Seminars

Documentary Fever

Organizer: Rosana Hernández

In the short story “Documentary Novelist,” by Argentinian author Sergio Chejfec, the narrator tries to explain to a hotel worker his determination to have his picture taken with the hotel’s macaws: “... more

Literature and International Development

Organizer: Susanna Sacks

“Literature, whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality…What better preparation can a people desire as they begin their journey into the strange,... more

Extractivism and Nation Building in the Long Nineteenth Century

Organizer: Nicolás Sánchez-Rodríguez

The term extractivism describes an economic model based on the circulation of non-renewable "natural" resources to world market metropolises from territories regarded as peripheral. As a practice and... more

Ciné-Poetics of Time in the Global South

Organizer: Marie Huber

If poetry, as Maurice Blanchot writes, is that which always eludes philosophical questioning, what philosophy of history could emerge from thinking with the poetic cinemas of the Global South?... more

Modernism in the Twenty-First Century

Organizer: Chris Gortmaker

Can the modernism genie truly be sequestered in its twentieth-century bottle? This seminar invites papers that explore the possible persistence of aesthetic modernism in twenty-first century... more

Unreliable Narration in Nineteenth- To Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Organizer: Carlo Arrigoni

Following Wayne Booth’s articulation of the notion in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), unreliable narration has been a long-standing topic of discussion in literary theory and criticism. Definitions... more

The Ends of the Road: Rethinking the Borders of the Picaresque

Organizer: Emily Mulvihill

The picaresque has largely fallen out of vogue in literary studies. Nevertheless, the genre has long shaped the study of many of the world’s major literary traditions. So, what happens if we rethink... more

Relationality in Queer/Trans Asian/American and Asian Diasporic Cultural Forms

Organizer: stef torralba

Since its inception, the interdisciplinary field of queer of color critique has recalibrated commonplace understandings of ethnic and racial difference by foregrounding the imbricated relations... more

Beyond Backwardness: Revisiting Rural Spaces as Sites of Resistance, Renewal, and Radical Potential

Organizer: Brittany Frodge

Due to varied complex historical processes such as industrialization, urbanization, and colonization, the rural has often been articulated in literature and other cultural products as an... more

Cultures of Monoculture

Organizer: Amber Bal

Monocultural farming practices are indissociable from the transformations that characterize life in the 21st century: climate change, urbanization and the dematerialization of labor are but a few... more

Undetermined Promising Futures

Organizer: Michael Anthony Turcios

That a promising future awaits us not too far has been rearticulated ad nauseum. Abstract, vacuous, and frequently unrealized, a promising future indefinitely extends precarity. To imagine a... more

Mysticisms in the Flesh: The Social Poetics of Nothingness

Organizer: Sally Hansen

In his essay, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” Fred Moten asks, “Can there be an aesthetic sociology or a social poetics of nothingness?” This seminar takes up Moten’s question,... more

Ethics and Aesthetics of Direct Climate Action

Organizer: Adam Hill

As the impacts of climate catastrophe worsen and the possibilities of systemic change remain improbable, spectacularized acts of civil disobedience play an increasing role in public debate on climate... more

(The Politics of) Writing Home: Language, and Identity in the Literature of Displacement

Organizer: Zaynab Ali

Destruction is transnational: homes, places of worship, healing and community are annihilated across borders. One factor remains that unites the varying images of destruction: regardless of race,... more

Lost in Austin: Critical Inheritances of a Philosophical Maverick

Organizer: Philip Mills

We are proposing an ACLA Seminar to convene, for the first time, the interdisciplinary community of scholars working on or in the spirit of J.L. Austin (1911–1960). Though widely, albeit often... more

Evolutions of Literary Theory: The Afterlives of New Criticism, Structuralism, and Others

Organizer: Katherin Yu

The publication of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, in some ways, marked the end of New Criticism. The two approaches—structuralism and New Criticism—represent two ways of seeing texts... more

Reception of War in Contemporary European Literatures

Organizer: Olha Voznyuk

The Russian full-scale invasion on Ukraine in 2022 brought back the question of war, its representation and reception in literature and culture in contemporary writing. In spite of the idea that war... more

Diagrams of writing. Design, ekphrastic and figural patterns in artistic and literary forms

Organizer: Thomas Symeonidis

Contemporary debates and research continue to investigate the various interrelations between the arts. “Communication”, “exchanges”, “encounters” between the arts, “interdisciplinarity”, “... more

Labor in Global Speculative Fiction

Organizer: Samuel Ginsburg

In their construction of possible futures and alternate realities, science fiction and other forms of speculative literature have often provided a space to reflect on the cultural and technological... more

After Caliban: Literary Education, Empire, and the “Global Anglophone”

Organizer: Laura Ritland

This seminar invites renewed analysis and debate about the educational institutions of English literature within the scope of British and US empire, especially (though not only) within the light of... more

ACLA