Seminars

ACLA Undergraduate Seminar "Bad Readers"

Organizer: Karyn Ball

In view of the popularity of last year's topic, we reprise it this year and encourage all who applied last year but weren't admitted due to space constraints, to reapply. From Heinrich von... more

Imagining Extinction: Afterness, Fossils and Fiction

Organizer: Asijit Datta

Writing about extinction is an aporetic coming together of our current geological reality and imagination that borders on speculation. It is an act that opens up the ecological, the ontological, and... more

‘Prompting’ World Literature: Generative AI, Comparative Aesthetics, New Hegemonies, New Peripheries?

Organizer: Dr. Saskia Schabio

The surge of generative AI poses new challenges for conceptualising world literature and comparative aesthetics. While AI is trained using large datasets containing ‘human’-created works, critical... more

Written in Stone: Lithic Inscription and the Poethics of Monumentality

Organizer: Marc Botha

Written in Stone: Lithic Inscription and the Poethics of Monumentality The invocation and use of stone in poetry – as image, metaphor, medium – has a long and varied history. Quarried,... more

Comparative Literature and the Politics of Detranslation

Organizer: Rusaba Alam

In his return to and rereading of Freud’s early writings on the interpretation of dreams, French psychoanalyst and translator of Freud, Jean Laplanche, makes the provocative claim that psychoanalytic... more

Reading the Archive of the Unexpected: Aspiration, Violence, and the Labor of Development in the Narratives on Reading in Latin America

Organizer: Diego Bustos

In Latin America, the convergence of financial crises, developmental and neoliberal policies, informal economies, and armed conflicts has created a backdrop of profound socio-political change... more

speculation I riddle I proemdra

Organizer: Danai Mupotsa

speculation I riddle I proemdra Zukolwenkosi ZIkalala’s essay “Forced Landing in Dark Time”, speculates on the method of a proemdra arises—a strategy, or trick-form that combines poetry, drama and... more

Finding New Kinships: Queer Homecomings in East Asian Literature and Media

Organizer: Fareed Ben-Youssef

This seminar invites papers on queer homecoming from across East Asian literature and media which present and wrestle with expanded definitions of home outside of the normative family and state... more

The Uses of Prose

Organizer: Musab Abdul Salam

During the colonial period, South Asia witnessed the rise of new literary forms, particularly in prose, that attempted to grapple with the complexities ushered in by colonial-modernity. Writers... more

Beyond Assimilation/Revolution? Collectivity, Solidarity, and the Future

Organizer: Michele Chinitz

This seminar hopes to engage with forms of social and political organizing that do not conform to binary understandings of the imperative towards assimilation or revolution. While reflecting on... more

The Blue of the Plums is the Memory of the Sea: Poetic Ecologies of Displacement

Organizer: Ada Smailbegovic

This seminar takes up the concept of displacement from two different vantage points. One is a consideration of how anthropogenically generated processes of environmental change can lead to a... more

Great Books? Bad Books? Rethinking our Broken Canons

Organizer: Amanda Malone

This seminar asks us to explore the forces—institutional, commercial, methodological—that form and reform literary canons. One such force is the great books approach to literature, which implies not... more

Oceans in World Literature: from the Middle Ages to Modern Times

Organizer: Yuanfei Wang

In The Novel and the Sea, Margaret Cohen argues that the dominant narrative about the rise of the western novel occurring on land could be revised with a consideration of sea adventure fiction.... more

Comparative Literature's Cold War

Organizer: Cate Reilly

What is the place of Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies in the comparative literary inquiry? Of comparative literary inquiry, with its emphasis on theory and the critical praxis of the left... more

Infrastructure(s) & Storytelling: Rethinking Contexts, Connections, & Erasures

Organizer: Rini Tarafder

Infrastructures, both visible and invisible, are all around us and they permeate our lives in various ways. Larkin defines infrastructures as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people... more

James Baldwin and the Eruption of the Ethical

Organizer: Bill Johnson-González

In interview footage from 1963 curated by Karen Thorsen for The Price of the Ticket (1989) there is a scene wherein James Baldwin makes a claim about value: “From my point of view, no label... more

Varieties of the Impersonal

Organizer: Elias Kleinbock

Impersonality has long been invoked as a marker of modernity and of its literary-aesthetic correlate in modernism: anonymity and ennui appear as symptoms of urbanization and bureaucracy; modern... more

Powers of the Inhuman: Representations of the Working Class in the New International Division of Humanity

Organizer: Marcela Romero Rivera

Vijay Prashad, from the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, recently proposed that the genocidal wars and policies that define our political moment as hyper-imperialist affect not only the... more

“Beyond Social Death?”: Afro-Pessimism in Literature, Film and Television

Organizer: Badreddine Ben Othman

This seminar aims to explore literary texts, films and television productions which adopt or challenge Afro-Pessimistic visions of Black life in a systemically anti-Black world. It asks whether Black... more

A PLANETARY TEXT. NOTES ON SPOKEN WORD POETRY, RADICAL IMPROVISATION AND UNIVERSALITY

Organizer: F.M. Ceci

This panel seeks to explore the intersections of spoken word poetry and radical improvisation in music, considering how both practices function as tools of liberation, subversion, and radical... more

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