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

Inter-Asian Literary Relations

Organizer: Firat Oruc

What are the textual modes of inter-Asian literary interactions? What are the forms of intertextuality across the literatures and languages of Asia? This seminar aims to examine the inter-Asian... more

Emergence of New World Imagination in the 19th and 20th Century: Understanding of the Global Colonial Countries through the Lens of Auto-Biographical Narratives, Memoirs And Travelogues

Organizer: Barnali Chanda

It is intriguing to examine how the documents from and about the global colonial countries written during the 19th and 20th century describe the extremely unstable social and political environments... 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

Orientation to Texts and Knowledge: From Antiquity to AI

Organizer: Reinhard Mueller

How do we orient ourselves to texts and knowledge across time and technological advancements? How do texts and knowledge in turn orientate and transform us, and how do they influence the world we... 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

Dismantling the matrix of oppression in Atwood's "the Testaments" and Parsipur's "Women without Men"

Organizer: Marjan Heidari

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women without Men may seem to be different works due to different settings and the writers’ backgrounds. The Testaments, written in 2019,... 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

Alternative Poetics of Environment in South Asia

Organizer: Sumera Saleem

In his 2009 text entitled Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz describes the political power of art in imagining and reimagining “other ways of being in the world... 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

What Are the Key Concepts of Literary Study?

Organizer: Christopher Kuipers

Delineating the Concept-Field of Literature: What Are the Basic Units of Analysis of Literary Study? In contrast to many other academic fields where the subject matter is clearly defined across its... 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

Symphonic Discourses and Connections for Interracial Alliances in Asian Diaspora and AAPI Communities

Organizer: Liyang Dong

Commending Goethe’s and Erich Auerbach’s philological approach to world literature, particularly Goethe’s s holistic understanding of Islamic literature and culture, Edward Said proposes a... more

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