, and
Makine’s La fille d’un héros (1990). This seminar will explore some of the conceptual and historical impli-
cations of this wide-spread phenomenon specifically for Comparative Literature, focusing on three main
areas: (1) How does writing such a text allow authors to position themselves differently, and challenge
concepts of authorship; (2) how does imagining a preceding original that only exists in the author’s and
reader’s act of imagination question the authority of original texts; (3) and how does the other culture in
which the original texts are supposedly situated offer a foil to contemporary political and social conditions?
We invite case studies and systematic or conceptual approaches and especially welcome contributions on
non-European texts.
797. Ecstasy
Organizes:
◦ Adam Ahmed, University of California, Berkeley

◦ Seulghee Lee, Williams College
Elizabeth Freeman has recently asked, “Why is it that even in queer theory, only pain seems so socially
and theoretically generative?” At the conclusion of his landmark book Cruising Utopia: The Then and
There of Queer Futurity, José Muñoz matches the incredulity of Freeman’s question with an enthusiastic
declaration: “We must take ecstasy together.” Muñoz’s insistence that we collectively possess an ephemeral
bliss comes in stark contrast to what he perceives as ”the dominance of an affective world, a present, full
of anxiousness and fear.” Responding to identitarian theorizations of queer, racial, and gender identities
marked by the anxiety, fear, melancholy, and pain of abjection, Muñoz asks us to believe in the “ecstasy”
of a future collectivity enclosed within the present.
Muñoz’s use of “ecstasy” to describe a rupture within the present hearkens back to its ancient Greek etymo-
logical root ekstasis—an irrational state associated with lovers and poets—literally meaning “to stand be-
side oneself.” More than opposing a regime of rationality, ecstasy here suggests an alternative to the double
consciousness of standing against the conditions of one’s abjection. If “straight time is a self-naturalizing
temporality,” which renders the structure of social intelligibility timeless, “queerness’s ecstatic and hori-
zontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world” (25). Following Muñoz’s
call, this seminar proposes that standing beside the conditions of the present retains the immanent content
of the faith so necessary for critique as well as the potential for more and better forms of collectivity.
This seminar seeks to explore the implications for ecstasy as a utopian hermeneutic, a potentially naïve
affect associated with religious and aesthetic experience, as well as a regulated substance that conjures
frictionless feelings of collectivity. Papers might approach these topics through sustained treatments of
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literary-aesthetic, religious, and/or theoretical materials, by describing scenes of ecstatic experience in
variously skeptical or affirmative terms.
Possible paper topics include:
Ecstatic relations in queer and/or minority works The secular or religious status of ecstasy The time of
ecstasy (within a phenomenological or historical register) Pedagogies of ecstasy (particularly within non-
Western religious traditions) Aesthetic dimension of ecstasy, pop art, aesthetic encounters with the present
The body in/on ecstasy Comparative ecstasies (across aesthetic or religious traditions) Ecstasy, dependency,
and abjection
Organizes:
◦ Mela Heestand, University California, Davis

◦ Neil Larsen, University California, Davis
Whether explicitly foregrounded or obliquely described, capitalism is necessarily traced in literature pro-
duced within its system. Capital is both unrepresentable (as the totality only partially grasped by literature)
and unavoidably represented (as the ground against which literature draws its figures). At different histor-
ical time periods, in different geographical locations, the mode of representation will vary, e.g. sometimes
presenting clearly articulated class and social struggles, sometimes displacing these struggles onto shad-
owy conspiracy theories. Both the mode of representation in literature and the mode of its interpretation
and critique are historically dependent; each historical moment will see its own concerns reflected in the
past, and each historical moment will unavoidably represent itself in its literature, if always in partial and
incomplete form. We find revisiting the relationship between the economic and the aesthetic particularly
pressing in our current age of constant crises (economic, political, environmental, and medical). How
might revisiting the latter relationship yield new insights into the systemic global crises we face? We are
looking for papers that discuss the representation of capital in literature in relation to its particular histori-
cal, geographical, philosophical, etc. location. Our aim is to engage the role of capital’s social formations
in the production and interpretation of literature, focusing primarily on questions of form and the failures
of representation. Possible sites of examination might include: capitalism and the possibility (or death)
of comparative literature, the simultaneous richness and paucity of literature as a consequence of a world
economic system, the attempt (or failure) to represent totality.
Organizes:
◦ Lily Gurton-Wachter, University of Missouri

◦ Andrea Gadberry, New York University
Poetics and defense have long been bedfellows, from Plato’s infamous call for poets to be exiled from
the polis to the cottage industry around the “defense of poetry” (Sidney, Du Bellay, Shelley, and so on).
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Our seminar aims to engage the problem of poetics and defense in a different way from this distinguished
lineage, though. How might poetry itself be a method of evasion and defense? And what tropic entangle-
ments do writers wishing to evade poetry and poetics find themselves in, perhaps in spite of themselves?
What does poetry have to teach us about the art of avoidance both in the successful execution of evasion
and in its botch? And how do poems figure avoidance itself, as both a goal and an object of critique?
We ask for proposals for papers examining poetics and its relationship to avoidance, defense, and evasion.
We are especially interested in papers that consider how poetry might work as a way to avoid action (how
it might, to borrow Auden’s familiar formulation, “make nothing happen”) or how it might even serve as a
form of security or protection. In this light, we’ll also ask how poetry and ethics conspire (or collide) and
how poetry might help us articulate a philosophy of the excuse and its ignoble kin: the shirk, the dodge,
the disavowal. Of particular interest to our discussion will be how these defenses, or their collapse, appear
in or hide behind specific figures and tropes – and how these figural evasions reflect political, ecological,
theological, and social engagements and disengagements.
We welcome submissions across time periods and national literatures.
747. Forms of Talk
Organizes:
◦ Amy Wong, University of California, Los Angeles

◦ Daniel Williams, Harvard University
“Forms of Talk” takes into account the multifaceted achievements of “talk,” as distinct from related cate-
gories like speech, voice, discourse, dialogue, communication, or even conversation. Our seminar shares a
title with sociologist Erving Goffman’s groundbreaking study (1981) on what is known as the “microsoci-
ology” of everyday interactions. We are interested in oralities that have been considered too commonplace,
informal, accidental, idle, wasteful, or inauthentic to be of literary value. Papers may focus on—but are
not limited to—ordinary forms of talk (Gerede, schmooze, chatter, small talk, table talk, badinage); false
and unverifiable talk (rumor, gossip, bavardage, slander, hearsay, tall talk, secrets, lies, eavesdropping);
talk that binds or supplants action (speech acts, performatives, promises); disorders of talk (stutters, stam-
mers, lisps); or the mediated talk of gossip columns, radio and talk shows, and digital social media. In
literary studies, forms of talk are often absorbed into literature or writing: literature disciplines or encom-
passes multiple kinds of discourse (Foucault, Bakhtin); writing is a technology that co-opts orality (Plato,
Saussure, Ong). Departing from such traditions, our seminar considers how genres and modes of talk
might shape, transform, or regulate literary aesthetics and/or poetics, figure plots and orchestrate the so-
cial dynamics of fictive worlds, transmit affective and sensational values, form social identifications and
aspirations, or achieve a (counter) politics of their own apart from text. We welcome papers on literature
of any period or place, as well as interdisciplinary approaches (e.g., communication and media studies,
systems theory, sociology, linguistics).
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Organizes:
◦ Lisa DeTora, Hofstra University

◦ Stephanie Hilger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This seminar will explore the representation of the gendered body across literary and medical discourses.
We are particularly interested in the portrayal of bodies that disrupt a binary conception of gender or that
vex expectations of a specific gender. By investigating the representation of these bodies at the intersection
of literature and medicine, we hope to establish a dialogue between disciplines that typically treat separate
concerns using distinct methods. This investigation should thereby expand our understanding of the ten-
dency to pathologize physical difference in many discursive spheres. We welcome work from all historical
and cultural contexts, also work that deals with visual materials.
Organizes:
◦ Tsitsi Jaji, University of Pennsylvania

◦ Lily Saint, Wesleyan University
This panel considers “genre fiction” and “genre film” in Africa. Science fiction, detective fiction, West-
erns, gothic, horror, noir and romance are often associated with the global north, but vibrant works in Africa
are increasingly garnering attention. We are interested in trans-media conversations, that put film and liter-
ature alongside popular magazines, cartoons, photo-comics, graphic novels, video, television, pamphlets,
advertisements and other “trashy” forms as well as emergent new media forms. By juxtaposing African
high literary/cinematic forms with popular ones, we seek to explore what the “popular” might mean in and
across various postcolonial, African contexts. We are interested in case studies and theories from a range
of periods, languages and locations extending popular culture scholarship by Stuart Hall, Karin Barber,
Emmanuel Obiechina, Stephanie Newell, Achille Mbembe and others. What new insights do film noir in
South Africa, Westerns in Mali, or gothics in Cameroon, for example, give us into the dynamics of genre
formation, consumption, and proliferation? What shared processes of production, circulation, and recep-
tion are apparent, and what are the recurring thematic and aesthetic preoccupations? How have modes
of production fostered generic innovation on both transnational local scales? Are models of origin and
reception even still viable? How might genre fiction/film defy the recently refurbished categories of world
literature, for instance, and economies of prestige attached to “highbrow” literature? And how do popular
aesthetic forms respond to, intervene in, and determine political currents? Please send inquiries to Tsitsi
Jaji (University of Pennsylvania) and Lily Saint (Wesleyan University) at genreinafrica@gmail.com
Organizes:
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◦ Joseph Jeon, Pomona College
◦ Kate Marshall, University of Notre Dame
On one hand, infrastructure and form are parallel concepts, both implying the undergirding of a larger struc-
ture, be it a city or a novel. But on the other hand, the former is more resolutely inhuman and instrumental
while the latter generally bears the weight of human expression. This seminar will explore the various
intersections and overlaps between these only partially related conceptions of structure as they manifest
in art and literature from the early twentieth century to the present. Taking Fredric Jameson’s essay “The
Realist Floor Plan” (1985) and Lev Manovich’s book Database as Symbolic Form (1998) as exemplary, if
somewhat arbitrarily chosen, polarities, this stream will examine the ways in which art and literature can
inhabit, materialize, and/or reimagine the worlds which they both represent and constitute. We envision
papers, for example, about architecture and other forms of spatial representation in novels; visualizations
of inhuman network spaces like the inside of wires and circuits in film; and sublimations of technological
procedures like slow motion, pixilation, or freeze frame as they manifest in visual art. We will also be
interested in the way in which these accounts of structure might speak to the formation and operation of
social and ideological constructs as well, particularly as infrastructure and form grow in scale to meet the
needs of transnational and global context.
Organizes:
◦ Kelly Oliver, Vanderbilt University
Julia Kristeva has moved from her early notion of revolution in poetic language to the notion of intimate
revolt. In this seminar, we will discuss Kristeva’s latest work on revolt from the last 10 years. Most
recently, she has introduced what she calls ”maternal reliance,” or rebinding with maternal eroticism, which
she associates with revolt. This seminar will take up the notions of revolt, reliance, and the relationship
between the two concepts in Kristeva’s latest work.
Organizes:
◦ Karen Benezra, Columbia University

◦ Fernanda Negrete, State University of New York, Buffalo
The post-Fordist regime of accumulation has placed the social and psychic life of the subject at the fore-
front of capitalist exploitation. Our seminar proposes examining the relationship between labor and the
unconscious as tools for analyzing the production of subjectivity in contemporary capitalism. We take as
our point of departure the central place the subject has occupied in debates about immaterial labor since
the 1970s, from Italian Autonomism to the investigation of ethical and anti-psychiatric practice among
authors such as Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari. According to their diagnostic, the self-production and
management of the subject thus emerges as both the cipher and site of potential emancipation from the all-
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inclusive reach of global capitalism. Our seminar asks how to understand the subject of the unconscious
in both ethical and socio-historical terms and, in so doing, to interrogate its potential as a site of internal
difference within and resistance to the exploitation of increasingly recondite zones of life.
How, for example, might the function of the drive and its address—from the dreamwork to the “working
through” of resistances—constitute forms of labor? In what sense does the psychoanalytic clinic participate
in or contest the capitalist expropriation of affect, language and informal knowledge? To what extent does
sexual difference question or reformulate such an ontology of (psychic) labor? What are the consequences
of reconciling an ethics of desire and the management of pleasures? In what ways do art and literature
illustrate or embody the ethical dimensions of psychic production?
Organizes:
◦ Kris Trujillo, University of California, Berkeley

◦ Eleanor Craig, Harvard Divinity School
Devotional texts, according to Richard Rambuss, ”afford us a plethora of affectively charged sites for trac-
ing the complex overlappings and relays between religious devotion and erotic desire, as well as between
the interiorized operations of the spirit and the material conditions of the body.” But, how do we conceive
of devotional literature that exceeds the boundaries of religion? If we imagine that a pedagogy of desire
is grounded, in general, in a devotional literature, then must a historical account of this literature draw,
in part, from a religious genealogy? Might an examination of literary erotics, indeed, require a reflection
upon the ways that religions have contributed to the training, cultivation, and disciplining of our affec-
tive attachments, investments, and engagements? This seminar aims to explore the relationship between
religious devotion and erotic desire by analyzing ”literatures of devotion,” in the broadest sense.
Eschewing a strictly religious history of devotional literature, we intend, instead, to trace a genealogy
of writerly and readerly practices that cultivate devotion both inside and outside the boundaries of con-
ventional religious structures. Thus, we will ask not only how religious practices like ritual, scriptural
exegesis, prayer, and contemplation are organized around literature, but also how these practices are trans-
muted into putatively secular forms of devotion. How might one be ”religiously devoted” in a political
(devotion to candidate, cause, state), epistemological (devotion to methods and objects of disciplinary for-
mation), or aesthetic (devotion to artifacts of popular culture) sense? To what extent can we demarcate
religious and non-religious devotion and what is at stake in attempts to do so? This seminar aims to foster
an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars of literature and scholars of religion in order to iden-
tify how these two disciplines concomitantly contribute to contemporary affect theory. Furthermore, we
hope to historicize a largely modern conversation about affect by paying particular attention to its religious
formulations - both pre- and postmodern. We might even ask how writing a history of devotional litera-
ture would complicate the distinction between literature and history, in the first place, by recognizing the
affective investments that orient our own disciplinary pursuits and devotions.
Open to any subject of devotion (monk, nun, fan, zealot), object of devotion (deities, saints, divas), devo-
tional community (monasteries, voter constituencies, groupies), and devotional form (hagiography, prayer
book, biopic), we welcome papers that examine how literature conditions the devotional practices of a
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particular religious tradition as well as of ”secular” devotions like nationalism, political allegiance, or fan-
doms. And, we invite contributors to think trans-historically in order to question the very assumptions
about periodicity that perpetuate the distinctions made between religious and ”secular” devotions.
Organizes:
◦ Michelle Ty, University of California, Berkeley

◦ Erin Trapp, University of Minnesota
Why is maintenance work so difficult to recognize? More practically, why is it so poorly compensated?
Judged “unskilled”?
Our seminar turns to the ordinarily devalued work of maintenance to ask how (mere) acts of subsistence
and repair might prompt us to reimagine the antithesis between productive and reproductive labor.
In seeking essays that attend to modes of upkeep and sustenance–or everyday acts that often lack the
dramatic arc of punctual action–we situate maintenance in relation to a broader lexicon of care work and
material provision. And yet, unlike feminist recuperations of reproduction that result in the retrenchment of
politics in the domestic sphere, we decidedly understand maintenance work to be just as much a household
affair as it is a concern of public works.
At its best, the labor of maintenance yields only what one already had before setting to work. How, we ask,
do artworks engage the fundamental ambivalence at the heart of maintenance, as both something that can
be interpreted as technically conservative, in that it preserves what already exists–or potentially radical,
in proving resistant to the logic of accumulation? And finally, might maintenance help account for the
establishment (or maintenance) of a division between reproductive labor and productive work–one that is
itself “productive” of ideologies of self-preservation?
Organizes:
◦ Juan Pablo Lupi, University of California, Santa Barbara

◦ Marta Hernández Salván, University of California, Riverside
Many processes of nation building, imperial domination and emancipatory struggle in the Americas have
been viewed from a historical or ideological perspective as instances of the messianic. The Haitian and
the Cuban Revolutions, the figure of the Latin American caudillo, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, or the
neoliberal “end of history” are but a few examples. It can be argued that what underlies messianism is a
sacred conception of history and the human, and much contemporary theoretical discussions (Agamben,
Badiou, Derrida, Žižek) either approach or assume the messianic as a mode of universality. However, at
the same time one can also situate historically and culturally the metropolitan roots of messianic narra-
tives; for example, the French Revolution, the sacralization of ideas borrowed from classical liberalism,
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or Spain’s Catholic expansionism (syncretized in its turn by indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples).
Several questions arise from the moment one thinks of messianic renditions of nation, Empire or eman-
cipation as particular instantiations of the universal. How does sacredness and universality relate to local
cultural, social, national(ist) or imperial(ist) discourses and practices construed as messianic? We welcome
papers that discuss how concrete historical events and narratives of nation, empire and emancipation in the
Americas and its former metropolitan centers coalesce with, nurture, contest, or break with the categories
inscribed in the idea of the messianic. Suggested themes for discussion include (but are not limited to): the
ethics of the messianic event, messianic temporality, messianism and historiography, messianism and the
subaltern, promise and redemption, potentiality and actuality, ideology, theology, secularism, charisma,
dystopia, apocalypse.

Attention
Organizes:
◦ Bronwen Tate, Stanford University

◦ Lucy Alford , Stanford University
A “poem” can be a single line or a multi-volume epic. While some writers have valued the poem for its
distilled intensity of focus, others have deliberately sought to produce states of absorption, distraction, or
frustration through overwhelming and excessive poetic forms. This panel seeks to explore the relation be-
tween the space and shape a poem occupies on the page and the mode and quality of attention it produces.
How do changes in formal scale shape the reading experience across cultures and linguistic traditions?
How do such features as length, line length, lexicon, use of white-space, and other formal features culti-
vate, manipulate, or form specific attentional and affective states? How does a haiku, a sonnet, or an epic
create a state of discomfort, ease, boredom, or ecstasy, or move between such states? How are ambition,
expansion, contraction, reticence, or garrulity in poetry read in terms of gender, race, class, and other social
identities? What do we as readers want from poetry and why do we turn to it? We invite contributions
from all fields of poetry and poetics, including cognitive and philosophical approaches to literature and
aesthetics, investigations of specific reading communities, and literary phenomenology. Research wel-
comed on specific poetic forms and formal features, attention dynamics and specific affective states. We
are interested in diverse perspectives on the relationship between—and “scalability” of—poetic form and
poetic experience.
Topics might include but are not limited to: Line length, poem length, Typography, graphic elements and
white-space, Wide and narrow lenses of focus, Concentration and deconcentration, Dynamics of inclu-
sion and exclusion, Panorama and hyper-focus, Concrete, visual and sound poems, States and scales of
attention (distraction, absorption, immersion), Minimalisms, maximalisms, and balancing acts, Poems and
physicality: size, gender, body language.
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Organizes:
◦ Jesper Gulddal, University of Newcastle, Australia

◦ Charlton Payne, Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study
Modernity and modern statehood are inextricably linked to the rise of effective movement control. With
the French Revolution and the First World War as the main historical drivers, the gradual introduction
of passport regimes brought about a profound reconfiguration of political space: enabling governments to
harness administrative resources while also facilitating the rise of the nation-state, these regimes meant that
individuals on the move had to contend with unprecedented restrictions on mobility across and often within
geopolitical borders. It is no coincidence that the emergence of the modern novel overlaps chronologically
with the rise of movement control. The modern politics of movement undoes the nexus of space, mobility,
and narrative on which earlier forms of novelistic discourse had typically been based and thereby forces
the genre to invent new plot types that align with the new mobility restrictions. Further, if narrative can be
defined as the crossing of a semantic border or threshold (as in Jurij Lotman’s theory of a narrative event
or Peter Brooks’s discussion of the demarcating function of plot), it is necessary to consider to what extent
geopolitical border control affects narrative structure and the boundary-work of storytelling as such.
We are interested primarily in interfaces between these two formative institutions of modernity: movement
control and the novel. As one of society’s privileged media of self-reflection, novels can both model
existing patterns of movement within geopolitical orders and imagine alternative scenarios of mobility.
In particular, we want to pursue how literature variously reflects, responds to and challenges the modern
regimes of movement control – through narrative form and the multiple perspectives of migrants, travelers,
and other border-crossers. In order to foster a comparative analysis of the intersections of movement
control and literature in the European context and beyond, we invite contributions that offer new takes on
the history of the novel from the point of view of mobility and movement control.
Organizes:
◦ Elisa Segnini, University of British Colombia

◦ Valentina Fulginiti, Cornell University
According to Edward Said, orientalism, as a stereotyped way of imagining and describing non-western
civilizations, contributed to establish Europe’s imperial role in the nineteenth century. However, as Roberto
Dainotto has argued, Europe constructs itself not only in opposition to the non-Western, but also to its
internal other, and exotic difference is often “translated and replaced by one contained within Europe itself”
(Europe in theory 54). This panel is concerned with constructions of internal difference within Europe
in literary, dramatic and visual representations throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth century. We
are particularly interested in narratives that address the north/south, east and west divisions, as well as in
analyses of works that describe ethnic and linguistic minorities within Europe. How is difference described,
represented, imagined? What metaphors or narrative strategies are used to describe inner diversity? Who is
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considered as European and who is not, and from what perspective is identity established? Do writers form
subaltern/minority areas participate in orientalized representations or their own culture? If orientalism,
as Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, can be conceptualized as the opposite of civilization, is difference
necessarily connected to backwardness? Contact Email: elisa.segnini@ubc.ca

Literature
Organizes:
◦ Florian Fuchs, Yale University

◦ Christopher Wood, New York University
Hans Blumenberg, adapting Husserl’s concept of the life-world (Lebenswelt), suggested that we need to
be open to the idea of “pre-critical” experiential reality if we are going to understand the momentum of
literature and art in the modern world. By “life-world” Husserl meant the experience of the overlap of the
perceptible and the intelligible; a zone where things are simply available, prior to symbols, concepts, and
predication; and a momentary lack of doubt. An imprint of this lack may persist in ”pre-critical” forms of
art or literature.
The wager of the seminar is that the analysis of pre-criticality in premodern literature and art will disclose
hidden structures of modern forms of life.
The main theme of the sessions is the introduction of factual reality, the rhythms of everyday life, sensual
and affective experience, and the lay, vernacular point of view into art and literature. The seminar asks: how
did everyday, self-evident experience become the content of art? does self-reflexivity disable all attempts
to recognize the lifeworld? does the prosaic precede or follow the poetic? is realism always desublimating
or is it in fact a rhetorical figure like any other? when and why do literature and art recognize the problem
of the representability of the people or peoples? does the digital representation of information force new
questions and new answers?
Topics of interest include but are not limited to: the representation of domesticity, labor, and leisure;
portraiture; anecdote and story-telling; “popular culture,” “folklore,” and “folk art”; satire and parody as
secularizing forces; exoteric vs. esoteric religion; the boundary between sacred and profane; early genre
paintings and prints; autobiography, ego-documents, conversion narratives; the prehistory and form of the
novel; proverbs, Kalendergeschichten, novellas; fairy tales, local myths and legends; vernacular retellings
of both Christian and pagan myths; inquiries into the public sphere and its discourse media from print to
cinema to twitter; the pragmatics of producing personal realities; relations to probability, formalism, the
history of science and thing studies.
The scope of this seminar is potentially limitless. We are seeking to identify innovative and creative projects
in a wide range of fields, mostly but not necessarily exclusively involving European literature and art from
1400 to 1800; as well as historiographic and methodological reflections.
Some significant scholars and thinkers whose writings might serve as touchstones:
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Svetlana Alpers, Erich Auerbach, Gaston Bachelard, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Eugenio Bat-
tisti, Laurent Berlant, Hans Blumenberg, Kenneth Burke, Michel de Certeau, Benedetto Croce, Georges
Didi-Huberman, Aron Gurevich, Roman Jakobson, André Jolles, Georg Lukacs, Meyer Schapiro, Viktor
Shklovsky, Aby Warburg, Robert Weimann
Organizes:
◦ Anjuli Raza Kolb, Williams College

◦ Christopher Taylor, University of Chicago
The academy is in what some have called a “post-postcolonial” moment: less and less work explicitly
declares itself “postcolonial,” “global Anglophone” and “world literature” positions increasingly crowd out
the academic job market, and popular books proclaiming postcolonial studies’ demise have begun gaining
traction. But if postcolonial studies has died, is it dead? What is buried if we concede this passing? Who
or what makes claim on its inheritance? In this seminar, we will consider the ongoing and perhaps renewed
significance of the various practices, objects, methodologies, and theoretical positions that have travelled
under the aegis of “postcolonialism.” We want to ask the following questions: Does postcolonialism have
a method, one that can be reactivated today? How might a return to postcolonialism productively inflect
the new methodological and theoretical orientations emerging from our post-poststructuralist moment? Do
postcolonialists still share a set of texts and critical orientations? Have we ever? What is convincing and
important in the current critiques of postcolonial studies? And how might we re-read what postcolonial
studies was from the perspective of what it could—and can—be?
We invite papers from any discipline or subdiscipline, and any region or language tradition that engages
these questions in both theory and practice. Possible topics may include neo-imperialism, postcolonial his-
toriography and discourse analysis, the institutional rise of the World/Global literature paradigms, political
economy and global capital flows, contemporary political formations and the postcolonial perspective,
postcolonial studies and Marxism, new postcolonial regions and formations, and more.
Organizes:
◦ Brad Freeman, Ohio State University

◦ Brandon Manning, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
As Henry Louis Gates Jr. articulates in Signifying Monkey, the relationship between form and race are
inextricably bound to historical ways of verbal and authorial resistance. The increased rhetoric and defini-
tions of post-racialism both inside and outside the academy bring new ways of understanding the relation-
ship between race and form in literature and other cultural productions. This panel seeks to illuminate and
interrogate the relationship between form, race, and resistance in narratives from the mid-20th to late 20th
century. This seminar is interested in understanding how different forms help to construct or erase racial
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boundaries. In addition, we seek to interrogate the potential for these forms to serve as type of narrative
resistance, both within the larger matrix of American literature, as well as to highlight the ways that authors
narrate moments of resistance in their works.
Organizes:
◦ Jeffrey Clapp, Hong Kong Institute of Education

◦ Melissa Karmen Lee, Chinese University of Hong Kong
In exile in the early 1940s, Stefan Zweig looked back on his youth in pre-war Vienna as the ‘golden
age of security’. In Zweig’s narrative, a shared sense of private and public stability was shattered by
the onslaughts of two world wars, giving rise to a generation perceived to have ‘long since struck the
word ”security” from [its] vocabulary as a myth’. Yet immediately following the war, ‘security’ began to
acquire a new currency and resonance which intensified through the paranoid maneuverings of the Cold
War, and which has increasingly come to define our own digital age. Security talk has become ubiquitous,
heightened by the war on terror on the one hand, and the possibilities of new information technologies on
the other. Following revelations about the extent to which security agencies have penetrated daily lives,
the time is right to examine how the discourse of security has come to control key features of contemporary
experience.
In particular, we would like to invite panelists to explore how security concerns are reshaping conceptions,
discussions, and practices of hospitality. Security and hospitality have long been uneasy bedfellows. If se-
curity is that which one purports to offer in extending hospitality, it is also that which one puts at stake. As
actors strive to forestall adverse events, security activities could well endanger hospitable relationships be-
tween friends and among strangers. From the individual’s telephone and data, to the threshold of the family
home, to the borders of the nation, sites of securitization confound hospitality’s injunctions to openness,
gifting, and refuge. Modes, etiquettes and platforms of hospitality are, moreover, evolving. It seems that
as we are increasingly “always on”, we extend our means of being “at home” to one another; at the same
time, we find ourselves password-protecting caches of passwords. Further, home twins homeland: people
move more than ever, yet they move through borders which are more and more intensively securitized.
Such questions—questions at once novel and perennial, intimate and universal, ethical and political—are
amplified in modern and contemporary representations. Indeed, writers and artists themselves can be found
to invite and repulse their very readers in ways which meditate on the meanings of security and hospitality.
We call on contributors to examine texts, in any genre or language, which consider how subjects, citizens,
communities, or states negotiate the mutual, and potentially exclusive, desires to secure themselves and
offer hospitality to others. While we primarily intend to discuss modern and contemporary experiences
and expressions, we are also open to considerations of earlier periods which trace their claims toward the
present.
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769. Seeing Animals
Organizes:
◦ David Coughlan, University of Limerick

◦ Elizabeth Wijaya, Cornell University
Jacques Derrida’s influential The Animal That Therefore I Am begins with a scene of seeing, as he stands
exposed before “a cat that looks at [him] without moving, just to see.” For Donna Haraway, in When
Species Meet, it’s key that Derrida “understood that actual animals look back at actual human beings.”
This seminar strays onto this scene also in order to consider this face-to-face encounter, and to consider,
in particular, the representation of these human and non-human seeing animals and what they see. Or,
what they perceive, because the sight of these faces is surely asymmetrical and must touch also on scent,
sound, and taste. In representing this scene, therefore, how can one express, as Derrida puts it, the “desire
to escape the alternative of a projection that appropriates and an interruption that excludes” the other? In
turn, how does recognition of the animal’s desire “to manifest to me in some way its experience of my
language, of my words and of my nudity” (Derrida) affect my world?
This seminar seeks theoretically-informed papers addressing seeing animals in visual art, film, and comics
and graphic novels, but it will also consider texts dealing with what might be more generally called animal
writing and the language of animals’ worlds. Possible topics include: • The visual representation of animals
• The figurative animal • Representing animal senses • Figuring animal experience • The language of animal
experience • Animal perspectives on the human (world) • Seeing animals, ethics, and rights
904. Sex/Comedy
Organizes:
◦ Joseph Lavery, University of California, Berkeley

◦ Clifford Mak, University of Pennsylvania
The cultural histories of sex and comedy are forever converging: from the bawdy tale to the porn par-
ody, these two disreputable modes of representation have dipped into each other’s generic and thematic
repertoires. Or do they rather compete? Why is it so unsatisfying, even shameful, to imagine laughter as
the destination of erotic longing? By weaving together figures of expenditure and desire, projection and
incorporation, sex comedy comprises a complex field in which erotic and social energies are calibrated.
This seminar explores the affective, aesthetic, psychic, and political consequences of such generic collu-
sions. How is sexuality regulated through the play of words and bodies, or else how does such play escape
the normalization of sexual subjectivity? Or is sexuality rather analogous to a laugh track, a regulating
structure deforming pleasures that might otherwise find other ends? We take no optimistic view of any
entanglements of sex with comedy, but nor are we prescriptively skeptical: we invite responses to these
questions from perspectives queer or Marxist, feminist or historicist, formalist or psychoanalytic.
Potential topics include:
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–Laughing about it later; leaving in a taxi; the recovery project; legitimation (“put a wig on before you
judge”); the pastoral impulse; Aristophanean, Rabelaisian, and picaresque
laughter; shamefacedness.
–Getting the giggles; the humiliation of gender; frankness; embarrassment; the Bad Sex
Award; queer and straight negativities; sexytime; slackness.
–Jokes and their relation to the drive; homosocial currencies; nocturnal emissions; the
comedy of remarriage.
–Nihilism and repetition; biopolitics, technique and pleasure; mirth and its absence;
optimistic cruelty; sadistic ethics; the carnivalesque.
–Porn parodies; sex tapes; dick pics; bathos.

Organizes:
◦ Monika Kaup, University of Washington

◦ John Ochoa, The Pennsylvania State University
This is a special session to honor the lifetime scholarly achievement of Lois Parkinson Zamora. A past pres-
ident of ACLA, Zamora is an influential cultural and literary critic who has published pioneering studies on
hemispheric American studies and modern Latin American literature: Writing the Apocalypse: Historical
Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction (1989) and The Usable Past: The Imagination
of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (1997) and, more recently, on the Baroque, New World
Baroque and Neobaroque (The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction; 2006).
Her monographs and co-edited collections, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (with Wendy
Faris; 1995), Image and Memory: Photographs from Latin America, 1866-1994 (with Wendy Watriss;
1998) and Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (with Monika Kaup;
2010) have become classics in their respective fields and seeded new work. This session gathers together
her collaborators and students whose presentations celebrate Lois work and demonstrate its impact.
Organizes:
◦ Jennifer Ballengee, Towson University

◦ David Kelman, California State University, Fullerton
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Two adjectives have often been used in popular discourse to describe terrorism: traumatic and tragic.
Tragedy seems to imply that the event of terrorism can be resolved or worked through, comparable to a
successful mourning process, precisely because the event not only happens but is also staged as a perfor-
mance. Trauma, on the other hand, implies that the event never occurs as such and therefore repeats as
a phantasmatic occurrence. As Derrida notes in his reflections on 9/11, ”[t]raumatism is produced by the
future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is ‘over and
done with.’” (97). Therefore, even as trauma and tragedy seem to imply different responses to the event,
both terms, in surprising ways, have recourse to the logic of the phantasm, the imagination, the ”perhaps,”
and even fiction. This seminar invites papers that ask about the role of the imagination (broadly theorized)
in defining the event of terror.
Organizes:
◦ Kyle Wanberg, New York University

◦ Sharareh Frouzesh, University of California, Irvine
We find ourselves in a world where economic logic rules the day. Caught within the rationality of neolib-
eralism, those of us who contest austerity, privatization, and the concomitant militarization of civil society
are often left to counter them through vague logics of redistribution which take as given the very systems
of accounting which we seek to undermine.
This seminar seeks academics who work on literature, film, and theory through critiques that reimagine
economic rationalities. We are particularly interested in papers that engage with literary and theoretical
representations of economic logic and the logic of economics, including uses of concepts of debt and
accountability. In this way, we hope to open conversations around the limits of accounting, accountability,
and calculability. Ultimately, our aim is to investigate the authority of systems of economic value and
imagine ways of contesting them which do not merely replicate but undo the attachment to their claims of
knowability and predictability.
Organizes:
◦ José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra, University of Houston

◦ Tamara R. Williams, Pacific Lutheran University
This seminar proposes to seriously propose a punctum that allows the examination of the literatures of
the world otherwise. The figure of the hospitable writer, here defined as the one who translates, edits,
and, more importantly, writes in dialogue with a number of writers that produce or produced their work in
different languages they use. These hospitable writers create unique genealogies, rather than histories of
literature, that are often capricious, and always peculiar enough to productively challenge the idea of the
canon and its inversion, the counter-canon, both written in the singular. Away from the ever-increasing
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narrowness of profit-driven global publishing empires, the tokenism and political-correctness of smaller
non-profit presses, and the monolingual syllabi of courses designed fulfill core requirements and placate
remorse in the beautiful souls of academia. Away, in one word, from the convergence implicit in the
singular of the phrase world literature. Exemplary as hospitable writers of the Global South are Jorge Luis
Borges, Sergio Pitol, Roberto Bolaño and perhaps even more poignantly, the recently deceased José Emilio
Pacheco, whose work is not only that of indefatigable translator, but that of the creator of hospitality as a
genre: several of his works both verse and prose, create the conditions for the encounter for writers that
never met in real life, should have met (such as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and the Rainer María Rilke), that
allow readers to go beyond the national and epochal constraints that our disciplines enforce and police.
Organizes:
◦ Karen Jacobs, University of Colorado at Boulder

◦ Laurence Petit, Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3
In light of recent reconceptions of objects, materialisms, and their contested ontological underpinnings,
this seminar reconsiders the still life as a historical genre fundamentally conversant with the object form.
The seminar furthermore revisits the question of the mutual constitution of literary and pictorial still lives
across a range of historical and cultural contexts. We highlight several paradoxes that subtend the identity
of the still life. The first inheres in the shift of emphasis between the English “still life” and the French
“nature morte,” the latter sense of which is most prominent in the still life sub-genre of vanitas paintings;
here we find the still life’s aesthetic quest confounded by its confrontation with the transience and futility
of human pleasures. The second paradox concerns the connotative and ontological status of those objects
that the still life conventionally represents. Chiefly consecrated to the quotidian objects of domestic life,
the still life has long been consigned to the lower rungs of pictorial representation. While recent work
asserting a “democracy of objects” (Bogost) pushes back against this hierarchical understanding through
such concepts as the assemblage, new materialists (Alaimo, Barad) have shown the ways the gendering
of objects and their domestic contexts renders such hierarchies still durable. Finally, however much the
objects of still life are aestheticized, they nevertheless exist in some proximity to the commodity form and
its circulation of meanings and values; like the “democracy of objects,” the exchange value of commodities
also flattens hierarchies of meaning but in a wholly different register.
Organizes:
◦ Sam Caldwell, University of Toronto
What demands does language face when it is pressed to describe God, gods, or things spiritual? Much
theological study in the Western tradition has focused either on the ’attributes’ used to describe divine en-
tities or on ’histories’ of divine revelation. Between attributes and histories lies the question of sentences.
Are theological sentences the same as descriptive, empirical sentences? Do they require novel modes of
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reading? This seminar proposes to study language at its most contentious and most speculative. While the
proposed focus is on syntax and theological questions at the level of the sentence, questions of performa-
tivity, speech acts, theological and ideological manipulation, theological poetry, and comparative religion
are welcome.
Organizes:
◦ Barrett Watten, Wayne State University

◦ Jonathan Stalling, University of Oklahoma
The past thirty-five years has witnessed the phenomenal growth of numerous avant-garde art and poetry
movements in China, from the 1979 Stars exhibition and Misty School of poetry to the present. This sem-
inar will survey the formal innovations, historical development, and cultural logics of the Chinese avant-
gardes, working across genres and disciplines in doing so. It will present examples of formally innovative
and culturally provocative art, from its period of emergence after the Cultural Revolution in the 80s to the
traumatic break that occurred with the events of the June 4/Tiananmen Square movement to periods of
growth and dispersion in the 90s and global recognition in the 00s. How have Chinese avant-gardes de-
veloped, dispersed, changed, been absorbed—what are their influences, accomplishments, contradictions,
historical mission? How are the Chinese avant-gardes global; how do they respond to or resist global-
ization; how do they reflect, affirm, or critique China’s role in the global order? How are the Chinese
avant-gardes a moment of cultural translation or hybridity between Chinese and Western/avant-garde aes-
thetics, philosophy, and/or politics (including gender)? How were emergent forms of transnational art,
such as Conceptual Art or Concrete Poetry, interpreted in China? How do the Chinese avant-gardes ne-
gotiate the visual/verbal interface between pinyin and roman characters as a part of its task? And finally,
what does the emergence of the Chinese avant-gardes, in their specific historical and cultural conditions,
mean for the theory of the avant-garde, given its Eurocentric historical basis?
Jacob Edmond, Associate Professor, University of Otago is a third co-organizer for this seminar.
Organizes:
◦ Robert Hughes, Ohio State University

◦ Gabriel Riera, University of Illinois at Chicago
Contemporary continental aesthetics has vigorously defended the specificity of art within human experi-
ence. It has done so, in part, by enforcing a theoretical separation between whatever it is that happens in an
event of art and the subject’s becoming within collective life–as if to say that art is important and politics
is important, but that one must not confuse the two, lest the incredibly precious but essentially weak claim
of art upon human care be overwhelmed by the more imperious exigencies of politics. At the same time,
some of these defenders of art nonetheless also provide resources for thinking carefully about the limited
263
intersections of art and aesthetics with the political and historical life of the subject.
The present seminar will offer papers considering the philosophical and theoretical dimensions of art con-
sidered as an event: an event in a moment of the subject that is also an event in some kind of relation to
historicity and political life.
Papers will consider especially the work of contemporary thinkers–Badiou, Nancy, Rancière, Agamben,
Žižek, Stiegler, and others–but will also make excursions through the work of earlier continental thinkers–
Schiller, Heidegger, Adorno, Lacan, Lyotard, and others–especially as they speak to contemporary con-
cerns about intersections of politics and the event of art.
Organizes:
◦ Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

◦ Gautam Basu Thakur, Boise State University
What is the function of the vernacular and/or vernacularity in a ‘globalized’ world that accepts English
in its various forms of enunciation as the lingua franca for the planet? Does an interest in and pursuit of
the vernacular index a desperate attempt to stay connected to a pre-globalized, and possibly pre-colonial,
past? Or should such attempts be read as affiliated to religious revivalist trends in ascendance throughout
the world? Or can we associate the focus on the vernacular with and as symptomatic of the possibility
of a resurfacing of Third worldism in the geopolitical present? Admittedly these questions conceive the
vernacular as arcane, of belonging to the past, and incompatible with the present. Therefore it is imperative
to inquire after the relationship between the vernacular and the modern and modernity. Does the vernacular
stand in opposition to; in spite of; or delimiting the present modern? Is it possible to conceive of vernacular
futures, both aesthetic and political? What would such futures entail in terms of issues like citizenry,
otherness, class, gender, and, the seemingly entrenched conditions of global capitalism?
This panel is interested in exploring, examining, debating, and dissecting the topic of vernacular and ver-
nacularity from a range of disciplinary perspectives, research agendas, and theoretical perspectives.
Possible sub-topics are:
Comparative literature/Translation Studies/ Globalization and the Vernacular Vernacular and Vernacular-
ity Theorizing/Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Vernacular The History of the Vernacular Politics of
Resistance and the Vernacular Affect, Memory, and Vernacular
Contact: gautambasuthakur@boisestate.edu; rbhttchr@illinois.edu
Organizes:
◦ Alexandra Moore, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
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◦ Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Babson College
The analytic frames of vulnerability and precarity have in recent years shifted the theory and practice of
human rights in relation to intersecting areas of social justice, including environmental justice, structural
inequalities, state violence and policing, feminist and queer studies, and neoliberalism. Literature and
criticism have taken up these frames to advance analyses of the liberal subject of human rights and to
reconceive human solidarity outside liberal notions of the universal. In this panel we aim to build upon
foundational work by Berlant, Butler, Fineman, Grear, Hesford, Lorey, and Puar in order to explore the
potential and limitations of vulnerability and precarity as alternative approaches to human rights-oriented
literary and cultural criticism.
How might theories of vulnerability and precarity reframe narratives of embodied suffering? What forms
of political agency are legible within these theories? How might a focus on vulnerability replicate or
avoid imperializing discourses of victimhood? Are there particular human rights violations that emerge
more clearly or that are masked by these theoretical frameworks? What are the norms and normativities
in human rights discourses and vulnerability frameworks? How do we understand the periodization and
historical contexts of claims made on vulnerability?
We invite papers that take up such questions in a broad range of human rights and cultural contexts.
Greg Mullins, Faculty, Evergreen State College is third co-organizer of this seminar.
Organizes:
◦ Brenda Sanfilippo, University of California, Santa Cruz

◦ Najwa Al-Tabaa, University of Florida
Every war has its own patterns of injury based on contemporary military weapons, strategy, and tactics.
Unlike in previous wars, the “signature wounds” of the Global War on Terror are the invisible injuries
of PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. While Elaine Scarry has argued that “what is remembered in the
body is well remembered” as a record of what happens in war, the visible wounds of war are today less
frequently seen. From the ban on showing returning military coffins to restrictions on images of wounded
soldiers and civilians to isolated injury care units, the physical wounds of war are often unrepresented
and unremembered. This panel explores the ways in which war visibly wounds the body, the nation, the
landscape, and the globe.
We seek papers that look at representations of military and civilian physical disability, rehabilitation and
treatment, the destruction of landscape and cityscape, “organic shrapnel” and human waste, and media
coverage and censorship. We are open to a variety of approaches to war injury, allowing us to engage
historically and comparatively across time periods, spaces, disciplines, and media, with special attention to
our contemporary moment. While we are focused on visual works – film, television, comics, photography,
art – we are also interested in any text that explores and represents these traumatic visible wounds. In
what ways do these visual representations of war injury “blast open the continuum of history,” as Walter
Benjamin proposes, by presenting us with what is unseen?
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Organizes:
◦ Eva Hoffmann, University of Oregon

◦ Kári Driscoll, University of Utrecht
What can the study of animals contribute to literary studies and vice versa? What can literary animal
studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might otherwise be blind to? Although
animals abound in the literature of almost every geographical area and historical period, traditional literary
criticism has been marked by the tendency to disregard this ubiquitous animal presence in literary texts, or
else a single-minded determination to read animals exclusively as metaphors and symbols for something
else, in short as “animal imagery,” which, as Margot Norris writes, “presupposes the use of the concrete
to express the abstract, and indeed, it seem[s] that nowhere in literature [are] animals to be allowed to be
themselves.” What does it mean for literary theory and criticism to allow animals to “be themselves”? How
can we as scholars of literature resist the tendency to press animals “into symbolic service” as metaphors
and allegories for the human, whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal?
The pervasive uneasiness regarding the metaphorical conception of the animal within recent scholarship in
animal studies stems from a more general suspicion, by no means unjustified, that such a conception serves
ultimately to assimilate the animal to a fundamentally logocentric discourse and hence to reduce “animal
problems to a principle that functions within the legibility of the animal: from animal to ani-word,” as
Jonathan Burt writes in response to Derrida’s ‘animot’. The question of the animal thus turns out to have
been the question of language all along. Conversely, however, we might also posit that the question of
language has itself also always been the question of the animal. What would it mean for literary studies
if we were to take the implications of this involution seriously? How can we be attentive to the specific
way animals operate in literary texts as “functions of their literariness” (to borrow a phrase from Susan
McHugh)? In other words, not merely as one trope in an author’s poetic arsenal that could easily be
replaced by any other, but rather as a speciﬁc problem to and for language and representation as such. This
seminar seeks papers dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study—i.e. texts from
any tradition or period that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language
and representation—and as a methodological problem for literary animal studies.
Organizes:
◦ Alejandro Quin, University of Utah

◦ Gustavo Furtado, Duke University
In his Lectures on the philosophy of History, G.W.F Hegel puts forward the idea that the spirit of time fills
space unevenly, imbuing some territories with historic meaning while leaving others empty, uninhabited
by time or history. Similarly, the age of Discovery imagined the entire American continent to be awaiting
the inscriptions of Western reason, a perspective that, even after the founding of independent American
states, continued to apply to the backlands of national territories such as jungles, forests, deserts, plains,
and mountainous regions. We designate by the term “wilderness” these and other spaces that, although
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nominally within national boundaries, are not fully domesticated by the metropolitan gaze and remain out-
side modern temporality—cast as “nature” in opposition to “culture,” therefore outside historic time and
meaning. Yet discourses about wilderness in the Americas are always inflected by complex temporal op-
erations that not only reinforce but sometimes challenge their passive role as the negative counterpart to
Hegelian, modern historicity. A journey into the American wilderness is often cast as an expedition into
the past, a pattern that effectively sanctions the nature-culture divide as well as the allochronic rendering
of native cultures as primitive, pre-Lapsarian, or even animal-like. Although the American wilderness is
often central to narratives of state formation, it is also the springboard for myriad counter-narratives, the
site from where to imagine alternate, nonlinear, messianic, and revolutionary temporalities, as illustrated,
for instance, in the theories and strategies of guerrilla warfare devised by many 20th-century rebel groups.
More recently, as concerns about climate change and environmental degradation grow, the potential ex-
tinction of wilderness areas points to an epochal change, one that confirms the thesis of the “anthropocene,”
which, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, names the period in which “humans act as the main determinant
of the environment of the planet”, making, therefore, untenable the separation between human and nat-
ural histories. This panel invites scholars to reflect on wilderness and temporality in the Americas both
in relation to specific cultural manifestations such as literature, cinema, and the arts, political and social
movements, or as a theoretical problem. Following are some suggested topics:
- The temporality of travel narratives from colonial times to the present. - The relationship between “nature”
and “culture” as well as approaches that question this distinction, such as the notion of the “anthropocene”. -
Nature, state formation, legal and paralegal violence. - Wilderness, non-linear temporalities, and messianic
and revolutionary time. - Ecology and temporality. - Extractive economies and developmentalism. -
Denial of coevalness, allochronism, and issues surrounding the meaning of the “contemporaneous”. -
Notions of the human (such the divide between humanitas and anthropos) and the posthuman. - The human-
animal divide as well as human and non-human agencies. - Interactions between historical and natural
temporalities.
Organizes:
◦ Nazry Bahrawi, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore

◦ Gonçalo Cordeiro, University of Lisbon
The interdisciplinary vocation of Comparative Literature offers scholars from diverse humanities fields
an invaluable opportunity to work together along unifying themes. This is evident in twentieth-century
debates about the place of religion in literary studies, with major contributions from T.S. Eliot, Mircea
Eliade, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, among others.
In this seminar, we propose to look at the intersections between religion and literature through the lens
of World Literature, which had allowed literary criticism to expand its inquiry into new realms such as
the question of scale in the practice of comparative literature, the circulation and migration of literary and
religious texts beyond their points of origin, and ‘the universal’ in aesthetics and ethics.
We therefore invite contributions that engage theory to speculate the ways in which world literature could
shed new light on the study of literature and theology across different cultures and geographic origins.
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This seminar also welcomes close textual analysis that explore how the sacred is conveyed and interpreted
in literature beyond local frames of belief.
Our aim would be to generate a favorable environment to discuss questions such as:
• Can literature be a space where non-denominative, non-parochial ideas of faith are imagined? • What is
meant by the ’world’ in world religion and/or world literature? • What forms can secularism and/or post-
secularism assume in world literature? • What is the role of ’theory’ in the field of religion and literature?
• Can comparisons be made across different faith-based literatures? • What kinds of links exist between
aesthetics and faith in literature?
We welcome contributions that deal with specific beliefs (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Secularism, and
others) or specific groups of faiths (Abrahamic, or non-Abrahamic), as well as papers that are comparative
in nature. We also strongly encourage approaches that address issues of ethical, philosophical, poetical,
aesthetical, and hermeneutical significance.
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Chapter 15
Stream C
Organizes:
◦ Stanton McManus, East Tennessee State University

◦ Chris Meade, Appalachian State University
The relationship between history and aesthetics is often considered a formal or poetic question from which
interpretations of ideology, epistemology, rhetoric, politico-cultural situations, etc. follow. Yet, this re-
lationship also involves the role of aesthetic models in producing affects that contribute to the formation
of identities and the shape of subjectivities. Aristotle, for example values the poetics of tragedy because
of the affective response that it elicits, and because it best informs his classical understanding of self and
world. Writing about modernity, by contrast, Peter Brooks argues that melodrama’s affective mode most
corresponds with the absenting of the Sacred and the resultant ambiguity of ethics in the everyday world.
However, this relationship is not limited to underlining differences between historical ages. It can also
be useful for understanding geographically based subjectivities, as when Alejo Carpentier implores Latin
American novelists to write melodramas to underscore the consequences of underdevelopment on the re-
gion’s reality.
This seminar seeks to foster discussion among scholars studying these complex interactions between his-
tory, aesthetics and affect. Other examples might include the querelle des anciens et modernes with respect
to tragedy and the early modern world; the reworking of tragedy in German Classicism; melodrama as a
‘realist’ film genre in contemporary cinema; analyses of the relation between the history of global devel-
opment and the biography of subaltern subjects; or any other investigation of how the aesthetics of affect
is historically inflected by philosophical, political, and social conceptions of self and other.
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in the 21st Century
Organizes:
◦ Stephenie Young, Salem State University

◦ Adele Parker, College of the Holy Cross
If, for Deleuze, the value of catastrophe lies in its power to subvert existing systems, we might ask how
this notion influences the kinds of texts that contemporary women produce in the face of traumatic events.
The purpose of this seminar is to examine the varied ways that transnational narratives written by women
over the past 10-15 years may create an aesthetics of ”catastrophe” in response to traumatic global events
since the mid-20th century. The papers in this seminar draw connections between narrative form and the
chaos of modern violence from a transnational perspective. By ”narrative” we refer to different modes of
storytelling including traditional texts, visual studies and performance art that address subjects such as war,
mass atrocity, civil unrest—whether witnessed first-hand or through layers of generational witnessing. Our
seminar pushes the boundaries of ”narrative,” but also the frontiers of other tricky terms such as ”national,”
”transnational,” “global,” and interact and interrogate concepts such as “multidirectional memory.” Some
of the questions that our papers consider include: How does women’s cultural production attempt to create
an aesthetics of catastrophe and to what extent is a transnational narrative possible? Do certain events call
for different aesthetic criteria, especially when interpreted through the lens of a woman writer or artist?
Are unique narrative forms necessary for the working through of these catastrophic events? What does it
mean to bring aesthetics to bear on what is monstrous or inconceivable as a woman writer or artist working
in the 21st century?

Organizes:
◦ Youngmin Kim, Dongguk University
Literary globalization and “distance” have become hot critical issues in the fields of comparative and world
literature as well as that of cultural studies, creating the problematics of border-crossing and convergence.
The issue of “distant reading” has been levying challenges against the hermeneutic authority of “close
reading,” and in so doing, has created a new space for macro literatures which necessitates a new recon-
figuration through geographic representation.
Under the title of “Aesthetics, Politics, and Ethics of Close Reading versus Distant Reading in World
Literature,” this seminar will provide an open forum for scholars from interdisciplinary areas of humanities.
Moreover, this seminar aims to foster ongoing dialogue regarding global exchanges and contestations in
the fields of English language and literature and the literatures at large. We invite submissions that grapple
with the tension between macro & micro literatures, from the aesthetic, political, and ethical perspectives
of both close reading and distant reading.
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Enquiries can be sent to Youngmin Kim, Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea. Contact Email: yk4147@hotmail.com
Organizes:
◦ Regina Lee, University of Washington
The deconstruction of categories of animal, human, and cybernetic organisms has led to wholesale re-
thinking of corporeal futures and agential action. Likewise, the increase of information-based interactions
refigures interactivity in ways which seem to subvert embodied expectation. At these removes, who is an
agential actor, and what are the borders of her presence? What are the frontiers of imagining embodied
futures?
This seminar invites papers developing feminist analyses of speculative futures, whether static, dystopic,
or new. The seminar seeks to build collaborative arrays of methods and examples for thinking through
evolution and teleology, difference and duration, and stasis and the event in order to parse or precipitate
these speculative futures. The impact and effects of feminist thought on speculative subjects thus forms
the central core of this seminar’s interdisciplinary inquiry. Interactions with theoretical discussions of
optimism, queer time, and/or teleologies of failure, although not necessary, would be welcomed.
Papers are invited on (but not limited to): explorations of gendered consequences to humanitarian inter-
ventions, feminist analyses of speculative texts, queering analyses of canonical texts, ramifications of ana-
lyzing gender in conflict narratives, methodologies of queer analyses for ecological futures or biographical
narratives.
Organizes:
◦ Tara Mendola, New York University

◦ Jacques Lezra, New York University
The eclipse of studies of allegory is taken to accompany a general disciplinary turn away from linguistically-
driven criticism, and toward more politically-inflected ways of writing about culture, whether based in
identitarian paradigms, in versions of hegemony theory, or in critical philosophy. (This description is
not uncontroversial, of course, and the derogation of allegory has a number of different causes and conse-
quences. Jameson’s analysis of ”national allegory” has a peculiarly leavening and enraging effect, painting
studies of allegory with a eurocentric, first-wordly brush.) This seminar wants to engage once more with
allegory, taking on the so-called political turn and asking what sorts of politics the figure, or the mode,
makes possible. Does a return to allegory allow us to rethink how universalist claims are made, according
to what logics, to what ends? What is to be gained by rethinking allegory from the sphere of politics–that
is, from the domain of force, institutionalization, distribution, administration, and so on? What sorts of
political representation become possible, if we take on the long history of allegorical representation, as
well as the critiques of the representationality of allegory that we find in rhetorical deconstruction? The
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scholars who have already expressed their desire to participate in this seminar come from diverse literary
fields (Latin American, Spanish, English, Slavic).
Organizes:
◦ Paloma Duong, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
As practitioner, as ideal, or as trope, the figure of the amateur is etched as a double inscription in cultural
histories and political theories alike: as a peculiar agent of cultural production and dissemination on one
hand, and as a special figuration of the demos on the other. This panel seeks to examine the contemporary
reemergence of figures of amateurism that inhabit, for example, the currency of community-based, par-
ticipatory and/or activist aesthetic practices; the effects of the horizontalization of creative and publishing
platforms introduced by new media and technologies (and the new asymmetries it conceals); the insurgent
political subjectivities to which the crises of traditional political institutions and forms of organization
give birth. The session would also be an opportunity to revisit and unearth the theoretical invocations and
the historical precedents of the amateur in all its modalities, as well as its relationship to other kindred
agents—dilettantes, autodidacts, bricoleurs, aficionados, and professionals—and to processes governing
aesthetic and social praxis: the construction of authorial legitimacy, the professionalization and legislation
of different spheres of productivity and creativity, and the precarization and politics of labor and leisure.

Organizes:
◦ Miaowei Weng, Southern Connecticut State University
Spain and Portugal were the major powers present in Asia in the age of European overseas discovery. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish and Portuguese writers provided to the West earliest accounts
of Asian territories. Meanwhile, Asian chroniclers also left records about the Spanish and Portuguese. The
international trade between the Spanish-American Empire and Asia via Manila triggered the continuous
mutual representations from the sixteenth century onward.
In addition to direct encounters, also included in the inquiry are indirect connections between these two
continents. Countries in both continents share same experiences such as colonialism, large-scale migration,
modernization, civil wars, authoritarianism, transition to democracy, historical memory, and so forth. We
examine these common issues through comparisons of East/Asia and West/the Hispanic world, in order to
gain new knowledge about one through the lens of the other.
We invite papers that explore: • Spanish and Portuguese depictions of Asia • Asian depictions of the
Hispanic world • Common issues shared by Asia and the Hispanic world • Colonialism and migration •
Mediated intercultural communications • Translations • Conceptions of the Other as well as the Self
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Organizes:
◦ Adelaide Russo, Louisiana State University

◦ Michelle Zerba, Louisiana State University
Between Nostalgia and Dystopia
Between epic praise of a past in which heroes walked the earth and modern literary dystopias of a post-
cataclysmic future in which humans are reduced to barrenness, we find two very different ways in which
cultures use art to mediate time and memory. In his Encomium of Helen, Gorgias anticipates the challenges
of temporality, observing that “opinion” has a decisive role in remembering the past and prophesizing
the future. Contemporary writers confront these challenges in various ways, sometimes succumbing to a
melancholic sense of a lost tradition or warning of imminent catastrophe. Michel Deguy’s Ecologiques
plays off Virgil’s prophecies of a golden age in the Eclogues. Kay Ryan’s The Niagara River reconfigures
Hesiod’s didactic Works and Days, expressing the difficulty of living in a place after an environmental
disaster. These works revise the attempts of traditional epic to forge a society’s sense of its importance in a
larger human community. Nostalgia conceived incrementally may assume a space along this spectrum as
an expression of a loss that is partially recoverable. In this seminar we explore the recurring relationship
of remembering the past and foreseeing the future as it pertains to the vestigial recovery of earlier literary
forms and the invention of new discourses.
Organizes:
◦ Jenny Wills, University of Winnipeg

◦ David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University
Since the 1970s theorizing identity has held to one basic belief: identities are not inherent, they are con-
structed. But recent scientific and technological innovations, along with a general fatigue in constantly
rehearsing the “identities are constructed” mantra, compel us to rethink that basic belief and see how it
might be deserving of radical rethinking, or at least radical modification. More and more we find people
searching for biological kinship and ancestry from around the world, embarking on “roots trips” to their
(or their ancestors’) countries of origin, and “culture camps” that offer young people (such as transracial
adoptees) the opportunity to “connect with their lost cultural origins.” There is an anti-constructivist, per-
sonal nostalgia sweeping the country (a nostalgia for something one has yet to experience—one’s bare
roots) as well as a fascination with the global applications of genetic analysis (for instance, with the Hu-
man Genome Project), that are represented in a variety of genres, media, and perspectives. What we are
witnessing here is a return to thinking about essence, identity, and more specifically, the biological aspects
of our far pasts as an important and missing index. Our seminar will move beyond the sentimental, how-
ever, to see the theoretical and political consequences of such an inversion of the essentialist-constructivist
dyad. We invite papers that explore such consequences for textual and cultural representations of glob-
ality, migration, genocide, Indigeneity, settler colonialism, postcolonialism, gender and sexuality, trans*
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subjectivities, transnational and transracial adoption, kinship, race, and ethnicity.
647. Compartments
Organizes:
◦ Nan Da, University of Notre Dame
This is a seminar devoted to the study of things that exist to keep other things apart. Compartmentaliza-
tion,” according to Wikipedia at least, is ”an unconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid
cognitive dissonance, or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a person’s having conflicting values,
cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves.” Compartmentalization describes the phenomenon
wherein consciousness takes its cues from watching the behaviors of object– a therapeutic mechanism for
dealing with the way thoughts/emotions/perceptions want bleed into one another. Thus, after Niklas Luh-
mann, compartmentalization is the artificial form that consciousness chooses as it veers towards what it
should have (but could not have) known to be true: that it can only go on in an evolutionary sense by parti-
tioning, cordoning off, and stopping connectivity wherever possible. Compartmentalization is a cognitive
response to the essential discontinuity of experience (of oneself or others) and the need for quasi-material
dividers (of time and perception).
In the past decade or so, thing theory, new materialism and media-centered historiography—all of which
fall under the emergence of object-oriented ontology—have contributed much to the discourse of networks,
circulation, and global interconnectivity. This seminar invites more of this kind of research, but that which,
unlike the current literature, specifically addresses the idea of compartments or compartmentalization. We
have invite scholars to use literature to explore the relationship between compartmentalizing and transna-
tional formation, to parse the logics of segregated space in books, maps, hair, surfaces, the open seas,
or to view as multi-systemic or compartmentalized paradigms and phenomena that we tend to regard as
accretional and continuous (“the social,” cross-cultural exchange, speech, belief). Instead of approaching
of things dialectically, we will be regarding them compartmentally—that is, without entwining, without
acting on each other in co-determinative historical processes, and without shared structures of meaning.
With this seminar we hope to start a serious dialogue that moves away from the discourse of interpolli-
nation, exchange and synthesis between and amongst humans, thoughts, emotions and objects but their
unsentimental and often unacknowledged hairs-breadth apartness.

Organizes:
◦ Kurt Cavender, Brandeis University

◦ Myka Tucker-Abramson, Boston University
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, American writers have begun to return to the political and aes-
thetic moment of the late 1960s and 1970s. This turn has taken both a domestic and a global perspective:
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from the recent revival of interest in the Weather Underground as the United States’ own stillborn revolu-
tionary moment—we can think of Bill Siegel’s 2002 documentary, new novels from Russell Banks and Jay
Cantor, and the recent memoirs of David Gilbert, Bill Ayers and Cathy Wilkerson, to name just a few—to
a revisiting of 1970s global insurgencies in places such as Italy, India, and South Africa as in Rachel Kush-
ner’s The Flamethrowers, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowlands, and Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las
Vegas respectively. In short, the literary climate of our contemporary neoliberal moment seems haunted
by a 1970s-tinged phantom of global revolutionary violence.
But what do we make of this return? We are particularly interested in 3 questions: 1) Why are so many
novelists returning to the 1970s at this current moment? and what are the social, political, and aesthetic
stakes of such a return? 2) How are these novels either re-opening, foreclosing, or managing moments of
apparent radical possibility in our recently-settled past? What sorts of aesthetic, political, or ethical prob-
lems arise in these novels, memoirs, and documentaries’ attempts to wrestle with these radical histories? 3)
Can we read these historical novels as not just representing a past moment, but also offering an interpretive
intervention in the present that recovers or remake the political potential of that past?
This seminar proposes to explore the manner in which the novel, memoir, poetry, film, photography, televi-
sion, theory, and artworks more generally since 9/11 have wrestled with the 1970s. We especially welcome
proposals that engage in theoretical discussions of the role of history in textual and political presents.
Organizes:
◦ Kara Lee Donnelly, University of Notre Dame
A quarter century ago, the canon wars were raging. Politically engaged academics argued that the canon
was a repressive institution while its defenders accused them of trading identity politics for cultural con-
tinuity and aesthetic greatness. While these debates were frequently crude, they engendered sophisticated
theoretical work on canons and cultural value. By the second half of the 1990s, a ceasefire came into effect.
Canonical figures retained their places in curricula and criticism, but space was made for occluded voices,
popular culture, and minority traditions. But while “the canon” may no longer dominate, canons continue
to exist, exerting pressure on what readers choose to read and how they read it. There are multiple canons
in contemporary literary culture, from national curricula to the Oprah Book Club to the body of short fic-
tion circulating through M.F.A. programs. The concept of canon and canonicity remains a valuable tool
for understanding contemporary literary culture. At the same time, the concept must be retheorized in light
of the multiplicity of contemporary canons and the new processes of canon formation.
This seminar seeks to describe, analyze, and theorize contemporary canons both inside and outside of the
academy. What role do institutions play in the creation of contemporary canons? How do these canons and
their modes of creation differ across language, nation, media, and genre? What is the relationship between
aesthetics and contemporary canons? How do the meanings of texts, especially minor or minority texts,
change as a result of their inclusion in contemporary canons?
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Organizes:
◦ Adeline Tran, University of California, Berkeley

◦ Annika Eisenberg, Goethe University Frankfurt
This seminar investigates the theme of “Detective Fiction and the Arts” primarily in three ways: First,
detective fiction often features other arts or media forms as important sources of aesthetic, narrative or
symbolic value. This might range from Sherlock Holmes’s violin playing to the portrait of Laura in Otto
Premiger’s 1944 film noir of the same title. How are these ”art”-ifacts incorporated into the structure of
the respective work? Second, detective fiction is frequently staged and hosted in a variety of art forms
itself: from literature and film to radio plays and television. In which ways does detective fiction depend
on or exploit the characteristics of its own medium to construct its own aesthetic style? How do adaptions
across art and media forms change the respective work? Finally, the distinction between “highbrow” and
“lowbrow” art – between literary writing and genre writing – has been a source of anxiety for writers
and critics who have sought to elevate the detective novel from a formulaic genre into a serious art form.
How can detective fiction exist apart from its commodified position as a form of mass entertainment? Do
some of them succeed at transcending the generic demands of detective writing that preclude others from
ever reaching the status of high art, and if so, why? We welcome papers that explore any aspects and
topics relating to the representation of and interaction between different art forms within detective fiction.
Potential panelists are invited to consider detective fiction from any culture, language or media form.
Organizes:
◦ Anick S. Boyd, CUNY Graduate Center

◦ Alisa Sniderman, Harvard University
This seminar will explore the representation of money, economies, and currencies in literature from a wide
range of methodologies (materialist, historicist, formalist, etc.) to examine the process of value making in
literature. One approach is to study the relationship between metaphor and economic exchange. As Marc
Shell has shown, metaphor is itself an exchange, and language and thought internalize monetary form
into what he calls “money of the mind.” And, in On Truth and Lies in the Extra Moral Sense, Nietzsche
compares “truths” to “coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
Still another approach is to look at the larger picture of the intertwining histories of economics and literary
studies. As Elizabeth Hewitt has recently noted, “even as American literary scholarship over the last thirty
years has emphasized the marketplace […] the field has not entirely erased its essentially antagonistic
attitude toward the economic world that is so fundamental to the production of the archive it studies.”
We invite papers that deal with the representations of economics in literature and with methodological
approaches to studying the two disciplines together such as but not limited to economic criticism and
rhetorical economics. How do literary texts create values? What kinds of economies exist in literature?
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Organizes:
◦ Yasmine Khayyat, Rutgers University

◦ Muhsin al-Musawi, Columbia University
The recent spate of politically violent events in the Middle East has resulted in new modalities of carceral
power that beg questions of sovereignty, might, citizenship and most importantly, literary democracy. This
seminar explores the new socio-political landscape of the Middle through a literary lens: how has literature
been used as a medium for dislocations, forced migrations, and above all traumatic witnessing? In the spirit
of comparative analysis, we seek papers that explore how various genres, including poetry, prose, political
treatises and even maps have migrated across national and temporal boundaries in the Middle East. How
have they helped to construct and contest literary imaginaries about the contemporary Middle East? We
welcome work that theorizes the literary dimensions of nationhood and its fractured literary landscapes.
Organizes:
◦ Eugenio Di Stefano, University of Nebraska at Omaha

◦ Emilio Sauri, University of Massachusetts Boston
What can Latin American literature tell us about freedom and constraint? How does literature as an art form
speak to the historical constraints that colonialism, imperialism, and military dictatorships have imposed
on the region? Is it enough to insist that the politics of contemporary literature derive exclusively from
its ability to narrativize such constraints? Or do new possibilities emerge by way of an attention to form,
itself long understood by artists and critics as a constraint? While these questions turn on an understanding
of the limits of literature, as the tension between freedom and constraint, and its relationship to the world,
it also raises questions about the meaning of freedom itself, which is by no means fixed, and can often
result in its opposite: constraint. This becomes all the clearer if we consider the role freedom has played in
free-market policies associated with neoliberalism, and its emphasis on political economic practices that
promote entrepreneurial freedoms and free trade. No doubt such policies have been the primary motor of
transformations within the region that have animated various responses at the ballot box (marea rosada)
and in the streets (mass demonstrations). But if the increasing antagonism between these responses raises
new questions about the freedom collective agency affords and the constraints oppressive social structures
impose, then perhaps this is a situation in which literature’s own concern with freedom and constraint takes
on an entirely new political significance. We welcome papers exploring these questions in the context of
contemporary Latin American literature.
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Organizes:
◦ Rafael Acosta, University of Kansas
Having developed in their respective countries as a main character in the narrative of their respective na-
tional histories, Cangaceiros, Gauchos, Cowboys and Charros, amongst others, became cornerstones of
their respective stories of exceptionalism. This comparative seminar would aim to discuss the common-
alities amongst these characters as well as other characters of the several frontiers of the Americas. We
aim to bring together experts of the different languages and traditions in order to better understand the
particularities of each figure through the commonalities across the continent. We would aim to explore,
amongst others, questions such as What do figures like McCarthy’s Judge Holden, Hernandez’s Martín
Fierro, Guimaraes Rosa’s Diadorim or Inclán’s Astucia have in common? What happens when we move
the American cowboy out of the narrative of American Exceptionalism and regeneration through violence.
What happens to the Argentine gaucho when we take him out of the narrative of civilization and barbarism?
What else can we learn about these figures from discourses that are not canonical in their analysis, such as
gender issues? What current figures might be their functional or ideological descendants in the modern day
Americas? This seminar invites papers that would approach figures of the American frontiers in ways that
dislodge them from their traditions, preferably, although not exclusively, comparing figures from across
borders. All theoretical approaches welcome.
Organizes:
◦ Chet Lisiecki, University of Oregon

◦ Jenny Odintz, University of Oregon
How does a consideration of gender enrich discussions on the representation of trauma in literature? How
does attention to this intersection help with understanding responses to trauma, both individual and collec-
tive? It is our intention with this panel to bring together studies of trauma, gender, and associated topics,
such as memory, historiography, testimony, and life writing. By drawing on the work of scholars such
as Cathy Caruth, Judith Butler, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Shoshana Felman, Marianne Hirsch, Vandana
Shiva, and Dominick LaCapra, we would like to investigate the difficulty of voicing gendered trauma
across linguistic, national, and generic boundaries. Likewise, we hope to explore possible differences
between writing trauma (lived experience) and writing about trauma, considering the implications of this
distinction for topics such as secondary, generational, national, historical, or global trauma. We are open to
a variety of critical approaches to this topic, including but not limited to: post colonialism, secularism and
religious studies, affect theory, performativity and performance theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis,
queer theory, translation studies, human rights discourse, ecocriticism, genre theory (particularly autofic-
tion and autobiography), intersectionality, and disability studies. Current paper submissions cover a wide
range of texts, including The Cry of the Dove by Fadia Faqir, How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel,
Visible Ghosts by Li Ang, and Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff. Several papers also
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focus on World War II, including women’s work songs in Fascist Italy, maternal absence in contemporary
women’s historical novels, and gay men’s Holocaust narratives.
Organizes:
◦ Cheryl Narumi Naruse, University of Dayton

◦ Kristine Kotecki, Ball State University
Postcolonial, ethnic, indigenous, and other such literatures are more commonly thought about as literature
in context rather than as literature with aesthetic specificity. Such literature indeed cannot be separated
from the material conditions from which it emerges. However, to read such texts only as evidence of their
historical context empties them of their forming and formative activity. In this seminar, we highlight the
importance of the aesthetic category of genre in order to interrogate the political implications of geography.
The scholarship on genre generally affords it a structuring but also fluid role in shaping how texts are con-
structed and received (e.g., Frow, Rieder, Dimock). In this seminar, we ask how attention to genre allows
us to understand geopolitical phenomena such as regional formations (e.g., the EU, Cascadia), sovereignty
movements, “post-national constellations,” the rise of the “global city,” apartheid, border control, digi-
tal networks, or war. How are geographical conditions such as topography, rising oceans, polar vortices,
garbage patches, the spread of disease, human migration patterns, and so on expressed through genre?
Conversely, how might a geopolitical framework enrich our understandings of genre? How do the global
culture industry and other smaller production and distribution networks shape texts? Are there representa-
tional systems other than “writing back,” the postcolonial allegory, ethnography, or hybrid melange? What
other traditions and innovations comment on experiences of space?
Our seminar already includes papers from scholars working in Eastern European, South/Southeast Asian,
and First Nations/Native American contexts. In the spirit of comparative analysis, we will welcome papers
in any language, historical period, media, or geographical context.
Organizes:
◦ Kevin Riordan, Nanyang Technological University

◦ Nicholas Hengen Fox, Portland Community College
“Government” and “literature” belong to different spheres, exercise different forms of power, and are
studied in different departments. As literary scholars, we often pit literature as a positive (humanizing,
expressive, or empowering) force against negative (impersonal, bureaucratic, or oppressive) governments.
Or, perhaps more commonly, we treat governments as irrelevant to the production and circulation of literary
works. This seminar works to move beyond these familiar positions. We welcome papers from varied
national, transnational, and historical contexts that stage the relation between government and literature
in new and surprising ways. Our goal is to deepen our understanding of the varied and fraught relations
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between these terms.
Contributions to this seminar might respond to some of these questions: How do governments support,
deploy, limit, and prohibit literature? What economic and ideological tensions do governments place on the
production of literature? How do authors attempt to engage governmental power without sacrificing their
artistic principles? What are the consequences of national aesthetic programs, whether state-sanctioned or
artist-driven? More broadly, what is produced in the tension and the terms’ seeming incompatibility? And,
with recent disciplinary shifts are there opportunities for imagining and excavating new relations between
these two terms?

ture
Organizes:
◦ Wendy Laura Belcher, Princeton University
This will be the fourth ACLA seminar on African language literature. While African literature in colonial
languages remains the subject of most Africanist scholarship in the United States and Europe, the vast
majority of African texts are in African languages. Indeed, Africa is home to vibrant literary practices
in indigenous languages that go almost entirely unstudied. Therefore, the seminar provides a forum for
scholarship on African language texts from any period, and in forms traditional and popular, including
film, television, music, art, online sites, genre novels like romances or thrillers, oral poetry, epic, and so
on. Papers may introduce relatively unknown texts or suggest new theoretical approaches to the study of
vernacular African literatures, which include, but are not limited to, literatures in Arabic, Berber, Coptic,
Meroitic, Ge’ez, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Kiswahili, Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya, Somali, Malagasy, Shona,
Zulu, and Xhosa, as well as Sheng, Nigerian Pidgin, and other creolized African languages.
Organizes:
◦ Marcelino Viera-Ramos, Michigan Technological University
In 21st century in Latin America, populist movements seek to affect the “distribution of the sensible”
(concept coined by Jacques Rancière) in the common space as a way of doing politics. This seminar
strives to analyze the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The so-called Latin American Lefts
appeal to loud and thespian accusations such as “evil” in order to justify their fight against capitalism (e.g.
during the 2006 O.N.U. meeting, Hugo Chávez accused George W. Bush of being evil—“En este mismo
lugar huele a azufre todavía”). Under these populists government, arts submission, and its diminution as a
political resource aims to trigger the classic schmittian division of friend-enemy; hence the reaffirmation
of the State as the place for politics. Understanding arts in this way entails an independent political notion
apart from aesthetics. Meanwhile, underneath this conception (arts as a State’s tool) lays the idea that
aesthetics are not related to politics, instead, are means to politics.
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In this seminar we ask about art’s role in politics under the light of a new configuration of the Left. Con-
cretely, how can literature be outside of the State’s purview, thus beyond the friend-enemy distinction? If
aesthetics and politics are together, as Rancière proposes, how does this change and affect our worldview?
And how does literature respond to this new interpretation of its social role? What kind of order would
these aesthetics-politics bring to the social life?
Organizes:
◦ Michelle Chihara, Whittier College

◦ Matthew Seybold, University of Alabama
This seminar attempts to periodize specific rhetorical aspects of finance, or, to ask why language and
metaphor – once the sole province of more literary traditions – have become methodological tools and
areas of focus for an array of scholars now, in their investigations of finance. The work of scholars like
Donald MacKenzie, or Deirdre McCloskey and Mary Poovey, insists on the literary, normative and per-
formative aspects of economics: the rhetorical performance of economic theory brings into being certain
aspects of the markets, and cultural narratives participate in the economy. As more and more scholarly
and popular work transforms the 2008 crisis into a canon of knowledge, we should ask, what specific
role does narratology play? What current transformations of global capitalism are related to the recent
focus on performativity, and how are they related? What kind of object does finance become as a result
of these investigations? What is it about finance that draws scholars’ attention to its appearance, exterior
codes of behavior and immediate embodiments as opposed to that structural medium for which it has long
been known in political economic work, namely time itself? This seminar will bring together analyses
of economic journalism, cultural performances of economic risk, and the reception of economic history.
Our goal is to gain a better understanding of the interaction among markets, socioeconomic realities and
performances broadly defined, and to reveal how and why critical language has become so crucial to the
representation of finance.

Archive
Organizes:
◦ Amal Eqeiq , Williams College

◦ Samer Al-Saber , Davidson College
In writing literary history in the Global South, the literary historian/historiographer encounters a nexus of
tensions between colonial theory and colonized resistance, the reliability of the occupier and the credibility
of the occupied, and the ethnography of the invader and the memory of the native. This nexus reflects a
greater tension between anthropology and critical theory. Ironically, the literary historian also encounters
natives who employ colonial anthropologies as means of resistance.
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In this seminar, we explore these tensions by examining the potential and limits of ethnography, oral
history, and the living archive as modes of inquiry and representation within the field of literary histo-
riography. While we invite traditional questions that focus on the identification of the ethnographic, the
oral, and the living archive as literatures in and of themselves, we also examine the role of such litera-
tures in transforming stagnant views of the colonized, subaltern, oppressed, and Orientalized. How has
the inclusion of testimony and folklore influenced the writing of literary history? What does ethnography
contribute to the literature and history of the colonized and what, if any, is its role in the present? Where
has literary historiography challenged master cultural and national narratives? Which historiographical
lenses arbitrate, vindicate, or indict settler narratives in relation to indigenous oral and written accounts?
In a critical gesture towards remapping world literatures, this seminar aspires to create South-South dia-
logues in comparative literary historiography between Latin America, Africa the Middle East, indigenous
communities, and South-East Asia. Given the particularity and the commonality of the colonial legacy in
the Global South and its burden on writing literary history, we invite scholars to participate in this dialogue
and to discuss any of the following themes: oral literature, documentary art/ film, cultural memory, native
archives, and ethnographies as historical/literary texts.
In Seattle, our ultimate goal will be to explore new directions for the study of indigenous epistemologies
and decolonized histories in the Global South.
Organizes:
◦ Elizabeth Coggeshall, Stanford University

◦ Melanie Conroy, University of Memphis
The introduction of network theory to literary analysis has opened a series of questions about human social
interaction both inside and outside of fictional worlds. Network connections of various kinds are mapped
and quantified: human geographies and social circles, correspondences, friendships. This session proposes
to study one aspect of such complex and dense social geographies: individuation within a network. How
does an aspirant to the group distinguish herself, while showing adherence to the group? How do group
members balance cooperation and ambition? What does it mean to be a part of a network? Can one achieve
individuality without stepping on the toes of one’s friends? Finally, is network theory too reductive for the
study of literature and literary groups?
Each paper should consider a particular literary network. We welcome submissions on modern and pre-
modern literature and culture.
Proposed topics include: - Networks within fictions - Networks of writers (poetic circles, avant-garde
groups) - Networks of readers - The intersections of networks and class, sexuality, race, and/or gender -
Homosociality/Homosexuality/Homoeroticism within networks - Competition within networks - Intellec-
tual property and networked ideas - The individual node and the network
Please send inquiries to Elizabeth Coggeshall, Stanford University (eacogg@stanford.edu), or Melanie

Conroy, University of Memphis (mrconroy@memphis.edu).
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Organizes:
◦ Dan Russek, University of Victoria (Canada)

◦ Susana Gonzalez Aktories, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
The seminar takes up the discussions of a seminar organized for the ACLA Annual Meeting in Puebla,
Mexico, in 2007, entitled “Arts in Academia”. It again invites papers that explore the multiple interactions
between literature, artistic practice and academic scholarship. Beyond, or besides, the traditional task of
interpreting and appreciating intermedial works of art, the panel explores the more recent ways in which
literary research has approached the dialogue, exchange, and ways of collaboration between literature and
other arts. The seminar aims to discuss some of the following issues:
- In what contexts does literary research help illuminate or obscure intermedial artistic expressions?
- To what extent do the goals of scholarship, on the one hand, and artistic production and consumption, on
the other, converge or diverge?
- If media determine the shape and scope of a message, what shape and scope does the work of art acquire
in the medium of higher education?
- In a sometimes hyper-intellectualized academic environment, what is the place, if any, of an education

of the senses?
The seminar is open to multiple perspectives, for example, general reflections on aesthetics, the exploration
of intermedial research tools to bridge the gap between academic departments, and case studies, among
others.
Comparisons between the artistic and scholarly traditions of North America and Latin America are also a
possible topic of exploration. Papers with a focus on Latin America are particularly welcome, as well as
papers written in Spanish.
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract to the organizers of the seminar (Dan Russek: drussek@uvic.ca or
Susana González: s_aktories@prodigy.net.mx)
Organizes:
◦ David Weimer, Harvard University

◦ Grant Shreve, Johns Hopkins University
Our seminar looks to investigate the diverse literary responses to the problems of church and state in modern
life. In the US, of course, everyone grows up hearing about the separation of church and state. But the
precise relationships between religious and state power have had profound effects throughout the world,
283
from the European Reformation to the Crimean War to the rise of ISIS in modern Iraq. Indeed, the very
notion of secularism–so important to the West–defines itself through precise interactions between religion
and the state, as scholars such as Charles Taylor and Talal Asad have shown. To this end, we seek papers
that explore not only the role of literature in the historical debates about church and state but also the effects
of the dynamics of church and state on literary form. More broadly, we might also consider questions such
as: How do changing relationships between church and state affect how we understand secularism? What
role does literature play in a secular (or post-secular) world? And, in turn, how does literature account for
the experience (or limitations) of secular life? We especially welcome papers that explore the problems of
church and state from outside of the Anglo-American context. Please send abstracts of 250 words and a
short CV to David Weimer (dweimer at fas.harvard.edu) and Grant Shreve (gshreve1 at jhu.edu).¬

States
Organizes:
◦ Ioana Luca, National Taiwan Normal University

◦ Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Arizona State University
Since the 1990s, scholars have emphasized the need for ”transnational” (Fishkin), ”global” (Giles), or
”planetary” (Dimock) approaches to US American literary production. The increasingly transnational per-
spectives on ethnic and immigrant writing that have emerged in the field also intersect with concerns about
limitations posed by borders, languages, and disciplinary boundaries articulated by comparative literature
scholars (Spivak, Damrosch, Saussy). While transnational scholarship has examined connections between
the United States and other parts of the globe, the role of post-socialist Europe in US American Stud-
ies and the significance of the writing by US immigrant authors from former socialist nations have only
marginally been explored. Our panel focuses on the prizewinning body of fiction, written mostly in En-
glish by post-socialist US writers. It examines themes centered around but not limited to the following
questions:
-What is the place of post-socialist diasporic writing in US literary studies?
- What methodological intersections between US American studies, post-socialist studies, immigration and
diaspora studies can be forged in view of the fictional work?
-How does their writing address the legacies of the Cold War in the United States?
-What forms of post-1989 migration or exile in the United States are chronicled in this writing? What di-
asporic or transnational post-socialist immigrant practices in the United States are chronicled or imagined?
-What connections exist between this work and other US literary production, including the work of other
migrant authors?
-How does the new writing intervene into US-based debates about neoliberalism, globalization, gender,
race/ethnicity, immigration, trafficking, human rights, diaspora, and citizenship?
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Organizes:
◦ Rosina Neginsky, University of Illinois
Mental Illnesses in the literature of the Symbolist Movement (Second part of the 19th – beginning of the
20th centuries)
Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) was a medical doctor who was especially interested in neurology and
made a considerable contribution to this field. Modern psychiatry owes him a great deal. While study-
ing neurology Charcot realized that neurology is closely connected to psychology. He was the one who
was the first to state the importance of studying the subconscious. He perceived neurological disorders
and mental illness, as a kind of invisible pathologies that inhabit the human unconsciousness and manifest
themselves at the time of psychological traumas. Charcot was also a discoverer of hypnosis, which was not
used before him as a treatment. Mental pathologies that lay invisible within the human psyche became the
center of attention of Charcot’s studies. He was interested in dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, madness
and obsessions because he believed they were linked to the secrets of the unconscious and that studying
them was a way to unlock it. Freud, who invented the psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious, was
Charcot’s student. Following Charcot’s interest in the study of the invisible world of the human psyche,
works of art and literature began to search for ways to represent the subconscious. The second part of the
19th beginning of the 20th centuries international and interdisciplinary movement of Symbolism was espe-
cially representative of these attempts. The artists, writers and poets who were the part of that movement
believed in the idea of suggestion, in the ability not to describe but to evoke. Hence they began to look
for ways through language and through artistic representations to evoke the subconscious. Attempting to
discover and to understand, and to depict a subconscious was one of the ways to go beyond conscious
human experience, which was appealing for Symbolist artists, poets and writers. Describing in literary
works and representing in art different manifestations of mental illnesses or mental disturbances starting
with nightmares and dreams and going as far as the manifestations of paranoia and other serious mental
troubles was one of the ways to depict the mysterious world of the subconscious. Redon was one of the
artists who endeavored to find a pictorial language to represent it. Huysmans in his novel Against Nature
created a character, Des Esseintes, an aesthete from aristocratic family in the process of degeneration, who
makes all kinds of psychological experimentations first with himself and then with others. Fedor Sologub
’s character Peredonov, in his novel the Petit Demon, suffers from paranoia through which we as readers
can have a glimpse into his subconscious. It is possible to cite many more literary works and works of art,
in which principal characters are victims of various mental disturbances. In this section we will examine
mental disturbances described in literature in the second part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and we
will inquire into the connection between those verbal representations and the Symbolist movement.
Organizes:
◦ Meg Weisberg, Yale University
285
“The center having been relegated to the middle of other centers, we are witnessing the formation of a
constellation, where language, liberated from its exclusive pact with the nation, henceforth freed from any
power but poetry and imagination, will have no frontiers but those of the soul.” In March 2007, a group
of French-language authors published a manifesto in the French newspaper Le Monde entitled, “Pour
une Littérature-monde en français,” quoted above. They offered the term “littérature-monde,” (“world-
literature”) in direct opposition to the term “francophonie,” which they argued represented the hub-and-
spokes model used by European colonial powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a means
of disseminating culture and knowledge from the center out to the periphery of the empire. The center-
periphery model is no longer, and has not always been, the exclusive means of transferring knowledge,
though one could argue it persists in certain spheres; this seminar proposes to explore various modes of
literary diffusion from a range of geographical, linguistic, and historical scenarios, particularly cases where
colonialism is/was not the dominant frame of reference, in order to better contextualize current debates such
as the case of contemporary French-language literature. To that end, we invite papers discussing a broad
range of literatures. Topics might include readership and the internet; cross-border linguistic or cultural
affinities; literary regions; shifting literary constellations; literary diffusion in other historical periods;
literature’s intended audience(s); or the effect of historical events or trends on literary diffusion.
Organizes:
◦ Juanita Aristizabal, Pitzer College

◦ Norman Valencia, Claremont McKenna College
This panel attempts to foster a broad discussion on the issue of violence and its representation in contem-
porary Latin America. We welcome papers that address the ways in which recent art forms and cultural
products deal with the multiple forms of violence that cut across the history of the region. Our goal is
to question the implications of the creation and consumption of cultural products that explain, remember,
narrate or process violence, with a particular interest in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Violence has been
a defining element in the history of Latin America. Since the first encounters between its cultures, what
Slavoj Zîzek calls systemic and symbolic forms of violence have been at the core of colonial power struc-
tures, the nineteenth century rise of the modern nation-state, failed revolutions, dictatorships, and, more
recently, the entrenchment of neoliberalism in the region. In more recent years, discourses of violence
continue to shape Latin America through the increased interest in the globalized rise of drug-related urban
violence, particularly in Colombia, Honduras, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. Violence is a
category that is used by several, contradictory political forces. On the one hand, progressive politics sees
in violence a phenomenon metonymically linked to injustice, inequality and oppression. Because of this,
it can become an important indicator for demands of social and political change. However, violence can
easily become a part of conservative political agendas that use affective responses such as fear and anger
to sustain racial and social segregation, anti-immigration laws, or the erasure of difference in the political
and cultural fields. These particular positions are also linked to formal strategies and solutions in the field
of aesthetics. How do we consider aesthetic problems of form, representation, or even style, and their
political potential when we deal with violence? Simultaneously, in the contemporary world, the represen-
tation of violence has become an important part of what Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle”, a
commodification of media and information that “sells” violent blockbuster films or TV shows without ever
leading to any real thought on the systems that produce and sustain violence itself. How do we, as literary
286
and cultural critics, deal with the ambivalence that defines the phenomenon of violence in the contempo-
rary world? Other questions that we hope to address during the seminar are: What are the sources of the
region’s discourses of violence? What are the mechanisms through which they emerge? To what extent,
and through what channels, have these discourses circulated across and beyond the region and how do they
operate in its positioning in global geopolitics? How do recent theoretical trends and concepts (Jacques
Rancière’s definition of aesthetics as a political field that defines a social “distribution of the sensible”,
affect theory, ecocriticism, trauma studies, postcolonial theory, gender studies, visual and film studies,
among others) help us think the concept of violence in its new, multimedia and globalized incarnations?
How does systemic violence shape cultural production and vice versa? What are the specific textualities,
genres, or cultural products that embody for us the more interesting or complex representations of violence
in the contemporary world?
Organizes:
◦ Joel Calahan, University of Chicago

◦ Naomi Levine, Rutgers University
In his 1973 essay “The Fall of Literary History,” Rene Wellek performs a belated eulogy for the large-
scale literary historiographical work that came of age in the nineteenth century, calling both its theoretical
premises and practical aims an “illlusion.” “There is no progress, no development, no history of art,”
Wellek writes, “except a history of writers, institutions, and techniques.” This analysis has proven prescient
in recent decades, as increasing specialization of period-field and subject has moved literary studies yet
farther away from the grand ambitions of nineteenth-century literary historiography.
This seminar proposes to take Wellek’s claim as a challenge to reassess the synthetic narratives of liter-
ary history that were already, for him and his generation, outmoded. We ask how working comparative
scholars might once again take seriously the kinds of knowledge that the “old” literary histories produced.
To what extent can literary scholarship lay dormant and be revitalized, and to what extent is it merely an
historical artifact? Might we turn to the models and approaches of nineteenth-century literary history for
usable theoretical tools? And what historical records have we lost in leaving these histories behind? What
do forms of literary scholarship dismissed as obsolete or antiquarian have to tell us about our own meth-
ods and our own demarcations of discipline, period, and nation? What do they have to tell us about the
investments of their time and about contemporaneous literature? How have nineteenth-century historio-
graphical approaches influenced the dominant literary theories of the last century? What questions raised
by nineteenth-century literary critics and historians remain unanswered?
We invite papers revisiting the theoretical and editorial claims of neglected critics, anthologists, philolo-
gists, and historians of the nineteenth century, as well as papers on more canonical figures (e.g. Karadžić,
Grimm, Gummere, Hegel, Schlegel, De Sanctis, Sismondi, Hallam, Veselovsky). We welcome work on
classical, medieval, modern, or popular/folkloric literary traditions; on national literary histories, small and
large; on histories of literary genres; and on nineteenth-century attempts at synthesizing modern European
or world literature.
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Organizes:
◦ Yoon Sun Lee, Wellesley College

◦ David Kurnick, Rutgers University
Until recently, criticism of the novel has assumed that what counts in the novel is the unit of the individual
character. Yet even in the classic accounts of the novel’s individualism, fictional character counts and is
counted because it is always more and less than itself: representative, typical, a concrete universal, etc.
Meanwhile, fiction’s intimate, sometimes antagonistic relation to the sciences of the social has guaranteed
the novel’s charged negotiation with statistics, social typology, and the idea of the multiple.
Convinced that the literary-aesthetic dimensions of these questions are all the more urgent in the era of
big data, we invite a range of approaches to the numerical and the quantitative in the history of the novel.
Among the questions we hope to address: How, and what do novels actually count? Do novels want us to
keep count? Is counting a form of abstraction, a link to the empirical, a disciplinary technique, the very
form of politics itself? How is the social quantified by fiction, if at all? What multifarious assemblages
does the novel set in play and how do they function? How do distinct genres—romance, sci-fi, mystery,
“literary” fiction, realism (magical, social, and otherwise)—think and feel multiplicity?
We welcome considerations of novels from all periods and languages from a variety of theoretical ap-
proaches, including but not limited to narrative theory, affect theory, queer theory, Marxism, ethnic and
minority studies, post-colonial studies, and digital humanities.

America
Organizes:
◦ Brais Outes-Leon, Northwestern University

◦ Leila Gomez, University of Colorado, Boulder
The last decades have witnessed a growing academic interest in materiality that has resulted in a fun-
damental reconsideration of the ontological and cultural nature of objects. In contrast with traditional
conceptions of objects as passive and eminently inert, the theoretical contributions by theorists such as
Bill Brown, Daniel Miller, Arjun Appadurai and Bruno Latour, amongst others, have shown the need to
redefine our views on the active cultural and social function of objects.
In this seminar, we propose to study travel writing in Latin America in its relation to objects and the varied
forms of materiality that help define the travel experience. Far from viewing them as inanimate entities at
the will of the traveler, we explore the powerful agency of objects and things that move and are moved in
the circulation, transference, translation, and journeying to and from the centers and the peripheries. For, as
Bill Brown has suggested in “Thing Theory,” given their ability to affect our ideas and organize our public
and private affects, things are “quasi-objects” or “quasi-subjects” (Brown “Thing Theory” 141). We will
focus not only on the circulation of objects in travel writing and on the capacity of means of transportation
288
to shape the traveler’s gaze and temporalities, but also on the materiality of the media in which the travel
experience is expressed (letters, chronicles, guides, diaries, etc.).
We accept paper proposals that deal with, but are not limited to, the following thematic lines:
• The circulation and displacement of objects and artifacts • Souvenirs and collectable objects • The ma-
terial dimension of travel writing and other cultural manifestations • Means of transportation and travel
experience • Temporalities and transportation technology • The exhibition of the traveler’s objects. Vi-
suality and Travelling • The Other as commodity and exhibit in the metropolis • Collecting protocols •
Instruments and Tools of Scientific Expeditions.
We particularly encourage interdisciplinary proposals that incorporate novel methodological and theoreti-
cal approaches.

2)
Organizes:
◦ Nasrin Rahimeh, University of California, Irvine

◦ Claudia Yaghoobi, Georgia College
Desire—from its mundane forms to its sublime varieties—has played a central role in Persian literature
from its inception to the modern period. It drives the plots of romantic epics, animates the imagery of
amatory lyrics (ghazal) and the introits (nasib) of panegyrics, and is undoubtedly one of the most impor-
tant theoretical topics for both Islamic mystics (sufis) and legal scholars alike. This seminar will seek to
bring together a range of scholars from the different time periods of the Persian literary tradition to analyze
the wide variety of ways in which desire has been represented, imagined, and discursively constructed in
Persian literature. Seminar participants will be strongly encouraged to address the implications that these
“permutations of desire” have for larger theoretical debates on gender, sexuality, “modernity,” mysticism,
intertextuality, etc., or bring their papers into conversation with other bodies of scholarship on patronage
relationships, genre theory, or other relevant political, theological, or legal issues. Papers that critically
assess the application of Euro-American theory to premodern and modern Persian literature are also wel-
comed. This seminar will be open to scholars of all time periods of Persian literature with the hope that
chronological diversity will produce some (preliminary) insights on the genealogies of different forms of
desire in the Persian literary tradition.
Organizes:
◦ Marijeta Bozovic, Yale University

◦ Walt Hunter, Clemson University
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The L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school of poetry marked a shift—or a return to avant-garde practice—in American
poetry in the 1970s. This seminar examines the continuing international significance of the L-A-N-G-U-
A-G-E school of poetry in the wake of renewed politically engaged practices after the international years
of protest (and protest culture) of 2011-2013.
At a moment when artistic movements across the world are taking up avant-garde and modernist strategies,
stances and practices, what is the legacy of that earlier recovery of the avant-garde? Diverse poetic practices
associated with the loosely defined movement edged toward the position, in Lyn Hejinian’s words, that:
“Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts rarely
coalesce into images, rarely come to terms. They are transitions, transmutations, the endless radiating
of denotation into relation.” Hejinian’s exchanges and mutual inspiration with Arkady Dragomoshchenko
and the poets of the Leningrad underground have been documented and studied—but what are the other
channels, networks, and systems by which L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry has gained a global reach? How has
contemporary avant-garde poetic practice incorporated, extended, or critiqued the relation between poetic
language and political formation? We return to the “language of inquiry” in Anglophone, Russophone,
South American, Francophone, and diverse global poetries—to raise questions of transcultural, translin-
gual, and transmedia poetic movements. Possible topics include: vernacular poetries and the avant-garde;
poetry and translation; the place of poetry in a literary world-system; the international flourishing of hybrid
forms of poetry, including lyric essays and disruptive performances; political readings of poetic meter and
trope; international poetry journals and publishing; institutions of contemporary global poetry.

Engagement
Organizes:
◦ Surbhi Malik, Creighton University

◦ Smita Das, University of Illinois at Chicago
In an interdisciplinary setting, any conversation and dialogue between various fields and sub-fields is
lauded as an end in itself, whereas the terms and conditions of this dialogue remain unexplored. While the
intersections between the fields of diaspora, postcolonial, and American Studies are routinely invoked in
comparative methodologies, the complexities and contradictions of these intersections are seldom charted.
It is well- established in scholarship that the dialogues between these fields act as correctives to each other
and fill essential gaps. This seminar is, however, interested in how the engagement between postcolonial,
diaspora, and American Studies also relies on the perpetuation and obfuscation of relatively conservative
agendas. How do the unevenly aligned fields of postcolonial, diaspora, and American Studies draw on
each other to legitimize claims of nationalism and U.S. exceptionalism? Why do the intersections between
these fields depend on foregrounding analyses of race and nation and allow only limited questioning of
class privilege and hierarchies of gender and sexuality? We are interested in papers, for instance, that con-
sider how American Studies draws on the strain of identity politics from postcolonial studies to enshrine
multiculturalism as a distinguishing feature of American nationalism or how conceptualizations of diaspora
as an exceptional state are used to buttress claims of American exceptionalism. Paper topics can address
authors whose work straddles the lines between postcolonial, diaspora, and American Studies, including
but not limited to C.L.R James, Claude McKay, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Kiran
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Desai.
Organizes:
◦ Kadji Amin, Stony Brook University (State University of New York)
This seminar examines, in a framework of historical, geographic, and racial comparison, the often unac-
knowledged affective stakes, for queer scholarship, of queer’s histories and genealogies. In queer theory,
queer has been celebrated as an almost infinitely mobile and mutable theoretical term, one that, unlike
gay and lesbian or feminist, need not remain bound to a particular identity, historical context, politic, or
object of study. From Judith Butler’s “Critically Queer” (1993) to the South Atlantic Quarterly special
issue “After Sex?” (2007), queer’s openness to novel resignifications, capacity to be turned away from its
past as a term of injury, and analytic reach beyond and “after” sex and sexuality have cemented claims for
queer theory’s continuing relevance.
Rather than celebrating queer’s portability, this seminar incites Comparative and World Literature to ground
queer in its various contexts, histories, genealogies, and inheritances. We invite contributions that inves-
tigate the affective histories - including those of queer’s emergence in the US during the 1990s - that
influence, without it being acknowledged, what meanings adhere to queer, how this term is deployed, and
what aspirations, orientations, and expectations it typically assumes. We also seek papers that explore,
in a comparativist framework, what becomes of these canonical affective histories when queer travels to
alternative or underexamined historical, geopolitical, and social locations. Do queer’s US-based affective
histories skew the work queer can do in other contexts? How might comparativist literary scholarship
recontextualize queer, right down to what the term means, how it operates, and what it feels like?

Organizes:
◦ Sayan Bhattacharyya, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The notion of text as a reified and stable artifact has long been put under interrogation in literary theory and
textual studies. In their own way, such practices as, for example, philological reconstruction of lost texts
from fragments, textual criticism and editorial theory, as well as formalist, structuralist and poststructuralist
critiques, can all be construed as affording the means of rethinking text in terms of process rather than as
artifact. Moreover, there have been recent developments in theory, such as post-humanism, speculative
realism and new formalism, as well as innovations in practice, such as the increasing prevalence of text
that is expressed through new media technologies (and that is readable either distantly or closely by human
or machine agency), that raise new questions about what we take for granted when we think of text. These
developments set the stage for a productive dialog between scholars and practitioners of digital humanities
and non-digital humanities. This seminar intends to create such a dialog. Papers presented at the seminar
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could, for example, address (but not necessarily be limited to) topics such as the following: How can
processes be construed as underlying (and/or undermining) text? How can text itself be construed as a
generative process? How may technologies, interfaces, media, modes of reading, and modes of critique
be useful for generating and/or challenging such construals? The seminar will aim to be a conversation
involving researchers of digital humanities and new media, as well as researchers in traditional fields of
literary and humanistic inquiry.
676. Rising Asia
Organizes:
◦ Shameem Black, The Australian National University

◦ Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College
The twenty-first century is often called “The Asian Century,” and prophecies of Asia’s rise abound in our
contemporary world. Yet images of an imminent Asian ascendance, and its consequences for the West,
can be traced back in literary and cultural discourse for more than a century. In this panel, we seek to
theorize how the rise of Asia has been imagined from the nineteenth century to the present. What are
the cultural aspirations and anxieties that emerge within this discourse? The seminar seeks to explore
how this discourse posits the idea of the future in specifically racialized ways, and how such futures are
mediated through representations of technology, print culture, the body, industry, spiritual development,
social media, and other cultural formations. What are the underlying assumptions that enable particular
parts of Asia to be seen as ”rising”? How have these representations engaged, refracted, and/or contested
political and economic theories of rising powers? What absences and erasures enable these discourses of
ascent? And how does the imagination of rising Asia help to construct specific imaginaries of the West?
Papers might consider how this discourse circulates in national and/or globalized marketplaces, what its
role has been in Asia, and/or how it has operated beyond its borders. Contributions might explore the
general construct of ”rising Asia,” or they might look at the ways in which particular nations and/or their
cultural signifiers, such as India or China, are thought to be rising.

Organizes:
◦ Molly Martin, New York University

◦ Luis Ramos, New York University
This seminar takes as its focal point early modern narratives of travel and exploration—with particular
attention on the interrelations between literature, maps and travel during a critical period of global transfor-
mation. We especially seek papers that focus on travel narratives that trace the movement of communities
across continents (Europe versus the Americas), oceans (Pacific versus Atlantic) and cultural imaginaries
(Mesoamerican versus European). Similarly, we welcome papers that work across genres (epic versus
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lyric poetry), disciplines (literary criticism versus geography) and media (literary versus visual works).
Among the principal concerns of the seminar will include: What are the shifting roles of religious and
commercial imperatives in the production of travel literature and cartography in the age of discovery and
exploration? How do early modern travel narratives articulate transatlantic cultural imaginaries and refash-
ion Old World and New World political geographies? What role do categories such as language, national
origin and regional identity play in the articulation of an early modern vocabulary of travel and mobility?
Organizes:
◦ Jeffrey Severs, University of British Columbia

◦ Ralph Clare, Boise State University
This seminar will explore notions of sincerity, affect, and authenticity in contemporary literary and cultural
productions of any nationality, specifically in light of the neoliberal age. At a time when even the most
trivial aspects of daily life have been commodified there has also been a marked turn to sincerity, affect, and
questions of authenticity in culture and the arts. Though performativity has superseded the transcendent
category of the “the real” in the wake of postmodernism, many contemporary literary and cultural artifacts
nevertheless seek to re-envision or repurpose ideas of authenticity. Recent studies have also addressed
related concerns with sincerity and/or affect, including work by Sianne Ngai and Patricia Clough. This
seminar will explore the ways sincerity, affect, and authenticity imbricate and inform one another. Is
sincerity merely a mode of affect, or is it something else? In what ways are these notions constructed, or
is conceiving of them as constructions antithetical to their supposed ontological status as “real”? Are there
differences between past and present formulations of them? What are the historical turning points? Are
today’s formulations merely nostalgic or sentimentalized, or are they indicative of new and singular ways
of being? Finally, what is the relationship of authenticity, sincerity, and affect to neoliberal ideology? Do
they challenge neoliberal order, or point to the (seemingly) final commodification of emotional life itself?
Papers might explore these topics with regard to aesthetics, culture, economics, race, class, gender, or
nationality. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
–The so-called “New Sincerity” movement –The recent controversial “Facebook study” and the manip-
ulation of emotion/emoti-cons –Post-postmodernism, cosmodernism, metamodernism, etc. –The role of
irony in today’s supposed post-ironic 9/11world –The relationship between sentiment and sentimentality
–Sincerity, authenticity, and neo-realism –Gender: are sincerity and authenticity gendered formations?
Why are a preponderance of the artists associated with them male? –The contribution of nostalgia (for
ages of pop culture, for “golden ages” of all sorts) to this alignment of affect and commodification? –
Performativity, affect, and sincerity –“Authentic” subjectivity or a post-humanist authenticity –Formations
of racial/ethnic/class identities or regionalist perspectives
Abstracts (300 words) and brief bios should be submitted to Jeffrey Severs (Jeffrey.Severs@ubc.ca) and
Ralph Clare (ralphclare@boisestate.edu) by October 15.
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Organizes:
◦ Christina Svendsen, Harvard University

◦ Ilka Kressner, University at Albany, SUNY
This seminar invites papers that zoom in on the spectral in recent literature and film –the appearance of
ghosts, objects, photographs, perfumes, etc.–, and its power to break into and therefore reframe a given act
of storytelling. It proposes to focus on the spectral as a kind of latency or pregnancy, a pre- or post-view
of something. It takes into account both the definition of “specter” or “spectrum” as ghost (reaching an
apogee in the “spectral evidence” of the Salem witch trials) and the scientific definition of “spectrum”
as either a ghostly optical afterimage (Goethe) or the range of transparent colors produced when light is
dispersed by a prism (Newton). The spectral sensitizes us to the anticipated, the remembered or the absent.
Therefore, the insertion of a haunting image in literary texts may be rather described less as a nostalgic
return but as creative praxis and con-fabulation.
Who or what is being “spectralized” and who has the energy to conjure and is capable of seeing the image
out of time within the time of a fictional work? Do our modern and postmodern specters still resemble
the Romantic revenants or the Gothic ghosts? Which new connections between the immaterial and the
material words are fathomed and which dark chambers of the mind, past, parallel or to come, are traced?
Must spectrality invoke an aesthetics of retrospection, recurrence, and return of the repressed, or can it be
oriented toward a future horizon, a shimmer of anticipation and expectancy?

Turkish Context
Organizes:
◦ Elizabeth Nolte, University of Washington

◦ Zeynep Seviner, University of Washington
Historically scholars have examined Ottoman and Turkish literature and other so-called ”minor” or ”pe-
ripheral” literatures within the geographic, historical, temporal, and cultural parameters of national literary
traditions; yet, frequently texts, authors, and literary themes circulate far beyond these traditional cat-
egories and generate in the process unexpected interactions and forge novel networks of exchange and
transformation.
This seminar seeks to investigate instances of literary encounters, circulation, and interchange in the Ot-
toman and Turkish context that transcend the conventions of national literature and literary criticism and to
explore literary interconnections. How and why do texts and themes travel, and how are they transformed
along the journey and through translation? Where do authors establish literary networks, on what basis,
and how do these interactions inform their own work? How can we reconceptualize literary history to
accommodate networks of exchange and influence and to utilize frameworks of connectivity rather than
comparison?
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We will explore these questions through papers that analyze literary texts from the classical Ottoman era
to the modern Turkish Republic within the context of world literature studies. The turn towards transna-
tionalism opens exciting opportunities for the study and inclusion of ”minor” or ”peripheral” literatures in
the global literary canon but presents the added challenges not to reduce a literature to select representa-
tive texts or authors nor to reproduce the traditional East/West framework for comparison. This seminar
aims to supplement discussions on world literature by examining Ottoman and Turkish literature through
interconnections, exchanges, and transformations within global literary networks.
Authenticity
Organizes:
◦ Dominique Jullien, University of California, Santa Barbara

◦ Stefan Helgesson, Stockholm University
The definition of “the vernacular” is always contrastive: native language(s) as opposed to language of
cultured elites; popular language (eg slang) vs. language of higher social classes; local language(s) vs.
colonial or imperial language(s). In this relational set-up, however, the scales of value are unstable and re-
versible. The local informant, the indigenous culture, the suppressed social group may, through language,
become the bearers of irreplaceable and coveted knowledge. This can make the vernacular a vehicle for
obtaining privileged local information, but also for establishing local agency by way of an authoritative
discourse on a place, culture or nation, or for creating an illusion of authenticity. Our panel invites contri-
butions on the following: • Travel narratives. The vernacular can be used to obtain knowledge inaccessible
to travelers who don’t speak it, hence the importance of guides, interpreters, intermediaries of all kinds who
populate travel narratives. • Social divides. The two different worlds may occupy the same urban space
but be socially differentiated, and the vernacular be a marker of social class. • Quest narratives. Since the
vernacular differentiates one world from another, characters can traverse into the other world, through the
vernacular “secret code”. In a quest narrative the other world can be a spiritual one, and the vernacular
a coded expression of the higher spiritual realm sought. • The vernacular and local literary agency. In
dynamic exchanges with cosmopolitan models, advocacy of the vernacular has worked towards securing,
valorizing and/or simulating the authenticity of local literary cultures.
Organizes:
◦ Taylor Eggan, Princeton University

◦ Caitlin Charos, Princeton University
“The World” retreats further into obscurity the more often theories of World Literature speak its name.
World-literary projects have always been plagued by the “untranslatability” of their central concepts. What,
for example, is “literature?” Scholars generally agree that the sheer variety of verbal arts from around
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the globe cannot be acceptably united under the totalizing banner of “literature,” and because of this we
remain unsure as to what, exactly, constitutes “the literary.” We have even less clarity around the concept of
“world.” Despite two centuries’ worth of speculation on the idea spanning at least from Kant to Heidegger
to Badiou (though we could easily include other concepts such as the Greek kósmos, allowing us to extend
our inquiry back to Aristotle), philosophy has yet to produce a fully usable theory of “world.” Nor have
literary theorists had much success in thinking the Welt of Weltliteratur, tending as they do either to section
the world into parts and systems that constitute their own individual worlds (e.g. Wallerstein’s world-
systems theory, Casanova’s “world-literary space”) or to expand the frame of reference in the spirit of
universal comparison (e.g. Moretti’s “distant reading,” Casanova’s “macrocomparative” study). As René
Wellek concluded more than 40 years ago, world literature proves paradoxical in its reference to an object of
knowledge that is at once impossibly narrow (if taken in a hyper-canonical sense) and impossibly capacious
(if taken in a purely cumulative sense). Squeezed between these two impossibilities, the world as such
begins to disappear.
This seminar convenes in response to the multiple threats undermining the possibility of a single world—
the world—and in doing so seeks a fuller, more rigorous understanding of “world” as a philosophical and
methodological problem. What kinds of issues does the disappearance of the world as such create for
literary and philosophical inquiry? How can comparative literature respond? How might a rigorous under-
standing of ”world” as a conceptual problem transform thinking, reading, and even writing? In what ways
do literary texts address themselves to the world and triangulate themselves within a wider globe? Due to
the breadth of inquiry these questions propose, we encourage a variety of philosophical and methodolog-
ical perspectives, and are equally interested in “theoretically” invested papers as well as more traditional
readings of particular texts. We especially encourage papers that investigate “marginalized” regions, lan-
guages, and literatures that—at least from a “global” (i.e. globalized) perspective—are so often written
out of the world.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
-What does “the world” look like from the perspective of literatures in languages typically marginalized
within the Euro-American academy? How do such texts “address” themselves to this world?
-Why do theories of ”world” emerge when they do, and what does the elusiveness of ”the world” in recent
theory say about our contemporary moment?
-How do theories of ”world” and of ”cosmopolitanism” intersect, challenge, or undo each other?
-Philosophies of “world” (e.g. Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Said, Glissant, Nancy,
Badiou)
-Speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and the critique of the world-concept
-“World” as an untranslatable, both in terms familiar to comparative literature (e.g. world, Welt, monde,
kósmos, etc.) and more obscure (e.g. ‘olam [Hebrew], dunya [Arabic], ulimwengu [Swahili], etc.).
-The status of “world” in theories of world literature
-Aesthetic worlds
-Formal and stylistic concerns of the “World Novel”
-Imperial “worlding;” settler colonial fantasies and rituals of possession
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-World v. Globe v. Planet
-Multiplicity of worlds: the “pluriverse” (Mignolo)
-World-systems and inconsistency
-Globalization and aesthetics
-Travel, tourism, and traveling cultures
-Differences and incommensurability in comparison (Melas)
-Capital, capitalism, and Weltliteratur
-The world as a network of meaning-making/unmaking
-The world and reading practices (distant reading, close reading, surface reading)
-Imagining communities beyond the nation
-Mapping
-Identity, identification, and world literary forms
Organizes:
◦ Dermot Ryan, Loyola Marymount University

◦ Casey Shoop, University of Oregon
How do we think about the future in the time of the Anthropocene? The growing recognition that humans
are now acting like a geophysical force that determines the most elemental of the Earth’s physical processes
has produced a number of paradoxical responses about our future. In one iteration, our future is radically
delimited, conditioned by our capacity to limit the effects of our own modernization. To paraphrase Mead-
ows and Meadows’s groundbreaking work, we must confront the limits to our growth. In another, the
future has already happened: our past collective actions having already released enough carbon into the
atmosphere to affect the climate of the planet for the next one hundred thousand years. In the time of the
Anthropocene, is it possible to think of a future that isn’t pre-determined, apocalyptic, or messianic? Our
panel will explore how recent literature, film, and theory grapple with the future of the Anthropocene.
What kinds of limits does an anthropocenic worldview place upon the literary imagination of the future?
What modes and genres can accommodate these possible futures? If this anthropocenic future invites post-
apocalyptic treatment, can it also find expression in new forms of pastoralism or frontier literature? Have
utopian and dystopian genres evolved and even combined in the light of this restrictive future? How have
older narratives of industrial and technological progress altered to reflect this changing perception of future
prospects and possibilities?
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tions
Organizes:
◦ Haerin Shin, Vanderbilt University

◦ Taek-Gwang Lee, Kyung Hee University
The Rise of Superheroes: Hollywood, Genre, and Global Variations
This panel explores the cultural mechanisms that drive the increasingly mainstream proliferation of the
superhero narrative, and its varying effects or alternative iterations across the globe. As a byword of
American popular culture, superheroes have served as elastic signifiers of discourses on racial and ethnic
identity politics, the ideal of civil governance and its failure, American exceptionalism, and yearnings for
power and transcendence. Panel participants will engage with the above topics by looking at the logic of
the film industry that propelled the sudden popularity of a genre that has long remained in the peripheries of
mass culture; transcultural adaptations and variations of the superhuman rhetoric; the role technology plays
in demonstrating the spectacular dimensions of the superhero narrative; and the philosophical traditions
that inspired and influenced the genre. The panel organizers also invite papers on the following topics:
- The genealogy of superheroes - Superheroes and spirituality - Postmodern aesthetics in superheroes -

Superheroes and antiheroes/adversaries - Nietzsche and Superman - European high culture and superhero
popular culture - The economy of the superhero industry - The superhero genre in Hollywood - The imag-
inary science in the superhero narratives
Organizes:
◦ Nico Dicecco, Simon Fraser University

◦ Lai-Tze Fan, York University
Ecstasy describes a heightened affective state that arises out of an instance of self-juxtaposition—to be
“beside oneself.” The subject regards itself as though from the position of an other, and this state of re-
gard produces intense fear, anxiety, passion, or astonishment. Although it is tempting to identify ecstatic
states with moments of epiphany, the emotional intensity that marks ecstasy does not guarantee anything
so utopian as self-understanding. As a mode of comparison, its politics are as like to reify hierarchies, and
galvanize conservative publics, as they are to reveal opportunities for understanding or connection. In-
deed, comparison in general does not guarantee progressive politics. In the article “Why Not Compare?”
(2011), Susan Stanford Friedman demonstrates a fundamental tension in comparison, arguing that there is
as much danger in comparing as in attempting to avoid comparison. Ecstasy intensifies this very dynamic
through the subject’s self-reflexive positioning. We are interested in situations where the subject being
compared is placed beside itself, so as to foster crisis and expose ways that it variously reinforces and/or
subverts the normative and the dominant. We encourage proposals that understand “subjects” in a broad
sense: texts, subject-positions, media forms, methodologies, etcetera. Topics could include, but are not
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limited to: - theories and methodologies that explore in/commensurability - comparative media frameworks
(convergence, remediation, adaptation, media archaeologies, intermediality, ekphrasis) - hybrids and jux-
tapositions of affect - intersecting text identities (paraphrase, palimpsest, intertextuality, performance) -
intersecting identities and histories (queerness, race, gender)
Organizes:
◦ Diego Santos Sánchez, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Theatre is a living cultural artifact in which groups of people form in particular places in order to participate
with performers in the creation of symbolic structures. Collectiveness and immediacy are thus essential
attributes of theatrical communication which are absent from other cultural phenomena. These exclusive
features endow theatre with the potential for great political impact. This can be observed especially clearly
in dictatorial contexts, where the links between theatre and power are bidirectional. On the one hand,
dictatorships have traditionally tried to maintain control over theatre as a tool to impose its hegemonic
ideology and create an obedient society. On the other hand, theatre has also proved a useful place for
resistance against such regimes.
Political brutality spans the whole 20th-century. Indeed, during what Hobsbawm calls the Age of Ex-
tremes (1914-1991), Fascism and Communism gave form to dictatorial regimes across the world. A series
of coups and wars enforced such regimes in Spain, Portugal and Latin America from the 1930s to the
1990s. Despite the diversity of the Luso-Hispanic countries, there are common trends in their dictato-
rial regimes, which have been addressed comparatively within the fields of Latin American and Iberian
Studies. The role played by theatre in these contexts has been mostly addressed from a national perspec-
tive. However, a transnational dialogue will shed light on analogies and/or differences in this vast cultural
domain. Establishing trends in the way theatre and dictatorship react to one another across the region
will help to go beyond national boundaries and understand the relations between theatre and politics more
broadly. Further to contributing to the Cultural History of the region, this will foster the understanding of
the Luso-Hispanic world as subject of academic discussion.
This seminar aims to foster dialogue among specialists of theatre and dictatorship in the Luso-Hispanic
world during the 20th century. Papers on the entanglements between theatre and dictatorship in Portugal
and Spain as well as in Brazil and Hispanic America will be welcomed. Case studies on Catalan, Basque,
Galician, Amerindian and other African/Asian Luso-Hispanic theatres are particularly encouraged. A non-
exhaustive list of proposed topics includes:
• Discourses of Obedience: Orthodoxy and Theatre
• Discourses of Resistance: Heterodoxy and Theatre
• Theatrical Poetics and Dictatorship: Political, Agit-Prop, Guerrilla, Documentary and Mass Theatre
• Theatre and the State: National Theatres, Censorship, Official Press Reviews, Teaching of Theatre, Pub-
lishers, Prizes, Festivals, Funding
• Fleeing Dictatorship: Theatre and Exile
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• Theatre and (State) Violence
• Theatre, Memory and Trauma: Post-Dictatorial Accounts of Dictatorship
Organizes:
◦ Keja Valens, Salem State University

◦ Jordana Greenblatt, York University
Per Sara Ahmed, “willing” accession to the general will requires “will work,” socially validating individual
wills, but when will work fails, we are deemed willful. Associating disciplining the will with normative
family, liberal multiculturalism, and the production of normative citizenship, Ahmed approaches Elaine
Scarry’s formulation of consent as at the intersection of sexuality and national identity. Most obviously
linked with willingness, consent is also implicated in willfulness and the will. If what we claim as willingly
consensual conflicts (sexually, socially, biopolitically, etc.) with the general will, we are delegitimized as
willful, paradoxically obstructionist and, through willing the “unwillable,” incompetent to determine our
own wills. Similar problems arise within oppositional politics. In contemporary feminist sex work de-
bates, for example, sex workers claiming willingness are frequently dismissed as either mistaking their
wills (false consciousness) or as willfully refusing to engage in (politically righteous) will work. Notions
of bodily/subjective autonomy integral to questions of consent and will(ingness), evident in the pro-choice
slogan “Every mother willing, every child wanted,” and in debates around dissident sexualities, indicate
that broader questions about agency, liberal individualism, and bodily coherence are central to concep-
tualizations of consent and its relationship to the will, willingness, and willfulness. We are interested in
questions about what kind of will or willingness are constructed/undermined in how we think consent.
When does the (non)consenting subject become willful? What kind of body/self do willing and/or willful
(non)consent construct/require? What kind of will is necessary for or forbidden by consent?
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Chapter 16
Stream D

Organizes:
◦ Maya Smorodinsky, Shoreline Community College

◦ Alice Pedersen, University of Washington, Bothell
In a 2006 Slate Magazine column, Stephen Metcalf asks, ”Why is Beloved Beloved?” Why, almost twenty
years after publication, does Beloved keep reappearing on the foreground of literary consciousness? Ori-
entating ourselves on Morrison’s choice to reimagine and reinvent the story of Margaret Garner, we can
similarly ask how the continual haunting of infanticide in Beloved is a formal innovation that interrogates
the place of Motherhood (and particularly black Motherhood) in both a slave and neo-slave era. This joint
haunting – Beloved reappearing for the American public and Beloved rematerializing for her mother –
anchors this seminar’s major concern: how is Motherhood represented in transatlantic literature and what
forms do these representations take on? What do we learn from accessing literature from the perspective
of Motherhood?
Since Gilbert and Gubar’s seminal Madwoman in the Attic, scholars have paid increasing attention to
representations of women and motherhood in 18th and 19th century literature. Following their lead, this
seminar asks how particular literary forms, such as the sentimental and the gothic, offered European women
writers a particularly “gendered” way to write against patriarchy and stake a claim for the female voice,
body, and experience. Likewise, feminist scholars of abolitionist literature have noticed how these same
forms were deployed in the US context to speak against slavery and racial capitalism. These questions
extend beyond the national conventions of gender and genre, as migrant literature often exposes the tensions
of mothering from a multipositional, multinational, or multicultural experience. In this seminar, we propose
to extend this conversation by creating a ”long history” of representations of the mother and mothering.
How have writers represented the female and/or maternal body, and to what political ends? How have
representations of mothering, motherhood, and/or the experience of being gendered female changed - or
stayed the same? Are there received forms through which experiences of motherhood, patriarchy, and/or
race are most easily written? What are the political implications of these forms? What are the intersections
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between representations of motherhood and the politics of Othering and Otherness? We welcome papers
that assess literary form, genre, the politics of reproduction, representations of motherhood or mothering,
and gender, from the 18th to the 21st centuries.

tated Economy
Organizes:
◦ John Ricco, University of Toronto

◦ Etienne Turpin, University of Wollongong
With Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, the early-21st-century species of
“indebted man” as outlined by Maurizio Lazzarato, and the severed heads that are the iconic and accursed
remnants in Julia Kirsteva’s meditation on “capital visions,” leading theorists of political economy have
articulated the inextricable relations between language and capital, sovereignty and guilt, representation
and instrumental reason, insurrection and occupation.
In light of these developments, and in the city where the anti-globalization movement was launched into
public consciousness fifteen years ago, this seminar seeks to draw upon lessons that we might still take
from one of the major philosophical and literary precursors: Georges Bataille’s general economy of excess
expenditure and waste, and his phantasmology of sovereignty without debt or servitude, as presented in
La Part Maudite (1967, The Accursed Share), and in such literary works as Madame Edwarda (1956), Le
Coupable (1944; Guilty), and La Tombe de Louis XXX (various dates).
In doing so, this panel explores the links that Bataille made between non-knowledge and rebellion (as in his
eponymous lecture from 1952), and draws out from close readings of Bataille, the image of an acéphalic
body of the general intellect, and its political and poetic assemblage. To acquit ourselves of the rational
servitude that Bataille correctly identified as endemic to capitalist economies, we may need, finally, to lose
our heads and pursue what might be properly called “acephalic reason” in pleasure, literature, philosophy,
and politics.
841. Art & Accident
Organizes:
◦ Monica Huerta, Duke University

◦ Daniel Clinton , Rutgers University
What do accidents mean to aesthetics and the periodization of art? For Franco Morelli, the accidental
marks on a canvas proved painterly identity. For Walter Benjamin, the eye sought out “the tiny spark of
contingency, the here and now” that “seared through the image-character of the photograph.” Through the
theory of medium-specificity, Modernism more generally embraced accident, making the contingencies of
material and process into the subject of art. But for minimalism, rather than accident underscoring aesthetic
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integrity, the sociological contingency of reception encompasses an extended quality of performances and
texts; accidents don’t stop within art, they keep going into history, keeping the art alive.
But what is the status of accident in art now that we tag historical movements (and historical epochs) with
an increasing number of posts and lates? Can accidents still work as art when we’ve been waiting for them?
This seminar will explore “accident” as both an object and condition of representation, tracing how dif-
ferent theories, media, artists, and readers distinguish between design and discovery, sense and nonsense,
rule and exception. We’re particularly interested in the way that the definition (or refusal) of accident con-
stitutes various kinds of system-building. How does assigning “accident” over “intention” create mutable
boundaries between text and world?
The operative sense of “accident” in the seminar will be left open to unexpected felicities and complica-
tions, but it may include some of the following:
• Misreading, misprinting, and decontextualization. • Historicist and psychoanalytic recuperation of “ac-

cident” as “symptom.” • Accident and association in close reading and surface reading. • Randomness &
probability. • Accident in law and literature, e.g. tort vs. “poetic justice.” • The ethical status of misfortunes
accidental – or so labeled. • Accident in new media: leaks, sexts, scandals, and misclicks. • Babble, doo-
dle, noise, and nonsense. • “Hysterical realism” and over-determination. • Artificial lens flare, shaky cam,
and other “contingency effects.” • Balladry & the “moving accident.” • Coincidence in plotting: “probable
impossibilities” vs. “improbable possibilities.”
Organizes:
◦ Carlos Yu-Kai Lin, University of California, Berkeley
Literature is often assumed as a universal concept which can be readily understood across cultures. How-
ever, the ways in which this concept is translated and conceptualized may vary according to different
linguistic traditions. This seminar explores the diversity of the role and nature of literature in the diverse
and multilingual world by addressing the following questions: How does literature function differently in
various cultural or social contexts? To what purpose does literature serve, and through what media does it
circulate, in a historical period other than now? Does it embody different values, articulate disparate ideas,
thereby arousing imagination that later becomes important social forces that moves history forward? How
is literature, or its related concepts such as novel, poetry, essay, and lyrics, translated in various languages
and do these concepts bear the same meaning as they do in English? In some older languages, the mod-
ern terms for literature derived from ancient words that did not bear any meaning similar to the modern
definition of literature; for example, in Chinese, the modern term for literature, wenxue, was an ancient
term denoting “general knowledge,” and in Arabic, edab was an old term that meant “courtly manners.”
They ways these olds terms come to translate the modern concept of literature requires detailed historical
analysis. In addition, how is literature canonized and institutionalized in different countries? What is the
role of language and power in the formation of national literature? This seminar invites its participants to
critically think about the various representations of literature, as well as its related concepts, terms, and
discourses, in a variety of cultural, social, and historical contexts. The aim of this seminar is to create a
cross-cultural and interdisciplinary conversation that further enriches our imagination of what literature is,
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was, or will be.

Organizes:
◦ Manuel Chinchilla, Sewanee: The University of the South

◦ Robert Wells, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
This seminar invites submissions that address impunity and immunity as both objects of cultural repre-
sentation and as meaningful terms in understanding inequality, injustice, and the political. We consider
impunity and immunity to operate as complementary concepts in theoretical and practical terms that affect
local, national, and international populations. We understand impunity as a state of affairs leading to an
exemption from justice and the denial of rights to victims of corruption and violence. Immunity, on the
other hand, functions as a correlative to impunity by setting certain individuals and institutions beyond the
law, e.g. politico-legal immunity, or outside the effects of a general state of emergency, e.g. the separa-
tion of populations during health crises, political turmoil, and/or widespread violence. We envision the
entangling (and, perhaps, disentangling) of these terms to be a productive way of analyzing cultural repre-
sentations (literature, film, performance, etc.) that portray regimes of violence and exception. Impunity,
immunity, and the relationship between the two could potentially be approached via theoretical constructs
such as Giorgio Agamben’s State of exception, Jacques Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity, or Roberto
Esposito’s interpretation of biopolitics and immunitas. We welcome proposals that engage the following
non-exhaustive list of topics/approaches: histories of inequality; art as critique of injustice; human rights
and aesthetics; politics of memory; societies of fear; organized crime in public discourse; geopolitics and
the juridical; restitution and recovery; subaltern history.

Organizes:
◦ Alexa Firat, Temple University

◦ R. Shareah Taleghani, City University of New York
Decades before the uprisings that have been taking place across the Arab world since December 2010,
intellectuals, writers, and artists have consistently challenged the status-quo of authoritarian regimes in
Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere. At the same time, state agents and cultural institutions have attempted
to dictate and limit the terms of literary, artistic, and intellectual engagement not only through sponsorship
and patronage but also through censorship, and other directly repressive acts such as surveillance, detention
and forced exile.
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How and to what effects do writers and intellectuals engage in opposing the politics of a given state both
directly and indirectly? How do they work to challenge undemocratic state policies and the politics of
authoritarianism both individually and collectively? What types of aesthetic interventions do different
authors produce in order to contravene the directives of the political regimes under which they live, and
how are these interventions transformed in a revolutionary context? How do writers’ and intellectuals’
engagements with the state challenge traditional concepts of authority, authoritarianism, and authorship?
Simultaneously, how do writers and intellectuals negotiate with the issues of state co-option of dissidence
and critique, state patronage, and state censorship?
In this panel, we hope to develop comparative discussions across world literature, and papers addressing
these questions by focusing on various national literatures and intellectual traditions are welcome.

Organizes:
◦ Etienne Charriere, University of Michigan
Among all the various genres and sub-genres of prose fiction which, during the nineteenth-century, reached
the margins of the literary realm after having been elaborated and codified at its core, the historical novel
appears to be the genre which most acutely emphasized the paradoxical situation of non-central literatures.
In peripheral spaces that experienced an oftentimes marked dependence upon imported models and simul-
taneously dealt with a cultural climate that required literature to express both the unity and the uniqueness
of the national group, historical fiction highlighted, with a particular clarity, tensions at play between do-
mestic goals and imported means.
In the long nineteenth century, historical prose fiction enjoyed an exceptionally large diffusion and seems
to have been particularly prominent in small, peripheral literatures. In fact, the genre often appears to
have constituted a common denominator between marginal literary scenes distant from one another and
there seems to have existed a special affinity of the periphery with this particular mode of fiction writing
throughout the period.
Traditional literary historiography has often insisted on the eminently derivative nature of the genre. The
lasting influence of György Lukács’ seminal 1937 study of the historical novel has resulted in the perpet-
uation of the idea that most of the nineteenth-century incarnations of the genre were, in varying degrees,
derived from the model of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels.
The extremely wide diffusion of Scott’s novels makes it indeed impossible to support the claim that there
wasn’t a durable and powerful moment of encounter –or rather a series of encounters- between Scott and
his contemporaries. However, the modalities of this global “Scott moment” must be analyzed with great
precision and with a special attention to the historical and cultural contexts of these interactions. After
all, even in its own native environment, the British Isles, the Scottian model seems to have coexisted, at
least for part of the nineteenth century, with competing and distinct modes of historical fiction writing, as
various scholars have shown over the past few decades.
In this seminar, we seek to answer the following questions :
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- without denying that Walter Scott’s historical novels were, indeed, widely read and almost unanimously
praised in a variety of literary scenes across the European continent and beyond, how valid is the notion
of an absolute prevalence, in terms of both form and content, of his specific approach to the genre ?
- what were the specificities of the historical novel as it was produced and consumed in the regions situated
away from the core of the literary system in the nineteenth-century ?
- were those specificities indicative of divergent definitions, in the periphery, of what the notions of “past”
and “history” entail ?
This seminar welcomes papers engaging with these issues or, more generally, with the writing of historical
fiction in non-central cultural spaces during the long nineteenth century.
Organizes:
◦ Jenny Wills, University of Winnipeg

◦ David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University
Since the 1970s theorizing identity has held to one basic belief: identities are not inherent, they are con-
structed. But recent scientific and technological innovations, along with a general fatigue in constantly
rehearsing the “identities are constructed” mantra, compel us to rethink that basic belief and see how it
might be deserving of radical rethinking, or at least radical modification. More and more we find people
searching for biological kinship and ancestry from around the world, embarking on “roots trips” to their
(or their ancestors’) countries of origin, and “culture camps” that offer young people (such as transracial
adoptees) the opportunity to “connect with their lost cultural origins.” There is an anti-constructivist, per-
sonal nostalgia sweeping the country (a nostalgia for something one has yet to experience—one’s bare
roots) as well as a fascination with the global applications of genetic analysis (for instance, with the Hu-
man Genome Project), that are represented in a variety of genres, media, and perspectives. What we are
witnessing here is a return to thinking about essence, identity, and more specifically, the biological aspects
of our far pasts as an important and missing index. Our seminar will move beyond the sentimental, how-
ever, to see the theoretical and political consequences of such an inversion of the essentialist-constructivist
dyad. We invite papers that explore such consequences for textual and cultural representations of glob-
ality, migration, genocide, Indigeneity, settler colonialism, postcolonialism, gender and sexuality, trans*
subjectivities, transnational and transracial adoption, kinship, race, and ethnicity.

erature)
Organizes:
◦ Jin Feng, Grinnell College

◦ Leihua Weng, Pacific Lutheran University
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Taken in a Foucauldian vein, this seminar operates on the assumption that body is more than a physical
entity: it is a cultural and social presence. As a cultural construct, sexuality is constantly and heavily
contested in its respective social context. By bringing together a set of research papers in different genres,
this seminar aims at exploring various literary expressions of and reflections on the body and sexuality
in literature. Parallels and contrasts will be drawn between the literature of East and West, both Ancient
and Modern. Attention will be directed to how social norms and discourses on the body and sexuality are
constructed, modified, de-constructed, and/or reconstructed.
This group focuses on the representations and discussions on the body and sexuality in modern and con-
temporary Chinese literature.
Organizes:
◦ Eugene Eoyang, Indiana University (Bloomington)

◦ Gang Zhou, Louisiana State University
British comparatist Susan Bassnett starts her with a question often asked by comparatists: ”Sooner or later,
any one who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question:
What is it?” In fact, the identity crisis experienced by American comparatists is very much about the same
question.
Instead of vainly searching for an abstract definition of what comparative literature is, THIS panel starts
with a more empirical question: what do comparatists – around the world – do? The panel welcomes reports
and presentations on comparative literature in various countries, with the aim of providing a forum for US
comparatists to acquire some global perspective on the field. Despite the crises, declines, and demises of
comparative literature reported in articles and books in the US, it may be salutary to know that, in other
countries, comparative literature may be struggling to establish itself, is burgeoning, or is flourishing.
Organizes:
◦ Brian Droitcour, New York University

◦ Michael Hessel-Mial, Emory University
The proliferation of social media has been significant enough to force a reinterpretation of what we thought
to be “the” internet. No longer accessed only on a computer, social media organizes communities around a
multiplicity of devices, splintering a single “web” while blurring the distinction between online and offline.
Recent memory shows us the kinds of shifts underway. Twitter brings out surprising points of resonance
between Gaza and St. Louis, while scientists and artists alike find celebrity in crowd-sourced and heavily
“branded” business models. Popular left-leaning academics are coming under fire from radical communi-
ties with a very new language of social justice, while reactionary groups like the men’s rights movement
gain unexpected visibility and traction. Meanwhile, social media is increasingly used for the practices of
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art, literature and performance. How does social media shape this complex new internet culture? How
might we describe emerging aesthetic practices, and how do they overlap with, political strategies and
identity-based communities? Is a new form of criticism called for?
We are seeking papers that examine literary and cultural texts relating to this body of questions, under the
broad heading of comparative social media studies. We welcome works considering particular platforms,
cross-cultural uses of them, and aesthetic problems that emerge in relation to social media. Questions we
would like to raise include: How do ‘classic’ internet-culture areas of research such as viral transmission,
democratization of access and anonymity shift after they’ve been folded into corporate-financed inter-
faces? How are these everyday realities manifested in artistic practices? What is the cost of trading private
data for user access? How do the global south and traditionally marginalized identities radicalize social
media? Is anybody still on Myspace? Other possible topics include memes, micro-fame, hashtag activism,
crowdsourcing, “call-out culture,” embodiment and affect, genres and platforms, and digital textuality.
Organizes:
◦ Steven Pokornowski, University of California, Santa Barbara

◦ Lindsay Thomas, Clemson University
In the 1960s, Elias Canetti wrote that “the fear of being touched” – which he related to physical and social
contagion – was at the heart of social structure and subject formation. Five decades later, we bear witness
to continuously renewed fears of contagion as the worst Ebola outbreak in history sweeps West Africa, and
the fictional nightmare of viral undead apocalypse continues to take popular culture by storm. In addition,
other fears of contamination – including nuclear radiation, bacterial contamination of food products, and
the pollution of groundwater and drinking water – have become daily events that drive our desire to isolate,
to maintain, to control – to quarantine. Yet, these contemporary dilemmas are not so easily grasped, as they
flow through boundaries that had once appeared impermeable.
This seminar will investigate the concept of quarantine as a neoliberal form of regulation that enacts varied
modes of controlling contamination through segregation, classification, and risk assessment. Building on
the biopolitical foundations of contemporary security discourses (military, disease, economic, gendered
bodies) we will explore how attempts to quarantine produce immeasurable insecurities: radio waves con-
stantly penetrating, radioactive waste leaking and lasting, and petrochemicals burning and spilling out of
our control. These calamities at every scale serve as something to avoid, to seal off, and to contain; but
attempts to control contamination nevertheless continually fail. Moreover, these failures often also serve
as galvanizing political events, bringing communities together in defense of their own personal, collective,
and environmental health.
Is quarantine an impossibility in the 21st century? What can quarantine (and its failures) reveal to us about
the interconnections of global industry and politics, national and ethnic identities, and luxury and waste?
Do these connections only become visible when we attempt to sever ourselves from them? And if so, is
there room for a reversal, a subversive fluidity?
This seminar will seek to historicize, critique, and revise the way we talk and think about containment
in the contemporary. Papers in this seminar will examine a variety of topics related to contagion and
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quaranatine, such as, for example: the relation of zombie fictions to contemporary biomedical and ethical
questions (such as creation of mutant strains of H5N1 “Avian Flu” in 2012); the way we can “read” data
gleaned through electronic surveillance strategies and technologies (such as the use of Google Flu Trends)
to understand the way illness and awareness spread; and the ties between social media and social contagion.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
health illness security ecopolitics biopolitics disaster risk and security digital culture immunity media and
time science fiction
Organizes:
◦ Beth Blum, University of Pennsylvania

◦ Ivan Lupic, Stanford University
Since antiquity, counsel has been central to literature’s form and social function: not merely as a stodgy
form of authorial didacticism, but as an intellectual, moral, and political challenge. Counsel is tied to such
issues as the unstable foundation of individual and collective decisions, the desire to dominate and the need
to defend oneself against coercion, the enforcement of legitimate power and the recognition of its limits. It
has proved a powerful tool for the fashioning of selves and subjects. This seminar brings together scholars
of counsel across periods and specializations. It offers a unique occasion to conceptualize distinct literary
engagements with advice as part of a larger ethical continuum, from the classically inspired Renaissance
adage or the eighteenth-century maxim to the modernist epiphany. How have the standards of wisdom and
moral authority changed since the time of the Renaissance? To what extent are the norms attending the
classical figure of the counselor—sincerity versus flattery, character versus duplicity, generosity versus
self-interest—still at play in modern and contemporary advice culture, for instance in the figures of the
friend or the expert? We invite contributions that address the history of counsel in specific periods and
genres, as well as those that nuance Eurocentric, gendered, canonical models of advice by invoking queer,
postcolonial, or transnational paradigms. In addition, we welcome submissions that engage with more
popular and contemporary forms of counsel including self-help, new media, and therapeutic culture.
Organizes:
◦ Bret Leraul, Cornell University

◦ Ian Butcher, Duquesne University
In a February, 2012 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Jeffrey Williams formally announced the birth of
Critical University Studies, a field that places labor issues, student debt, the job market, education funding,
and resource allocation among the fundamental elements which condition the production and distribution
of knowledge in not just the humanities, but the university as a whole. However, while Williams’ article
traces the history and prospects of this field for a US academic audience, it also highlights a notable, if
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unintentional, ethnocentrism that unduly narrows the field’s frame of reference by occluding scholarship
from and about contexts and conjunctures outside of North America and Europe. Given the historical
cosmopolitanism of the modern university and the increasingly global nature of contemporary higher edu-
cation, this seminar argues that any Critical University Studies must embrace a comparativist methodology
and perspectives on and from the Global South. In so doing, we seek both to expand and deconstruct the
field of Critical University Studies to better aid its own project of, in Williams’ words, “deconstructing
academe.”
Some questions that might animate our intervention into the field are:
How might literary studies contribute to Critical University Studies (both in terms of scholarship and ped-
agogy)? What role might Critical University Studies play in core curricula, general education programs,
and courses which reach large portions of the student body, like freshman composition? In what ways does
a transnational approach modify or contest the emergence and legitimation of the field of Critical Univer-
sity Studies? To what extent does the university serve as a barometer of global capital, and how might
institutions of higher education in the Global South ‘write back’ to metropolitan academies about the rela-
tionship between capitalism and higher education? How would a transnational Critical University Studies
complicate post-Marxist notions of intellectual labor and knowledge work? What conditions—disciplinary,
institutional, regional—inflect issues of labor and debt and how might understanding these local conditions
inform larger action? How might a global Critical University Studies galvanize and support transnational
networks of activist solidarity like those among the recent Chilean, Quebecois, and Californian student
movements?
Organizes:
◦ Adeline Tran, University of California, Berkeley

◦ Annika Eisenberg, Goethe University Frankfurt
This seminar investigates the theme of “Detective Fiction and the Arts” primarily in three ways: First,
detective fiction often features other arts or media forms as important sources of aesthetic, narrative or
symbolic value. This might range from Sherlock Holmes’s violin playing to the portrait of Laura in Otto
Premiger’s 1944 film noir of the same title. How are these ”art”-ifacts incorporated into the structure of
the respective work? Second, detective fiction is frequently staged and hosted in a variety of art forms
itself: from literature and film to radio plays and television. In which ways does detective fiction depend
on or exploit the characteristics of its own medium to construct its own aesthetic style? How do adaptions
across art and media forms change the respective work? Finally, the distinction between “highbrow” and
“lowbrow” art – between literary writing and genre writing – has been a source of anxiety for writers
and critics who have sought to elevate the detective novel from a formulaic genre into a serious art form.
How can detective fiction exist apart from its commodified position as a form of mass entertainment? Do
some of them succeed at transcending the generic demands of detective writing that preclude others from
ever reaching the status of high art, and if so, why? We welcome papers that explore any aspects and
topics relating to the representation of and interaction between different art forms within detective fiction.
Potential panelists are invited to consider detective fiction from any culture, language or media form.
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Organizes:
◦ Anick S. Boyd, CUNY Graduate Center

◦ Alisa Sniderman, Harvard University
This seminar will explore the representation of money, economies, and currencies in literature from a wide
range of methodologies (materialist, historicist, formalist, etc.) to examine the process of value making in
literature. One approach is to study the relationship between metaphor and economic exchange. As Marc
Shell has shown, metaphor is itself an exchange, and language and thought internalize monetary form
into what he calls “money of the mind.” And, in On Truth and Lies in the Extra Moral Sense, Nietzsche
compares “truths” to “coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
Still another approach is to look at the larger picture of the intertwining histories of economics and literary
studies. As Elizabeth Hewitt has recently noted, “even as American literary scholarship over the last thirty
years has emphasized the marketplace […] the field has not entirely erased its essentially antagonistic
attitude toward the economic world that is so fundamental to the production of the archive it studies.”
We invite papers that deal with the representations of economics in literature and with methodological
approaches to studying the two disciplines together such as but not limited to economic criticism and
rhetorical economics. How do literary texts create values? What kinds of economies exist in literature?

Organizes:
◦ Muhsin Al-Musawi, Columbia University

◦ Yasmine Khayyat, Rutgers University
The recent spate of politically violent events in the Middle East has resulted in new modalities of carceral
power that beg questions of sovereignty, might, citizenship and most importantly, literary democracy. This
seminar explores the new socio-political landscape of the Middle through a literary lens: how has literature
been used as a medium for dislocations, forced migrations, and above all traumatic witnessing? In the spirit
of comparative analysis, we seek papers that explore how various genres, including poetry, prose, political
treatises and even maps have migrated across national and temporal boundaries in the Middle East. How
have they helped to construct and contest literary imaginaries about the contemporary Middle East? We
welcome work that theorizes the literary dimensions of nationhood and its fractured literary landscapes.
Organizes:
◦ Jenny Odintz, University of Oregon
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◦ Chet Lisiecki, University of Oregon
How does a consideration of gender enrich discussions on the representation of trauma in literature? How
does attention to this intersection help with understanding responses to trauma, both individual and collec-
tive? It is our intention with this panel to bring together studies of trauma, gender, and associated topics,
such as memory, historiography, testimony, and life writing. By drawing on the work of scholars such
as Cathy Caruth, Judith Butler, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Shoshana Felman, Marianne Hirsch, Vandana
Shiva, and Dominick LaCapra, we would like to investigate the difficulty of voicing gendered trauma
across linguistic, national, and generic boundaries. Likewise, we hope to explore possible differences
between writing trauma (lived experience) and writing about trauma, considering the implications of this
distinction for topics such as secondary, generational, national, historical, or global trauma. We are open to
a variety of critical approaches to this topic, including but not limited to: post colonialism, secularism and
religious studies, affect theory, performativity and performance theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis,
queer theory, translation studies, human rights discourse, ecocriticism, genre theory (particularly autofic-
tion and autobiography), intersectionality, and disability studies. Current paper submissions cover a wide
range of texts, including The Cry of the Dove by Fadia Faqir, How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel,
Visible Ghosts by Li Ang, and Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff. Several papers also
focus on World War II, including women’s work songs in Fascist Italy, maternal absence in contemporary
women’s historical novels, and gay men’s Holocaust narratives.
Organizes:
◦ Stephanie Hilger, University of Illinois

◦ Lisa DeTora
This seminar will explore the representation of the gendered body across literary and medical discourses.
We are particularly interested in the portrayal of bodies that disrupt a binary conception of gender or that
vex expectations of a specific gender. By investigating the representation of these bodies at the intersection
of literature and medicine, we hope to establish a dialogue between disciplines that typically treat separate
concerns using distinct methods. This investigation should thereby expand our understanding of the ten-
dency to pathologize physical difference in many discursive spheres. We welcome work from all historical
and cultural contexts, also work that deals with visual materials.
Organizes:
◦ Valerie Anishchenkova, University of Maryland
With the increasing globalization and interdependency of world’s cultural, political and ideological dis-
courses in the last few decades, one may observe the growing number of global communities – transna-
tional and transcultural, defying and transforming the traditional understandings of belonging, and gen-
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erating their own cultures and collective identities. They emerge under various circumstances and take
diverse forms – from all kinds of fan clubs (e.g. the global Nirvana following in the 1990s which, in turn,
promoted and commercialized the grunge culture) to ideological movements (e.g. those that largely initi-
ated the Arab Spring and helped its dissemination throughout the Middle East) to generational groups (e.g.
the “global teen”) to online forums discussing world politics. This seminar seeks papers that explore and
theorize global communities of various periods and types and/or their articulation in literature, film, visual
art, cyberculture, music and other cultural forms. How can one define global community? In what ways
do global communities challenge or rethink the concepts of nation, nationalism, identity and selfhood,
culture, homeland? How do they articulate their cultural discourses through both conventional and un-
orthodox genres? Participants are welcome to consider these questions or offer other ways of approaching
global communities and their cultural effects.
Organizes:
◦ Annelle Curulla, Williams College

◦ Sophia Tingting Zhao, Stanford University
Revolutionary theater—as both a genre and a form of embodied performance—is at the heart of questions
related to politics, representation, and modernity, yet these questions often remain confined by disciplinary
and national boundaries. This panel will gather scholars of revolutionary theater from a broad range of
national and regional traditions. Our purpose is to share and compare methods, approaches, and problems
related to revolutionary theater, and to explore how theater manifests itself in different national or regional
contexts. How do the form and function theater change in times of social upheaval? How does theater
relate to new forms of political and social life? What are the themes, body languages, dramaturges, and
affective states that give meaning to revolutionary changes? As scholars of revolutionary theater, what are
our methods and sources of evidence? Where does evidence fail? Send 250 word abstract and brief bio to
ac8@williams.edu and sophia22@stanford.edu
Organizes:
◦ Charlotta Salmi, University of Birmingham, UK

◦ Angus Brown, University of Oxford
Perhaps no other word in our critical vocabularies is changing as quickly as “reading”. As critics such
as Franco Moretti, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus offer highly visible ways of approaching the digital
through distant reading and surface reading, they have limited their focus to the textual. This seminar aims
to take reading out of its comfort zone and to move away from the traditional parameters of fiction, poetry,
and prose. Comics, book art, maps, the digital, and, often, the archive, comprise of words and images that
require us to learn new or unfamiliar reading practices that can account for the visuality and materiality
of text. This seminar will raise and explore these practices, cutting across cultural and literary contexts to
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follow their global intricacies and interdisciplinary implications.
Critical attention is increasingly turning to the graphic – most recently in a special issue of Critical Inquiry
(2014) edited by Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda– but it has long been treated as a peripheral, “low”
or crude form of art. Less and less of a guilty pleasure, critics are finding that the unconventional, con-
troversial, and popular aesthetics that these texts often entertain make for nothing like easy reading. The
presence of pleasure in this work – whether overt or insidious – gives trouble to its readers. We therefore
want to consider how the naïve, the confessional, the indecent, the violent, the gratuitous, and the explicit
function in both familiar and less established mediums. In short, what happens when we read the graphic?
Too often, “reading” functions as a seemingly transparent figure for interpretation. Does the apparent ease
in our consumption of graphic works of literature render this kind of invisibility more obviously unaccept-
able? Does the graphic alert us to how we can read more ethically, more humanely, more generously, and
with greater vulnerability across the wider worlds of literature? What critical theories might help us do
so? And what are the political, social and disciplinary consequences of such reading? The intersections
of pleasure and the unexpected difficulties that occur when reading graphic forms or content also affect
our approach to more canonical or established bodies of text. We invite papers that consider graphic read-
ing across critical, literary, and theoretical texts as well as less established mediums. Possible topics may
include but are not limited to:
*Past, present, and future methodologies and theories of reading *Representations of reading, represen-
tations of violence, representations of desire *The pleasures/erotics of reading * Reading as labour, the
ethics of reading *The history of reading, history of the book, the book as object *Approaches to reading
in queer theory, narrative theory, theories of affect, translation studies *Reading in the digital humanities
*Reading theatre, reading drama
Organizes:
◦ Jessica Crewe, University of California, Berkeley

◦ Jill Richards, Yale University
The recent proliferation of paranormal romances and post-apocalyptic serial dramas have made the inhu-
man a naturalized — even commonplace — part of our current popular cultural landscape, from the blasé
blood addicts of Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive to the love-struck teen zombie narra-
tor of the novel Warm Bodies. As cultural producers increasingly blur lines between human and inhuman,
this panel will interrogate the affective, political, social, and queer potential of reading and writing at the
limits of the human. As we discuss the possibilities offered by the inhuman, papers may touch on what is
alien, anthropomorphic, animalistic, undead, elemental, cybernetic, or ghostly.
Our panel will explore the critical, philosophical, and artistic categorization of “human” and “inhuman”
through a range of questions: what is the status of the human (and its alternatives) in anti-universalist
or anti-liberal critical theories? How do narrative or poetic forms pre-suppose certain kinds of subjects?
How does genre influence the figuration of the human and inhuman? What is the legacy of the “universal
human” in modernist and contemporary literary and cinematic works? How do these visions of the human
and inhuman map onto particular understandings of the past, present, or future? And how do conceptions of
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the human and inhuman interact with broader theories of race, national collectivity, and sovereign power?
Organizes:
◦ José Luis Venegas, Wake Forest University
One of the most significant tendencies in contemporary modernist studies is the investigation of geographic
location and literary change from cross-cultural and cross-national perspectives. Recent studies – including
Geo-Modernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2005), edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel – have
successfully re-examined long-standing literary hierarchies that consider Euro-American modernism as the
model to be imitated and assimilated from non-Western locations. Drawing on the theoretical insights of
postcolonial studies, these innovative approaches propose alternative transnational literary geographies that
no longer gravitate around categories such as “nation,” “center,” and “periphery.” The resulting cultural
maps situate literary creation, reception, and exchange in a non-Eurocentric supra-national space. This
seminar seeks to build on these global approaches to modernism by looking at ways in which “the new” is
located in marginal, non-modern settings below rather than above the nation. The seminar invites papers
that explore how this intra- or sub-national perspective complicates and complements current transnational
approaches to modernism and the avant-garde. The overarching question to be addressed is not only how to
determine the place of vernacular modernisms – i.e. the Spanish avant-garde, Irish Modernism, Brazilian
Modernism – within an expanded literary cartography of global dimensions; but also how the national unit
of analysis becomes fractured when the negotiation of what qualifies as modern is an intra-national as well
as an inter-national process.
Topics might include regionalism and nationalism, vernacular cosmopolitanism, alternative modernities,
postcolonialism and modernism, primitivism and the avant-garde, Iberian Studies, Transatlantic Studies,
and Orientalism.

Archive, Group 2
Organizes:
◦ Samer Al-Saber, Davidson College

◦ Amal Eqeiq , Williams College
In writing literary history in the Global South, the literary historian/historiographer encounters a nexus of
tensions between colonial theory and colonized resistance, the reliability of the occupier and the credibility
of the occupied, and the ethnography of the invader and the memory of the native. This nexus reflects a
greater tension between anthropology and critical theory. Ironically, the literary historian also encounters
natives who employ colonial anthropologies as means of resistance.
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In this seminar, we explore these tensions by examining the potential and limits of ethnography, oral
history, and the living archive as modes of inquiry and representation within the field of literary histo-
riography. While we invite traditional questions that focus on the identification of the ethnographic, the
oral, and the living archive as literatures in and of themselves, we also examine the role of such litera-
tures in transforming stagnant views of the colonized, subaltern, oppressed, and Orientalized. How has
the inclusion of testimony and folklore influenced the writing of literary history? What does ethnography
contribute to the literature and history of the colonized and what, if any, is its role in the present? Where
has literary historiography challenged master cultural and national narratives? Which historiographical
lenses arbitrate, vindicate, or indict settler narratives in relation to indigenous oral and written accounts?
In a critical gesture towards remapping world literatures, this seminar aspires to create South-South dia-
logues in comparative literary historiography between Latin America, Africa the Middle East, indigenous
communities, and South-East Asia. Given the particularity and the commonality of
Organizes:
◦ Brian Reed, University of Washington

◦ Kornelia Freitag, Ruhr University Bochum
Joseph Jeon has argued that contemporary Asian American poetry inherits a “multifaceted legacy—of po-
litical activism, identity politics, and multiculturalism—that must be digested and resynthesized.” And one
can, without a doubt, productively draw on these strains within post-Vietnam War American politics and
political thought when reading poetry by such ambitious twenty-first-century authors as Cathy Park Hong,
Tan Lin, Craig Santos Perez, Srikanth Reddy, Prageeta Sharma, and Pimone Triplett. This seminar will
ask, however, what other imperatives, genealogies, and frameworks—especially comparative, diasporic,
sub- and transnational ones—might also help us to understand a fast-growing, quickly diversifying body
of literature. How might we read Asian American poetry alongside or in dialogue with Asian Australian,
Anglophone South and South East Asian, and/or other Pacific Rim poetries? What kinds of exchange and
memorialization are occurring across linguistic as well as geographical boundaries? What are the presses,
journals, occasions, and institutions that have facilitated inter- and transnational conversations about Asian
American poetry? How does Asian American poetry intersect with or respond to other forms, sites, and
modes of cultural production such as Bollywood cinema, the Korean Hallyu, and Japanese anime?
Organizes:
◦ Kyunghee Pyun, SUNY - Fashion Institute of Technology

◦ Jung-ah Woo, POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology)
Research on a tantalizing relationship between East Asia and modernism have focused on the formal-
aesthetic and the geopolitical-historical dimensions surrounding literature, music and art. Orientalist mod-
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ernism should be understood not primarily as a more or less flawed representation of “the Orient,” but
as a geopolitically specific iteration of aesthetic modernism’s problematic relationship to the history of
modernity. East Asia was widespread in Euro-American modernism and therefore its study should not
be dismissed to the status of a subfield such as “East/West modernism,” “modernist Orientalism,” “other
modernisms,” or the like. Our seminar explores an overview of the inter-arts context within which literary
modernism had emerged in East Asia and modernism in visual arts was formulated. Interaction between
literary and visual modernism will be closely debated. We will also consider in turn how East Asian
modernity had left impact on the Western historical imagination. In conclusion, we hope our papers will
describes East Asian modernisms and their significance in relation to a general study of modernism by
including possible directions for future research.
We have a few literary scholars and art historians to lay out an overview of their own sub-fields. We would
welcome papers on specific cases or individual writers/artists analyzed through lenses of recent theories
of modernity and modernism.
Organizes:
◦ Danielle Drori, New York University

◦ Liron Mor, Cornell University
Negation takes on many forms—from objection and opposition, through designation of lack, all the way
to denial, rejection and even annihilation. We use negation when we say ‘no’ to or about something, when
we seek to point out an absence and when we dismiss an idea or an option, or even cultures and people.
Yet each of these forms may designate or produce different rhetorical, philosophical, and political effects.
In this seminar we will examine these effects of negation in Middle Eastern literatures, which present us
with various intricate forms of negation. For the past century, politics in the Middle East have been figured
as a zero sum game, where the victory (or survival) of one side implies the negation of the other. Rhetorics
of genocide or annihilation—us or them—have proliferated in recent discourses of the history and future
of the region, but are not limited to the present. When coming to deal with a political reality violently set
on a negation of any form of alterity, writers from the Middle East—in Hebrew and Arabic languages—
have struggled with the question of negation in numerous contexts: Is modernity the rejection of tradition?
Should the nation be a negation of other affiliations? Is secular philosophy the negation of religion? From
the denial of the Middle Eastern context in Hebrew literature to the use of Sufi mystical practices of self-
negation in modern Arabic literature, our seminar will explore the tension between political economies of
negation and their literary and philosophical representations.
Organizes:
◦ A.J. Nocek, University of Washington
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In a short essay from 1990 titled, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze calls upon us to
find new political tools and materials to counter the emergence of post-disciplinary societies of control, or
societies that Michel Foucault calls “neoliberal.” Today, with neoliberalism’s control of nearly everything
from affect to geological processes, Deleuze’s call for new political materials couldn’t be more urgent. With
the rise of new materialism(s) in the humanities and social sciences in the last decade, however, it would
seem as though there are an abundance of new materials (from technological, biological and chemical
materials to geologic and quantum materials) by which to understand the planetary flows of capital and to
reframe the potentials for political and economic change. Thus, once the rampant anthropocentrism of our
Kantian past has been called into question, and non-human spaces and temporalities become “material” for
thought—or even “thinking material”— what new means do we have for conceptualizing and critiquing
the planetary flows of capital? And furthermore, how do we prevent the proliferation of new materials
and materialisms from becoming just another site for neoliberal control? This seminar interrogates the
many conjunctions of post-disciplinary societies and the new material(ism)s populating the humanistic and
social sciences in the hopes of fleshing out some of the most promising avenues for political, economic,
and social critique. Papers that reflect upon, reframe, or critique the coincidence of these two discourses
are particularly welcome.
Organizes:
◦ Andrea Opitz, Stonehill College

◦ Ji-Young Um, Williams College
Our seminar seeks to understand the multivalent ways in which militarism, war and state violence have
informed cultural and social processes. While militarism may seem evident in cultural artifacts like war
films, recruitment materials, memorials, or in the popularity of military-themed video games, we also want
to examine how the wars of the past century have militarized the ways in which we produce, consume, and
understand contemporary culture and social order. How might we, for instance, think of war not only as
having material consequences but also as constituting ”the secret motor of institutions, laws, and order”
(Foucault, ”Society Must Be Defended”). In what ways is the basis of social order and “perpetual peace”
constituted by war and violence? How is the experience of peace and war distributed unevenly? How is
peace experienced as violence by some and not by others? How have national and/or imperial consoli-
dation relied upon war and violence? We look to explore these questions from a broad range of topics
and media: relation to other forms of state violences (policing, surveillance, e.g.); cinematic productions
of war memories; militarization of visual culture (film, photography, museum exhibits, advertisement,
e.g.); militarization of race, gender, sexuality in contemporary culture; militarism in particular literary
genres (detective fiction, e.g.); violence and affect in imperial/post-colonial settings. We hope that our
conversations will illuminate the ways in which war as an enterprise invites comparisons across borders,
and welcome papers that offer cross/inter-disciplinary approaches. Send inquiries to either Ji-Young Um
(ju1@williams.edu) or Andrea Opitz (aopitz@stonehill.edu)
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Organizes:
◦ Brendan Lanctot, University of Puget Sound

◦ Verónica Garibotto, University of Kansas
If, as Baudrillard suggested, there is something quaint about Borges’s fable of the remnants of the Em-
pire’s map, it is not because “the sovereign difference… that constitutes the poetry of the map and the
charm of the territory” have disappeared in the contemporary moment. Instead we might argue that recent
economic and technological changes have led to the privatization and aggregation of practices that created
the “powerful, metaphysical effect” (T. Mitchell) of the modern state. There is, then, not a single map
of the Empire (or for that matter, the nation-state) nor its tattered remains, but competing modes of rep-
resentation (cartographic and otherwise) that retain and reinforce the indexical or iconic status of images
in the service of “sovereign difference” (and perhaps sovereign indifference, too). How do various forms
of cultural production (literature, film, and art) intervene in this context, particularly when these fields no
longer enjoy the autonomy or privileged status they once did? What are some of the strategies of engage-
ment, assimilation, and appropriation they employ with respect to the dominant representational modalities
of a globalized world? And how do these strategies critique existing and archaic political practices and
identities or propose new ones?

Organizes:
◦ Antonio Rueda, Colorado State University
The medieval and early modern periods in the Mediterranean witnessed a continuous exchange of ideas
between groups of different origins which contributed to the construction of a platform for social, cultural
and intellectual development. However, this development also brought upon the creation of new perspec-
tives of “otherness” as well as unknown features of integration and exclusion. Also, the integration of
America into a newly re-shaped mappa mundi ignited an economic boom that would also manifest itself in
the proliferation of minority groups. This seminar seeks papers that explore ways in which racial and eth-
nical minorities, such as Black Africans, Muslims, Gypsies or Jews, were represented in these moments of
cross-cultural encounter and construction of a changing conception of the Mediterranean society. Consid-
ering the many historical factors that influenced cultural production in medieval and early modern periods:
How do Mediterranean territories deal with such significant social changes?How do literary and visual rep-
resentations give account of this? What was the overall role that members of these minor groups played in
the definition of Medieval and Early Modern societies? What passions were produced by the encounter of
bodies from different environments? How was “otherness” interpreted by the dominant ideology in its ne-
gotiation of urban space in cosmopolitan cities such as Florence, Seville, Venice, Naples or Madrid among
others? How did intellectual, political and religious debates interpret the presence of minorities? These
and other questions might be addressed in presentations of 20 minutes’ length. Proposals from scholars of
history, language, art, music or literature are welcome. To be considered for these sessions, please send a
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150-word abstract of your paper and a short CV with full contact information to Prof. Antonio M. Rueda
(antonio.ruedamesa@colostate-pueblo.edu).

Digital (Group 2)
Organizes:
◦ Jacob Haubenreich, Southern Illinois University

◦ Sayan Bhattacharyya, University of Illinois
The notion of text as a reified and stable artifact has long been put under interrogation in literary theory and
textual studies. In their own way, such practices as, for example, philological reconstruction of lost texts
from fragments, textual criticism and editorial theory, as well as formalist, structuralist and poststructuralist
critiques, can all be construed as affording the means of rethinking text in terms of process rather than as
artifact. Moreover, there have been recent developments in theory, such as post-humanism, speculative
realism and new formalism, as well as innovations in practice, such as the increasing prevalence of text
that is expressed through new media technologies (and that is readable either distantly or closely by human
or machine agency), that raise new questions about what we take for granted when we think of text. These
developments set the stage for a productive dialog between scholars and practitioners of digital humanities
and non-digital humanities. This seminar intends to create such a dialog. Papers presented at the seminar
could, for example, address (but not necessarily be limited to) topics such as the following: How can
processes be construed as underlying (and/or undermining) text? How can text itself be construed as a
generative process? How may technologies, interfaces, media, modes of reading, and modes of critique
be useful for generating and/or challenging such construals? The seminar will aim to be a conversation
involving researchers of digital humanities and new media, as well as researchers in traditional fields of
literary and humanistic inquiry.
676. Rising Asia
Organizes:
◦ Shameem Black, The Australian National University

◦ Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College
The twenty-first century is often called “The Asian Century,” and prophecies of Asia’s rise abound in our
contemporary world. Yet images of an imminent Asian ascendance, and its consequences for the West,
can be traced back in literary and cultural discourse for more than a century. In this panel, we seek to
theorize how the rise of Asia has been imagined from the nineteenth century to the present. What are
the cultural aspirations and anxieties that emerge within this discourse? The seminar seeks to explore
how this discourse posits the idea of the future in specifically racialized ways, and how such futures are
mediated through representations of technology, print culture, the body, industry, spiritual development,
social media, and other cultural formations. What are the underlying assumptions that enable particular
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parts of Asia to be seen as ”rising”? How have these representations engaged, refracted, and/or contested
political and economic theories of rising powers? What absences and erasures enable these discourses of
ascent? And how does the imagination of rising Asia help to construct specific imaginaries of the West?
Papers might consider how this discourse circulates in national and/or globalized marketplaces, what its
role has been in Asia, and/or how it has operated beyond its borders. Contributions might explore the
general construct of ”rising Asia,” or they might look at the ways in which particular nations and/or their
cultural signifiers, such as India or China, are thought to be rising.
Organizes:
◦ Dylan Robinson, Queen’s University
How are Indigenous definitions of sovereignty ‘written’ differently across Indigenous oratory, song, dance,
pictographs and other expressive and material culture? How are these senses of sovereignty shared and
experienced differently through their specific performative, linguistic, and material forms? While scholars
have engaged the various activisms, affirmations and assertions of visual sovereignty (Raheja, Rickard),
this seminar seeks to extend Indigenous theorizations of sovereignty into into other sensory domains. Par-
ticipants are invited to compare the written, visual and aural political-aesthetic impacts of Indigenous law
and protocol, and examine how different forms of Indigenous expression act not simply as the modes by
which political messages are conveyed, but as forms of politics in and of themselves. Further questions
participants might address include the following: How do written, sung, beaded or spoken ‘documents’
represent Indigenous law, or enact models of treaty and land title? How do protocols across Indigenous
Nations and peoples affirm sovereignty and/or challenge Western conceptions of law? In what ways might
we consider Indigenous aesthetic ‘acts’ in relation to performative speech acts? In both contemporary and
traditional forms, how do these various “song acts”, “dance acts” and even “beading acts” balance politi-
cal efficacy with aesthetic engagement? How do such acts speak to Indigenous peoples, other-than-human
relations, and settler publics? Interested participants across disciplines are encouraged to submit abstracts
that pertain to written, visual, aural, and kinetic forms, in addition to other affective and sensory registers
(olfactory, gustatory).
Organizes:
◦ Jeffrey Severs, University of British Columbia

◦ Ralph Clare, Boise State University
This seminar will explore notions of sincerity, affect, and authenticity in contemporary literary and cultural
productions of any nationality, specifically in light of the neoliberal age. At a time when even the most
trivial aspects of daily life have been commodified there has also been a marked turn to sincerity, affect, and
questions of authenticity in culture and the arts. Though performativity has superseded the transcendent
category of the “the real” in the wake of postmodernism, many contemporary literary and cultural artifacts
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nevertheless seek to re-envision or repurpose ideas of authenticity. Recent studies have also addressed
related concerns with sincerity and/or affect, including work by Sianne Ngai and Patricia Clough. This
seminar will explore the ways sincerity, affect, and authenticity imbricate and inform one another. Is
sincerity merely a mode of affect, or is it something else? In what ways are these notions constructed, or
is conceiving of them as constructions antithetical to their supposed ontological status as “real”? Are there
differences between past and present formulations of them? What are the historical turning points? Are
today’s formulations merely nostalgic or sentimentalized, or are they indicative of new and singular ways
of being? Finally, what is the relationship of authenticity, sincerity, and affect to neoliberal ideology? Do
they challenge neoliberal order, or point to the (seemingly) final commodification of emotional life itself?
Papers might explore these topics with regard to aesthetics, culture, economics, race, class, gender, or
nationality. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
–The so-called “New Sincerity” movement –The recent controversial “Facebook study” and the manip-
ulation of emotion/emoti-cons –Post-postmodernism, cosmodernism, metamodernism, etc. –The role of
irony in today’s supposed post-ironic 9/11world –The relationship between sentiment and sentimentality
–Sincerity, authenticity, and neo-realism –Gender: are sincerity and authenticity gendered formations?
Why are a preponderance of the artists associated with them male? –The contribution of nostalgia (for
ages of pop culture, for “golden ages” of all sorts) to this alignment of affect and commodification? –
Performativity, affect, and sincerity –“Authentic” subjectivity or a post-humanist authenticity –Formations
of racial/ethnic/class identities or regionalist perspectives
Abstracts (300 words) and brief bios should be submitted to Jeffrey Severs (Jeffrey.Severs@ubc.ca) and
Ralph Clare (ralphclare@boisestate.edu) by October 15.
Organizes:
◦ Christina Svendsen, Harvard University

◦ Ilka Kressner, University at Albany, SUNY
This seminar invites papers that zoom in on the spectral in recent literature and film –the appearance of
ghosts, objects, photographs, perfumes, etc.–, and its power to break into and therefore reframe a given act
of storytelling. It proposes to focus on the spectral as a kind of latency or pregnancy, a pre- or post-view
of something. It takes into account both the definition of “specter” or “spectrum” as ghost (reaching an
apogee in the “spectral evidence” of the Salem witch trials) and the scientific definition of “spectrum”
as either a ghostly optical afterimage (Goethe) or the range of transparent colors produced when light is
dispersed by a prism (Newton). The spectral sensitizes us to the anticipated, the remembered or the absent.
Therefore, the insertion of a haunting image in literary texts may be rather described less as a nostalgic
return but as creative praxis and con-fabulation.
Who or what is being “spectralized” and who has the energy to conjure and is capable of seeing the image
out of time within the time of a fictional work? Do our modern and postmodern specters still resemble
the Romantic revenants or the Gothic ghosts? Which new connections between the immaterial and the
material words are fathomed and which dark chambers of the mind, past, parallel or to come, are traced?
Must spectrality invoke an aesthetics of retrospection, recurrence, and return of the repressed, or can it be
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oriented toward a future horizon, a shimmer of anticipation and expectancy?
Organizes:
◦ Ian Campbell, Georgia State University

◦ Erin Fehskens, Towson University
Speculative Fiction (SF) has demonstrated an ongoing engagement with colonialist projects since the nine-
teenth century, but the late twentieth century has witnessed a rise in SF penned by writers from former
colonial spaces who often set their fictions in speculative versions of locations in the Global South. Eric
Smith argues that these fictions first gained formal consolidation in Nalo Hopkinson’s edited collection
So Long Been Dreaming (2004), though Hopkinson and others such as Sam Delaney and Octavia Butler
had been publishing long before the arrival of that volume. These writers turn to SF to address perennially
postcolonial issues such as diaspora, decolonization and its economic and sociopolitical aftermaths, and
the perils and possibilities of hybridity. SF in the Global South also regularly challenges the conventions
of the genre, blending it with magical realism, fantasy, gothic, and other modes. And SF writers of the
Global South do not only explore postcolonially inflected issues.
This seminar invites papers that explore the variously articulated relationships between SF and the Global
South. While the construction of the panel assumes a relationship between genre and region, it welcomes
papers that explore the ways in which postcolonial and globalization discourses challenge the limits of
SF and vice versa. Topics might include Afro-futurism, race, posthumanism, utopia, futurity and history,
technology and underdevelopment, western and non-western scientific rationalities, magical realism, and
postcolonialism.

Turkish Context
Organizes:
◦ Elizabeth Nolte, University of Washington

◦ Zeynep Seviner, University of Washington
Historically scholars have examined Ottoman and Turkish literature and other so-called ”minor” or ”pe-
ripheral” literatures within the geographic, historical, temporal, and cultural parameters of national literary
traditions; yet, frequently texts, authors, and literary themes circulate far beyond these traditional cat-
egories and generate in the process unexpected interactions and forge novel networks of exchange and
transformation.
This seminar seeks to investigate instances of literary encounters, circulation, and interchange in the Ot-
toman and Turkish context that transcend the conventions of national literature and literary criticism and to
explore literary interconnections. How and why do texts and themes travel, and how are they transformed
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along the journey and through translation? Where do authors establish literary networks, on what basis,
and how do these interactions inform their own work? How can we reconceptualize literary history to
accommodate networks of exchange and influence and to utilize frameworks of connectivity rather than
comparison?
We will explore these questions through papers that analyze literary texts from the classical Ottoman era
to the modern Turkish Republic within the context of world literature studies. The turn towards transna-
tionalism opens exciting opportunities for the study and inclusion of ”minor” or ”peripheral” literatures in
the global literary canon but presents the added challenges not to reduce a literature to select representa-
tive texts or authors nor to reproduce the traditional East/West framework for comparison. This seminar
aims to supplement discussions on world literature by examining Ottoman and Turkish literature through
interconnections, exchanges, and transformations within global literary networks.

Organizes:
◦ Xin Ning, Jilin University

◦ Cheng Jin, Jilin University
A vibrant and productive branch of modern literary theory, eco-criticism not only unsettles the old anthro-
pocentric view of nature and humanity and fuels environmentalist activism, but contributes, directly or indi-
rectly, to the (re)construction of national and ethnical identities, gender roles and cultural self-imaginations
in different historical contexts. Also a cosmopolitan movement that urges a collective response of human
race to the environmental challenges in the modern world, eco-criticism nonetheless vehemently condemns
the rapacious and hegemonic globalization through foregrounding the importance of locality and the at-
tachment of human beings to their immediate living environments. By contrasting what Spivak terms
as “planetarity” to capitalist globalization, eco-criticism promises a cultural pluralism based on mutual
recognition and respect.
Inspired by contemporary eco-criticism, this panel attempts to reexamine modern Chinese literature and
culture from a comparative and global/ “planetary” perspective, addressing in particular the metamorphosis
of nature, both conceptual and material, in modern Chinese history and its intersections with various efforts
to reconstruct cultural identities of modern Chinese subjects. By scrutinizing the changing visions and
roles of nature in modern China, this panel means: 1) to illuminate the inherent connection as well as
the significant fissure between modern and traditional Chinese cultures; 2) to examine the cross-cultural
dialogues between modern Chinese and Western cultures on the issue of nature and humanity; 3) to combine
literary and ideological analysis of nature with ecological study and economic, political and social history
of modern China for a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of modern Chinese subject.
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Authenticity
Organizes:
◦ Dominique Jullien, University of California, Santa Barbara

◦ Stefan Helgesson, Stockholm University
The definition of “the vernacular” is always contrastive: native language(s) as opposed to language of
cultured elites; popular language (eg slang) vs. language of higher social classes; local language(s) vs.
colonial or imperial language(s). In this relational set-up, however, the scales of value are unstable and re-
versible. The local informant, the indigenous culture, the suppressed social group may, through language,
become the bearers of irreplaceable and coveted knowledge. This can make the vernacular a vehicle for
obtaining privileged local information, but also for establishing local agency by way of an authoritative
discourse on a place, culture or nation, or for creating an illusion of authenticity. Our panel invites contri-
butions on the following: • Travel narratives. The vernacular can be used to obtain knowledge inaccessible
to travelers who don’t speak it, hence the importance of guides, interpreters, intermediaries of all kinds who
populate travel narratives. • Social divides. The two different worlds may occupy the same urban space
but be socially differentiated, and the vernacular be a marker of social class. • Quest narratives. Since the
vernacular differentiates one world from another, characters can traverse into the other world, through the
vernacular “secret code”. In a quest narrative the other world can be a spiritual one, and the vernacular
a coded expression of the higher spiritual realm sought. • The vernacular and local literary agency. In
dynamic exchanges with cosmopolitan models, advocacy of the vernacular has worked towards securing,
valorizing and/or simulating the authenticity of local literary cultures.
Organizes:
◦ Erin Kappeler, Massachusetts Historical Society

◦ Sarah Ehlers, University of Houston
Following recent developments in the history of the book, reception studies, and historical poetics, this
seminar explores the transnational circulation and republication of poetry in order to investigate the inter-
cultural work poems have done at different historical moments, and to illuminate the ways in which poems
and poetic genres have produced ideas about transnationalism. In the spirit of comparative analysis, we
seek papers that explore how poems have moved across national, linguistic, and temporal boundaries in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How has this transnational poetic movement helped to construct
and contest cultural imaginaries? As individual poems navigated the globe in newspapers, magazines,
textbooks, pamphlets, live performances, websites, and chat rooms, how did their meanings and cultural
significance change? How might historical discourses about poetics allow us to reexamine the role of aes-
thetics in the creation of global networks? We welcome papers that consider the reception of individual
poems and of authors, as well as studies of specific periodicals and of historical readers. We are also inter-
ested in work that theorizes the poetic dimensions of nationhood and international community formation,
or that investigates how poetic categories have developed in relation to histories of globalization.
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Organizes:
◦ Luz Angélica Kirschner, Bielefeld University

◦ Andrés Amerikaner, The Pennsylvania State University
The conquest of the Americas, scholars such as Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo argue,
brought about a classifying ‘racial’ matrix that ranked humankind by stages of cultural development, with
Europe as the norm. This matrix, which also laid the groundwork for scientific biological racism in the 18th
and 19th centuries, continues to play a role in violence perpetrated in the name of civilization, development
and the market economy. Further, modern discourses of Eurocentric ‘raceless’ racisms proliferate and are
routinely deployed to deal with racial, ethnic and cultural difference in an increasingly globalized world.
This transatlantic panel seeks contributions from literature, painting, music, film, etc., that may address
issues such as:
-How are ‘minorities of color’ originating from areas such as Africa, Asia, and the Middle East struggling
to redefine white, Christian European identity—allegedly already beyond the troubles of race—which
routinely silences racial and colonial histories, and denies discourses of racialized oppression, even while
the effects of racialization are continuously felt?
-How can we theorize Latin American and U.S. Latin@ identities that acknowledge the African, Asian,
eastern European, indigenous, and non-Catholic heritages, often covered up by the discourse of supposedly
colorblind mestizaje, that are constitutive of the histories and cultures of the hemisphere?
-How do we preserve critical complexity when reading racial difference in contemporary European, U.S.
and Latin American artistic production? What methods can we draw from diaspora and border studies that
might help us disrupt facile identity narratives?
Organizes:
◦ Mitchum Huehls, University of California, Los Angeles

◦ Daniel Worden, University of New Mexico
From metafiction to LANGUAGE poetry, twentieth-century postmodern literature was greatly influenced
by Theory’s linguistic turn. Such literature incorporated Theory’s key insights—the deferral of meaning,
the death of the author, the materiality of the signifier, the presence of absence, the textuality of history—
into its very form, producing a strong vein of postmodern literature committed to enacting poststructural
precepts. Exemplified in writers as geographically, stylistically, and politically diverse as Charles Bern-
stein, Umberto Eco, Jessica Hagedorn, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and
Karen Tei Yamashita, contemporary literature from the 1960s to the 2000s dramatized the linguistic turn
in Theory and confirmed the emergence of poststructuralist methodologies in literary studies.
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Since then, many critics and literary historians have noted that postmodern cultural forms have waned and
Theory has declined. In their place, “post-postmodern” literature delivers neo-realism, genre fiction, and a
new sincerity while “post-poststructural” theory attends to long ignored presences: affect, objects, religion,
and political economy. Or so the story goes.
But why, this seminar asks, in the midst of these twenty-first-century movements away from postmod-
ernism in literature and theory, are there still so many texts which, on their face, look remarkably similar
to the Theoretically-committed postmodern literature of old? Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper, Per-
cival Everett’s Not Sidney Poitier, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Roberto Bolaño’s
2666, and Ben Marcus’s Flame Alphabet are all examples of contemporary works that question the stabil-
ity of meaning, emphasize the materiality of the signifier, and represent history as a textual undertaking.
While many critics have come to assume contemporary works such as these are qualitatively different from
their postmodern predecessors, we wish to interrogate how postmodernism is absorbed, revised, and, per-
haps, renewed by contemporary writers. What exactly is the status of poststructural Theory in twenty-first
century literature? What new ways and to what new ends are contemporary authors deploying Theory’s
conceits and concepts? How does Theory’s residual presence change the way we think about and periodize
contemporary literature, and how might we historicize the phenomenon we’re observing?
Paper topics might address:
• the nature of twenty-first-century experimentalism
• periodizing and historicizing the contemporary
• Theory’s influence on contemporary literary form
• Innovations or developments in metafiction
• Literary reflexivity and Theory’s demand that thought think itself
Organizes:
◦ Morten Hansen, Bowdoin College
The Italian film director Sergio Leone once contended that “America is really the property of the world, and
not only of the Americans.” Today, there is hardly a person on earth who has not been, in smaller or larger
ways, influenced by U.S. power, whether through military intervention, economic policies, or exposure to
American commercial products or popular culture. Yet the study of American culture too often assumes
either that America is completely divorced from the rest of the world or that America’s global presence
evinces itself solely by way of the one-way street of its imperial power. This seminar contends that the
idea and reality of United States remain inextricably entangled with the process of globalization, connect-
ing people, objects, and ideas all across the planet. Mapping the intricate network of global connections
between America and the rest of the world, this seminar invites papers exploring the mutual constitution of
American and global cultural productions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Paper topics might
include (but are not limited to) third-world cinema’s response to Hollywood, Ethic-American novels as
part of a global rather than a national field, the hidden global connections of canonical American cultural
327
productions, and aesthetic representations of the United States by writers from the Global South.
Organizes:
◦ Susanne Knittel, Utrecht University
Perhaps more so than any other recent field, memory studies is committed to a humanist conception of
the subject. Emerging as it did in response to the dehumanizing experience of WWII and the Holocaust,
it is perhaps not surprising that the question “if this is a man” should have been a crucial concern for the
field. In light of poststructuralist and posthumanist critiques of the subject, however, the limitations of this
question are becoming apparent. The exclusion of the victims of Nazi euthanasia from the discourse on the
Holocaust, for example, reflects unexamined prejudices concerning who is or can be an agent of memory,
and inadvertently reproduces the Nazi stigmatization of these people with physical and mental disabilities
as not or not fully human. How can memory studies move beyond the humanist paradigm? What would
a posthumanist memory studies look like? This seminar invites papers that address the future of memory
studies in light of recent theoretical developments, e.g. in the areas of posthumanism, disability studies,
animal studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, affect theory, and digital humanities. Papers about individ-
ual and collective memory, cultural memory, and commemoration beyond the context of the Holocaust are
especially welcome, as well as papers dealing with issues of forgetting, erasure, repression, artificial and
prosthetic memory, the “right to be forgotten,” etc. from a literary, cultural, historical, legal, ethical, and
political standpoint. The seminar will seek to strike a balance between case studies and theoretical and
methodological approaches.

Communist Space
Organizes:
◦ Ileana Marin, University of Washington

◦ Otilia Baraboi, University of Washington
In 2008, Marianne Hirsh drew on the Holocaust legacy to launch the concept of postmemory and describe
the way in which memories of a traumatic past are passed onto the second generation as their own. As
early on as Hannah Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism (1951), similarities between Nazi and com-
munist regimes have been made, although not without signaling a semiotic minefield in need for constant
exploration and redefinition. While the Holocaust second generation vacillates between establishing a con-
nection and breaking it up, the second generation of the Communist era seems inclined to break all ties
with their parents’ past and start afresh relying on cultural imports more than local traditions and customs.
The post-communist generations’ ethos of “do-it-yourself”, however, has been challenged by older gener-
ations’ split between digital and analog media, liberal democracy and socialism, ethnically homogeneous
and multicultural society, hierarchical and non-hierarchical family structure, urban and rural space. Trans-
generational conflicts and negotiations have shaped post-communist societies in their transition to global
328
and European citizenry, and have become a major theme in literature, arts, and film.
Suggested topics: - postmemory and Communism - Communist nostalgia and European skepticism - the
old “new man” of Communism and neo-communism - memorializing the past (e.g. the Budapest House of
Terror, the only museum dedicated to victims of Nazi and Communist regimes) - continuity and change in
East-European urban and rural space - family dynamics and East-European migrations within the European
Union
Organizes:
◦ Natasha Lvovich, City University of New York
Literary Translingualism refers to the phenomenon of writing in a non-native language or in a mix of

languages. Spanning in time, from Petrarch and Descartes to Beckett and Nabokov to present day Nancy
Huston, Ilan Stavans, and Andrei Makine, across continents and languages, this emerging field includes a
substantial strand defined by the upheavals of twentieth-century Eastern Europe. During and immediately
after the Bolshevik Revolution, artists and writers from Russia, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Elsa Triolet,
and Marc Chagall, to name just a few, started their spectacular literary/artistic careers in the West and
developed translingual creative identities in English and French rooted in the specifically Russian cultural
and linguistic context. Subsequently, in the 1970-80s and later after the dissolution of the USSR and
the fall of Berlin Wall, the post-cold war exilic drama changed its plot and multi-generational immigrant
communities shifted their bilingual/bicultural identities. These shifts and oscillations about their liminal
condition in two languages and cultures and the perennial idea of home are reflected in contemporary
literature and poetry written by translingual writers in their step-mother tongues (see, for example, Lara
Vapnyar, Zinaida Linden, and Andrey Gritsman). It is not accidental that quite a few of them tended to
be Jews, since European Jews have always been ’internal immigrants’ in the Diaspora, where they faced
discrimination and suspicion, no matter how assimilated they were. Perhaps this ’pre-existing condition,’
as tragic as it may be, was, for Eastern European Jewish authors, a historical ”bonus” of their diasporic
drama which pushed them toward a multilingual existence and predisposed them to translingual creativity.
834. Travel and Intersections: The Curious Identities of Modern Chi-

nese Poetry
Organizes:
◦ Liansu Meng, University of Connecticut

◦ Zhange Ni, Virginia Tech University
Since James Clifford called attention to the close connection between modernism and transnational travel-
ing more than two decades ago, studies of modernist literature have been increasingly marked by attempts
at going beyond the national framework. Jahan Ramazani (2009), for instance, re-conceptualizes twenti-
eth and twenty-first century poetry studies in English and argues for a transnational poetics. Michel Yeh
329
(2008) points out that broad exposure to world literature during the poets’ studying abroad resulted in the
creation of a new Chinese poetry that is international and hybrid in nature. This seminar attempts to further
expand the perspectives on and bring fresh insights into the study of modern and contemporary Chinese
poetry by focusing on the intersections of poetry and diverse factors such as transnational traveling, global
feminism, international modernism, world literature, religion-making, ethnic identities, science and tech-
nology, translation, war, politics, race, gender and class. We welcome papers that critically explore such
intersections from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. Topics include but not limited to travel
and poetry, constructions of gender ideology, the problematization of gender, the destabilization of ethnic
identities, the tension between literary genres, poetry’s participation in secularism and religion-making,
the interrelation between poetry and technology, contested notions of the individual, the nation, the local
and the global.
Organizes:
◦ April Durham, University of California, Riverside

◦ Sabine Doran, Pennsylvania State University
In this session we will explore the complex transmissions arising in networks governed by digital time.
Considering Whiteheadian processes of time and events, described recently in Timothy Scott Barker’s
“Time and the Digital” (2012), we will ask how digital aesthetics creates dense networks of relational
transmission across bodies, geographies, and perceptions. As these relations become open to complex
affective associations, they afford intricate ontological conditions that renew the potentials of bodies, sub-
jectivities, and sensations. Neither merely interior nor wholly exterior, the untamed and volatile creativity
of these multiplied networks of transmission are difficult to control or recuperate toward certain forms of
productivity. Thus, they give rise to unexpected, recombinant embodiment and subjectivity across lines
of distribution and apperception, in complex historical associations that are never wholly the result of in-
dividual agency. This panel invites papers that ask how literature, artworks, and media constitute digital
forms of temporality differently that include but are not limited to the historical, memorial, and archival.

Organizes:
◦ Chad Kia, Harvard University
Who reads modern Middle Eastern fiction? Audience is perhaps implied in literary form and material, but
what is its role in the discourse of contemporary Middle Eastern literature? What are the implications of
the idea of audience, political, literary or otherwise?
Publishing works of fiction or imaginative literature in the Arab- and Persian-speaking worlds has never
been a “market driven” phenomenon, but even before the current upheavals in the Middle East and North
330
Africa the question of reception was an important, if seldom discussed, aspect of “modern” literary pro-
duction. At least until the end of the Cold War, the importance of social engagement in works of fiction
and poetry stood as a measure of the proclivities of a reading public that consisted largely of a burgeon-
ing middle class which, at least indirectly, was influenced by western liberal education–notwithstanding
problems of state suppression, censorship, women’s education, and literacy rates.
Today, the emergence of World Literature and a globalized economy, with the publishing world at a cross-
roads and academic disciplines in the humanities in crisis, make the issue of readership and audience highly
significant in any case. But with the crisis of the 2009 presidential elections in Iran, the turmoil following
the Arab Spring and the related rise of the internet, and with many of the acclaimed writers of “Middle
Eastern literature” in exile, the issue of the displaced and fractured, even brutalized “reading public” in the
Middle East is complicated further.
The premise of this seminar–based on a simple question: For whom are Middle Eastern authors of fiction
writing?–emphasizes both the reception of literary works and the response of the “reading public” within
the so-called “Middle-East,” as well as the discourse surrounding the meaning and relevance of such an
audience. Related issues arising from the perspective of reception theory, sociology of literature, questions
of translation and accessibility, the curriculum in liberal arts education, demographics, and the economics
of publishing will also be of great interest.
Organizes:
◦ Gustavo Furtado, Duke University

◦ Alejandro Quin, University of Utah
In his Lectures on the philosophy of History, G.W.F Hegel puts forward the idea that the spirit of time fills
space unevenly, imbuing some territories with historic meaning while leaving others empty, uninhabited
by time or history. Similarly, the age of Discovery imagined the entire American continent to be awaiting
the inscriptions of Western reason, a perspective that, even after the founding of independent American
states, continued to apply to the backlands of national territories such as jungles, forests, deserts, plains,
and mountainous regions. We designate by the term “wilderness” these and other spaces that, although
nominally within national boundaries, are not fully domesticated by the metropolitan gaze and remain out-
side modern temporality—cast as “nature” in opposition to “culture,” therefore outside historic time and
meaning. Yet discourses about wilderness in the Americas are always inflected by complex temporal op-
erations that not only reinforce but sometimes challenge their passive role as the negative counterpart to
Hegelian, modern historicity. A journey into the American wilderness is often cast as an expedition into
the past, a pattern that effectively sanctions the nature-culture divide as well as the allochronic rendering
of native cultures as primitive, pre-Lapsarian, or even animal-like. Although the American wilderness is
often central to narratives of state formation, it is also the springboard for myriad counter-narratives, the
site from where to imagine alternate, nonlinear, messianic, and revolutionary temporalities, as illustrated,
for instance, in the theories and strategies of guerrilla warfare devised by many 20th-century rebel groups.
More recently, as concerns about climate change and environmental degradation grow, the potential ex-
tinction of wilderness areas points to an epochal change, one that confirms the thesis of the “anthropocene,”
which, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, names the period in which “humans act as the main determinant
331
of the environment of the planet”, making, therefore, untenable the separation between human and nat-
ural histories. This panel invites scholars to reflect on wilderness and temporality in the Americas both
in relation to specific cultural manifestations such as literature, cinema, and the arts, political and social
movements, or as a theoretical problem. Following are some suggested topics:
- The temporality of travel narratives from colonial times to the present. - The relationship between “nature”
and “culture” as well as approaches that question this distinction, such as the notion of the “anthropocene”. -
Nature, state formation, legal and paralegal violence. - Wilderness, non-linear temporalities, and messianic
and revolutionary time. - Ecology and temporality. - Extractive economies and developmentalism. -
Denial of coevalness, allochronism, and issues surrounding the meaning of the “contemporaneous”. -
Notions of the human (such the divide between humanitas and anthropos) and the posthuman. - The human-
animal divide as well as human and non-human agencies. - Interactions between historical and natural
temporalities.
332

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ACLA 2015

Program Schedule Organized by Day and Stream

Friday, March 27th

Stream A (8:30 – 10:10)

903. Active Voices: Global Literary Journalism and Social Justice

From Soulsearching to Performativity: The Aesthetic Potential of Literary Journalism

Materiality and the Activist Potential of Literary Journalism

887. Alien Approaches: Literary and Visual Representations of For-

Heterogeneous Bodies: Alienation and Alterity in Chris Abani’s Los Angeles

Approaches from the Edge: Urban Space in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission

Finten: Reflections on Gender, Class and Race in Victorian England

902. Americanist Criticism, Back and Forward

Americanizing Michel Foucault

Toward a Criticism of Self-Parody: Renewing Richard Poirier

The Magisterial Mode in Criticism: Slotkin and Bancroft

Location: Room 3002

Endless Books, Endless Aunts: the reproductive metaphor in Hedda Gabler

Serial Deferral: Queer Time and Place in Single Fictions

‘Still Life With Children’: Fun Home’s Queer Generations

Building Upon Sand: Destruction and Creativity in the Literary Breakdown

Racism as Public Feeling: Claudia Rankine’s American Lyrics

Chronotopic Breakdown in Danielewski’s ”House of Leaves”

782. Childish Forms

Location: Room 2802

601. Comparative Approaches to Federico García Lorca

Location: Eagle Boardroom

582. Crime Fiction as World Literature

Location: Room 2702

Does Existentialism Travel? Exploring the Subjective Universality in DeLillo’s Writing

Universal in/and/or Global

Other People’s Classics: Content, Skills, and the Motivation to Read

738. Ecocriticism in Japan

From “Ecocriticism in Japan” to “Japanese Ecocriticism”

The Practice of the World

Representation of Nomads in the Works of Michiko Ishimure

701. Europe and Its Other

Location: Room 3202

Romanticism in Transit: the Idea of ‘America’ in the American Renaissance

889. Fictions of Circulation

The Polyglot Vampire: Translation in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

900. Form and its Function: the Practices of Literary Production

Location: Room 3228

652. Form As/Against History

Figure, Fetish, Formalization

Poetics, Commodity, Form

(Digital) History, Form and Social Critique

853. Hölderlin’s Rivers

Location: Alki Boardroom

Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Turbulence of Language

Sediment of Greek Rivers in Der Rhein

The River of Rivers in Swabia: Hölderlin’s River Names

The Law of the Song: Hölderlin’s ”Der Rhein”

820. Importing/Exporting Racism

835. Intersections of War, Memory, and Cities in Twentieth Century

Location: Room 2628

Fearing the Masses in Sofía Casanova’s Kola el bandido

Jelinek’s Vienna: Power and Decadence

613. Legitimate Voices in Contested Spaces

“Un créole extrêmement vivace”: Linguistic Identity and Belonging in Bessora’s 53 cm

“Facets of Our Diglossia”: Native Speakers in the (Post-)Colonial World

Linguistic Authority in the Multilingual Mediterranean

888. Literature and/as language-in-use

Location: Capitol Hill

“The Sound Effects of Vox Populi in Public Radio”