CFP: 14th Asian Cinema Studies Society Conference 2025 (May 22-24, 2025) -The University of Hong Kong

Call for Papers: What is Asian Cinema?

We invite paper and panel proposals to present at the 14th Asian Cinema Studies Society conference to be held at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) during May 22-24, 2025. As a non-profit scholarly organization, the Asian Cinema Studies Society (ACSS) actively fosters international research in Asian film and media and publishes the flagship peer-reviewed journal Asian Cinema (Intellect). With the support of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), the Master of Arts in Literary and Cultural Studies Programme (MALCS), and the Department of Comparative Literature of HKU, ACSS brings its first face-to-face meeting since the global pandemic back to Hong Kong, a major Asian metropolis, transport hub, filmmaking capital, and connective node of regional, inter-Asian, and transpacific cultural globalization.

ACSS 2025 invites participants to present papers on any aspect of Asian film and media, though we encourage proposals that address the question: “What is Asian cinema?” Although often understood as cinematic practices, institutions, cultural formations, and critical discourses in or from Asia, the term “Asian cinema” belies its contradictions and complexities as an idea. Historically, scholars challenged such simplistic and binaristic understandings by investigating: how “Asia,” “Asian,” and “cinema” were defined under colonialism and postcolonialism; the way transnational productions trespass national and regional boundaries; the complex relations between home/ancestry/ethnicity/linguistic sharedness and diaspora; as well as how cinema itself often redefines and rewrites the meanings of “Asia” and “Asian.” Recently, theorists posit that the term “Asian cinema” implicitly constructs “cinema” and “media” as universal concepts modified by a particular concept: “Asian,” a construction that perpetuates the orientalist knowledge formation of Asia as an exception to the norm.

In light of these provocations, we ask: Does studying cinema in, from, about, or by Asia/Asians always suggest a power relation between an observer and an observed or an irreconcilable difference between Asia and somewhere else? Do strategically essential concerns justify the particularity of Asian film and media studies? How do evolving meanings and technologies of “cinema,” “film,” and “media” in our era of digital globalization reshape ideas of “Asia” or “Asian?” And, what was Asian cinema?

We welcome discussions and interventions addressing these questions both directly and indirectly, and from different disciplinary perspectives, methods, and approaches. Possible topics in relation to Asian film and media may include, but are not limited to:

● Colonialism, postcolonialism, decolonization, nationalism, empire, globalization

● Digital and online media, cultures, communities, and fandoms, streaming and platforms, video games, new media, seriality, intermediality, transmediality, post-cinema, big data, AI, CGI, deepfakes, surveillance

● Environmentalism, ecocriticism, animal studies and/or plant studies, anthropocene

● Film and media theory, philosophy, and discourse

● Historiography, memory, media archaeology and ecology, industry, exhibition, distribution, censorship/regulation, museology and curation, film festivals, stars

● LGBTQIA+, disability, race, ethnicity, class, feminism, and gender

● Pedagogy, production, performance, criticism, sound, music, effects, choreography

● Poetics, narrative, aesthetics, genre, documentary, experimental, animation, authorship, studios, independent, reception, audience, waves, movements

● Regional, national, transnational, indigenous, diaspora, language communities, refugee, exilic, inter-Asian, transpacific, Asian/American, Asian Australian, Asian Canadian

● Urban, rural, archipelagic, oceanic, and other spatial and environmental imaginaries

Please send proposals or enquiries to acssconference2025@gmail.com. For individual paper proposals, send a 200-300 word abstract and include the title, author name(s), institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email contacts, as well as a brief (50-100 word) biography of the contributor. For pre-constituted panel proposals (of 3-4 papers), provide a brief description (100 words) of the overall panel along with the individual abstracts and contributor information. Sessions will be 90 minutes in duration, and time limits will be strictly enforced. The deadline for submission of proposals is 10 November 2024. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of January 2025.

There will be no conference registration fee per se, but all presenters must be members of the Asian Cinema Studies Society, which requires an annual fee of $550 HKD / $70 USD. Full-time students (with ID) and underemployed scholars may pay a discounted fee of $450 HKD / $57 USD. The fee covers one year membership, one volume (two issues) of Asian Cinema, and gives access to the society’s executive meeting at the conference.

CFP: International #Conference: #Comparative #Literature as #Alternative #Humanities #Ethics, #Affect and the Everyday Social-#Delhi #University- September, 2024

In the last few decades, scholars in the Humanities have found it necessary to examine the fundamental underpinnings upon which their disciplines are built. One of the primary questions that animated this re-examination has been regarding the very terms of our engagement with countries and communities that inhabit radically different social and moral life-worlds, living as they do outside the orbit of European Enlightenment values that still regulate both organisation and practice within and outside the academy, across the world. Instead of accepting difference as a defining feature of the human condition, the grand narratives of the Enlightenment were used as colonial and imperial tools to homogenize the diversity of experience, emotion and expression as the high tide of colonial modernity swept the world. The consequent otherness and alienation that characterised human society have deeply impacted literary and cultural production. We witness a disjunction between the objective, scientific discourse with its claim to truth and the everyday social experience of the human subject which Humanities seek to understand. These asymmetries compel us to rethink the Humanities from alternative positions and perspectives to embody and address the plural orders of reality and the differences between them. How can the collection of disciplines we call the Humanities recover the capacity of self-reflection and self-criticism? Much has been written about how stereotypes invade our imagination to contaminate our experience and knowledge.

Comparative Literature’s commitment to alterity and plurality gives it a foundational interest in

the non-stereotypical, non-canonized, un-heard narratives of “others” that constitute a radical sense of the literary. Such articulations can only emerge from the confluence of different locations, experiences and identities, demonstrating how our vision of “others” projects our own versions of ourselves onto the outside world.

An alternative view of the Humanities will have to come to terms with the ideas of relationality, plurality and cultural mobility as the defining features of all epochs including that of the pre-modern. Texts, ideas, images, metaphors, themes, modes, genres, tales are all human endeavours and like humans themselves these have the capacity to travel across constructed, eternally given or pre-fixed borders, thereby defying the exclusivist, essentialist ideas of culture and literature. The prevailing inclination towards connected sociologies and connected histories, while a step in the right direction, often reflects the dominant discourses which impose homogeneity and hierarchy, evincing a lack of empathy for the precarious endeavour of encountering alterity and a lack of understanding of the transient and the contingent.

Thus, we propose plurality as a conceptual framework to address this eco-system of interconnectedness and relationality in terms of their manifestations in the languages and literatures of all nations, regions and communities, regardless of their location in the hierarchy of political and economic regimes, or of their internal stratifications. We would like to recover the mutuality of interconnections and interdependence between literatures and cultures across the world. The assertion that we live in a post-human world prompts us, as humans to consider our experience in terms of relationality and plurality. These emerge as conceptual tools for recasting our relations with the other - be it humans, animals or the non- living.

Texts are actualised through their immersion in the shared ideological and affective worlds that constitute the everyday world. From orality to print to the visual media, modes of intersubjective engagement are implicated in structures of power relations within society and our response to them. The very practice of Comparative Literature is an acknowledgement of plurality and a willingness to engage with difference. The discipline emphasises upon relationality, heterogeneity, multivocal perspectives, and direct engagement with alterity that translation offers as a process and a product. Built into the discipline is the interaction between literatures in multiple languages both within the nation and in other countries of the world. Furthermore, it takes orality and performance in its ambit. It reaches out to all other disciplines by asking the existential question : can we open ourselves to the location of the other and view the world from the vantage point of difference that we encounter outside ourselves? Can we frame a dialogic mode of interaction that reading teaches us to our relations with the world, to expand our view of the world outside our own limited subjectivity ? Hence, we propose Comparative Literature as an alternate paradigm - and invite reflections upon the possibilities inherent in the conceptual frame structured by the reciprocal, the relational and the plural. It is our hope that it will help to grasp and address the nature of the crisis that afflicts the Humanities today both in intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary framework.

Sub-themes

Some of the sub-themes in the context of the main theme that can be taken up for discussion are as follows:

Interrogating categorial binaries (tradition/modernity, nature/culture, regional/national, east/west etc.)/ Literature after theory/ Shifting paradigms between Literary Studies and Social Sciences/ The Post-human as a paradigm in literary studies.

Worlding literature / Historicising canons/ Global and local as contexts of reading. The idea of the classic in modernity: circulation or creativity ?

Translation and the encounter with difference. Translating “dialects”/ The oral texts/ Archaic texts.

The plural nation: stratification and resistance/ Literary historiography and geopolitics/ Intertextuality and chronotopes.

Polyphony/ Polysemy in literature/ Poetry and cosmopolitanism.

Interrogating “Minor” literature as category/ Identity theories as critiques of the Humanities / Life-writing from the margins.

The performativity of literature/ Screenplay as literature/ Intermediality in literature. South Asian literatures and cultures: relations, reciprocity and ruptures/ Population movements and literature.

Papers are invited from scholars of Comparative Literature,

Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, Theatre Studies, Gender Studies, Black Studies, Dalit Studies etc. or on any aspect of literature and culture that will help us understand and practice the Humanities in accordance with the ethical perspectives outlined above.

Abstracts of about 250 words along with a short bio-note of about 100 words may be submitted to clai2024@admin.du.ac.in

Upon acceptance, participants will be provided with registration details through email. The Registration Fee will include workshop kit, certificate, lunch, and refreshments during the three days of the conference. Participants would need to become members of CLAI on receiving their acceptance letters in order to present papers, if they are not already members of CLAI.

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Important Dates:

Last date of abstract submission: 30th April, 2024

Selected participants will be notified by: 30th May, 2024

Last date of registration: 15th July, 2024

Registration Fee:

Faculty members: Rs.3500/-

Research scholars/students: Rs.2000/-

International participants: US$ 200

For further information please visit: https://www.clai.in/upcoming-event/

clai2024@admin.du.ac.in

Organising Committee, XVII Biennial International Conference

Call for Papers - Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 47, No. 3, Autumn 2024

The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics is now accepting submissions for its forthcoming regular issue, Vol. 47, No. 3, Autumn 2024.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Comparative_Literature_and_Aest...

The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (ISSN: 0252-8169) is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, India, since 1977. The Institute was founded by Prof. Ananta Charan Sukla (1942-2020) on 22 August 1977, coinciding with the birth centenary of renowned philosopher, aesthetician, and historian of Indian art Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) to promote interdisciplinary studies and research in comparative literature, literary theory and criticism, aesthetics, philosophy, art history, criticism of the arts, and history of ideas. (Vishvanatha Kaviraja, most widely known for his masterpiece in aesthetics, Sahityadarpana, or the “Mirror of Composition,” was a prolific 14th-century Indian poet, scholar, aesthetician, and rhetorician.)

The Journal is committed to comparative and cross-cultural issues in literary understanding and interpretation, aesthetic theories, and conceptual analysis of art. It publishes current research papers, review essays, and special issues of critical interest and contemporary relevance.

JCLA is indexed and abstracted in the MLA International Bibliography, Master List of Periodicals (USA), Ulrich’s Directory of Periodicals, ERIH PLUS, The Philosopher’s Index (Philosopher’s Information Center), EBSCO, ProQuest (Arts Premium Collection, Art, Design & Architecture Collection, Arts & Humanities Database, Literature Online – Full Text Journals, ProQuest Central, ProQuest Central Essentials), Abstracts of English Studies, WorldCat Directory, ACLA, India Database, Gale (Cengage Learning), International Directory of Philosophy (PDC), Bibliography History of Art (BHA), ArtBibliographies Modern (ABM), Literature Online (LION), Academic Resource Index, Book Review Index Plus, OCLC, Periodicals Index Online (PIO), Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, CNKI, PhilPapers, Google Scholar, Expanded Academic ASAP, Indian Documentation Service, Publication Forum (JuFo), Summon, J-Gate, MIAR (Matriz de Información para el Análisis de Revistas), United States Library of Congress, New York Public Library, BL on Demand and the British Library. The journal is also indexed in numerous university (central) libraries, state, and public libraries, and scholarly organizations/ learned societies databases.

The Journal has published the finest of essays by authors of global renown like René Wellek, Harold Osborne, John Hospers, John Fisher, Murray Krieger, Martin Bocco, Remo Ceserani, J.B. Vickery, Menachem Brinker, Milton Snoeyenbos, Mary Wiseman, Ronald Roblin, T.R. Martland, S.C. Sengupta, K.R.S. Iyengar, Charles Altieri, Martin Jay, Jonathan Culler, Richard Shusterman, Robert Kraut, Terry Diffey, T.R. Quigley, R.B. Palmer, Keith Keating, and many others. Celebrated scholars of the time like René Wellek, Harold Osborne, Mircea Eliade, Monroe Beardsley, John Hospers, John Fisher, Meyer Abrams, John Boulton, and many renowned foreign and Indian scholars were Members of the Editorial Board of the journal.

Manuscripts in MS Word (5,000–8,000 words) following the MLA style should be sent to editor@jcla.in by 31 May 2024.

Founding Editor: Ananta Charan Sukla (1942-2020), Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute, India

Email: jclaindia@gmail.com

Website: jcla.in

CFP: Intersecting Ecologies: Navigating Crises, Traumas, and Movements in Asian Comparative Literature and Film _ October 10- 12, 2024,

CFP: Intersecting Ecologies: Navigating Crises, Traumas, and Movements in Asian Comparative Literature and Film

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 77th Annual Convention

Conference Date: October 10-12, 2024

Location: Las Vegas, Nevada

The “Intersecting Ecologies and Narratives: Navigating Crises, Traumas, and Movements in Asian Comparative Literature and Film” panel welcomes scholars to an interdisciplinary exploration at the intersection of ecological themes, migration and refugee experiences, medical humanities, and the post-COVID era within the context of Asian literature and film.

Our panel aims to engage in comparative analyses across various regions and genres within Asian literature and film, focusing on their navigation of crises and traumas, particularly those related to ecological themes. We invite contributions that dissect not only ecological crises and traumas from diverse perspectives but also complex relationships between humans and nature, cultural identities and environmental narratives, ecofeminism, and ecology's implications in the age of globalization.

We seek to foster a dialogue that connects Asian comparative literature and film with the broader fields of environmental humanities, migration and refugee studies, medical humanities, and reflections on the post-COVID world. We encourage submissions that explore the intersections of ecological crises with human health, displacement, environmental activism, and migration narratives, offering new insights into the challenges and opportunities these intersections present.

Highlighted topics for exploration include but are not limited to:

• Reflections on nature and the human condition within Asian literary traditions.
• Analyses of nature, technology, and modernity, and their implications for health and displacement in Asian contexts.
• Intersections between environmental and medical humanities focus on Asian narratives that address the health implications of degradation.
• Explorations of gender and nature within the framework of feminist ecologies in Asian contexts.
• Investigations into the portrayal of animals and anthropomorphism in Asian literature and cinema.
• Cross-cultural and interregional narratives of ecology, crisis, and movement, including Forrester (forest-based) fiction that envision alternative ecological futures.
• Discussions on the dynamics between ecology, globalization, and their impacts on health, migration, and the environment in Asian comparative literature and film.
• Insights into the post-COVID landscape through world literature and cinema, with a lens on ecological activism.

Contact Information

Submissions should consist of a 250-word abstract and a brief biography (2-3 sentences), formatted as a DOC document, to be sent to Yueming Li at yul282@ucsd.edu by March 15, 2024. The convention’s presentations will be conducted in English.

Contact Email: yul282@ucsd.edu

CFA: XVII Biennial International Conference on Comparative Literature as Alternative Humanities Ethics, Affect and the Everyday Social organized by Comparative Literature Association of India and University of Delhi-10th-12th September, 2024

Comparative Literature as Alternative Humanities Ethics, Affect and the Everyday Social

In the last few decades, scholars in the Humanities have found it necessary to examine the fundamental underpinnings upon which their disciplines are built. One of the primary questions that animated this re-examination has been regarding the very terms of our engagement with countries and communities that inhabit radically different social and moral life-worlds, living as they do outside the orbit of European Enlightenment values that still regulate both organisation and practice within and outside the academy, across the world. Instead of accepting difference as a defining feature of the human condition, the grand narratives of the Enlightenment were used as colonial and imperial tools to homogenize the diversity of experience, emotion and expression as the high tide of colonial modernity swept the world. The consequent otherness and alienation that characterised human society have deeply impacted literary and cultural production. We witness a disjunction between the objective, scientific discourse with its claim to truth and the everyday social experience of the human subject which Humanities seek to understand. These asymmetries compel us to rethink the Humanities from alternative positions and perspectives to embody and address the plural orders of reality and the differences between them. How can the collection of disciplines we call the Humanities recover the capacity of self-reflection and self-criticism? Much has been written about how stereotypes invade our imagination to contaminate our experience and knowledge.

Comparative Literature’s commitment to alterity and plurality gives it a foundational interest in the non-stereotypical, non-canonized, un-heard narratives of “others” that constitute a radical sense of the literary. Such articulations can only emerge from the confluence of different locations, experiences and identities, demonstrating how our vision of “others” projects our own versions of ourselves onto the outside world.

An alternative view of the Humanities will have to come to terms with the ideas of relationality, plurality and cultural mobility as the defining features of all epochs including that of the pre-modern. Texts, ideas, images, metaphors, themes, modes, genres, tales are all human endeavours and like humans themselves these have the capacity to travel across constructed, eternally given or pre-fixed borders, thereby defying the exclusivist, essentialist ideas of culture and literature. The prevailing inclination towards connected sociologies and connected histories, while a step in the right direction, often reflects the dominant discourses which impose homogeneity and hierarchy, evincing a lack of empathy for the precarious endeavour of encountering alterity and a lack of understanding of the transient and the contingent.

Thus, we propose plurality as a conceptual framework to address this eco-system of interconnectedness and relationality in terms of their manifestations in the languages and literatures of all nations, regions and communities, regardless of their location in the hierarchy of political and economic regimes, or of their internal stratifications. We would like to recover the mutuality of interconnections and interdependence between literatures and cultures across the world. The assertion that we live in a post-human world prompts us, as humans to consider our experience in terms of relationality and plurality. These emerge as conceptual tools for recasting our relations with the other - be it humans, animals or the non- living.

Texts are actualised through their immersion in the shared ideological and affective worlds that constitute the everyday world. From orality to print to the visual media, modes of intersubjective engagement are implicated in structures of power relations within society and our response to them. The very practice of Comparative Literature is an acknowledgement of plurality and a willingness to engage with difference. The discipline emphasises upon relationality, heterogeneity, multivocal perspectives, and direct engagement with alterity that translation offers as a process and a product. Built into the discipline is the interaction between literatures in multiple languages both within the nation and in other countries of the world. Furthermore, it takes orality and performance in its ambit. It reaches out to all other disciplines by asking the existential question : can we open ourselves to the location of the other and view the world from the vantage point of difference that we encounter outside ourselves? Can we frame a dialogic mode of interaction that reading teaches us to our relations with the world, to expand our view of the world outside our own limited subjectivity ? Hence, we propose Comparative Literature as an alternate paradigm - and invite reflections upon the possibilities inherent in the conceptual frame structured by the reciprocal, the relational and the plural. It is our hope that it will help to grasp and address the nature of the crisis that afflicts the Humanities today both in intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary framework.

13%

Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

₹799.00

3%

Glimpses Of Comparative Literature

₹595.00

15%

MEG-15: Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice (IGNOU Study Guide Book)

₹350.00

24%

Comparative English Literature

₹595.00

16%

Studies In Comparative Literature

₹695.00

14%

Comparative literature

₹3,592.00

Comparative Perspectives on Indian Literature

Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction

30%

NEERAJ MEG-15 Comparative Literature : Theory And Practice- English Medium for MA- IGNOU - Chapter Wise Help Book / Guide including Many Solved Sample Papers and Important Exam Notes– Published by Neeraj Publications

₹320.00

20%

Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturism (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

₹3,800.00

Sub-themes

Some of the sub-themes in the context of the main theme that can be taken up for discussion are as follows:

• Interrogating categorial binaries (tradition/modernity, nature/culture, regional/national,
• east/west etc.)/ Literature after theory/ Shifting paradigms between Literary Studies and Social Sciences/ The Post-human as a paradigm in literary studies.
• Worlding literature / Historicising canons/ Global and local as contexts of reading. The idea of the classic in modernity: circulation or creativity ?
• Translation and the encounter with difference. Translating “dialects”/ The oral texts/ Archaic texts.
• The plural nation: stratification and resistance/ Literary historiography and geopolitics/ Intertextuality and chronotopes.
• Polyphony/ Polysemy in literature/ Poetry and cosmopolitanism.
• Interrogating “Minor” literature as category/ Identity theories as critiques of the Humanities / Life-writing from the margins.
• The performativity of literature/ Screenplay as literature/ Intermediality in literature. South Asian literatures and cultures: relations, reciprocity and ruptures/ Population movements and literature.

Papers are invited from scholars of #Comparative #Literature,

#Translation Studies, #Cultural Studies, #Theatre Studies, #Gender Studies, #Black Studies, #Dalit Studies etc. or on any aspect of literature and culture that will help us understand and practice the Humanities in accordance with the ethical perspectives outlined above.

Abstracts of about 250 words along with a short bio-note of

about 100 words may be submitted to clai2024@admin.du.ac.in

Upon acceptance, participants will be provided with registration details through email. 

The Registration Fee will include workshop kit, certificate, lunch, and refreshments during the three days of the conference. Participants would need to become members of CLAI on receiving their acceptance letters in order to present papers, if they are not already members of CLAI.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Last date of abstract submission: 30th April, 2024 

Selected participants will be notified by: 30th May, 2024 

Last date of registration: 15th July, 2024

REGISTRATION FEE:

Faculty members: Rs.3500/-

Research scholars/students: Rs.2000/- 

International participants: US$ 200

For further information please visit:

  https://www.clai.in/upcoming-event/

Organising Committee, XVII Biennial International Conference.

clai2024@admin.du.ac.in

CFP: 10th Annual National RAW.Conference on COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: PERSPECTIVES, PRACTICES, POSITIONS: 5th – 7th March 2024 University of Hyderabad

Centre for Comparative Literature

School of Humanities University of Hyderabad

Hyderabad, Telangana – 500046, India

CALL FOR PAPERS

“We all know that the word ‘method’ is eventually derived from the Greek ‘methodos’ which again is derived from ‘meta’ meaning ‘after’ and ‘hodos’ meaning ‘way’. If method is moving after a way, then it must have been arrived at after moving wayward for some time.” 

-Amiya Dev, “Comparative Literature from Below”, JJCL 29

Comparative literature is a way of reading literature. Literature is the object of study and the method is ‘comparative’. This begs questions like: what does a comparative reading entail? Why should we study literature comparatively? And most importantly, how do we do a comparative reading? These questions have been raised time and again at different locations, both by people within and outside the discipline and various answers have been offered. Historically, different ‘schools’ of comparative literature (the French school, the Russian school, the German school et al.) have conceptualized the method of comparison in different ways. If we look at comparative literature as a situated interpretive practice (as opposed to a theory or body of works), the question of (spatio-temporal and cultural) location becomes very important. Given our location in the plurilingual and pluricultural society of India, where living with plurality and difference is part of our quotidian reality, can we think of an Indian way of doing comparative literature founded upon plurality, relationality and an ethical engagement with difference?

Given the nature of literature which is marked by the singularity of each ‘text’ and its irreducible difference from another of its kind, how do we conceptualize a comparative method that is sensitive to this fact? Our method should follow a  “from below” (Amiya Dev) approach which modifies itself according to the literary data and does not tweak data to fit the method and creates an open and inclusive discourse. Such an approach makes comparative literature a willing and ethical engagement with alterity and difference aimed at understanding the Other. Our textual practices of reading, writing and interpretation are aimed at understanding the process of textualization, its production and reception, in order to access through literature what Simone de Beauvoir calls a “taste of another life”. These acts of conscious and reflective reading taking into account the ontological plurality, relationality and living with alterity which are conditions of our being, we believe, are fundamental to comparative literature as a practice across the world.  

Apart from this, what else can we say, if anything, in general about our research method  given that each literary text is singular and hence, each engagement with it is unique? What are the essential characteristics our method must have so that we don’t move too wayward and invite charges of dilettantism that is often levelled against our discipline? Given the history of the discipline which has been beset by a number of crises, even pronouncements of death, calls for dissolution into other disciplines which are often from the Anglo-Saxon academia, how should the comparative method be applied, especially in the Indian academia, to different areas of research and assert its vitality and relevance for a location like ours? What makes our practice different from that of other disciplines like English studies, cultural studies, translation studies, area studies etc.? What is the relationship of comparative practice with theory? How do we negotiate with categories that are often used for the study of literature such as those based on region (South Asia, the Global South, the ‘third world’, regional language literatures, the Commonwealth, the nation), history (the post-colonial, industrial modernity) or identity (based on caste, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion,  and other theories of marginalization)? What are the ethics and aesthetics of our engagement with alterity and plurality? Can we interrogate received categories and ideas of comparison and construct a method for research that is suitable to study our lived realities? This conference is an attempt to bring fellow comparatists together to reflect on these questions and clarify for ourselves and “others” the relevance of comparative literature methodology for literary studies today, in India and elsewhere and share our insights and ideas from the point of view of our own practice of comparative literature.

We invite papers that engage with, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Literary historiography, genology and thematology: Integrated approaches

• Comparative poetics: Sanskrit, Tamil, Greek, Perso-Arabic et al.

• Literature and other arts: relations and intermediality

• Reception aesthetics and reception history

• Organic plurality of Indian languages: implications for literary studies

• Literary movements and movements of literatures

• Otherness and difference: encounters, engagements and ethics

• Literary relations: interliterariness, contact and literary transactions

• India as a site for comparative literature

• Comics and graphic narratives

• Spatiality, temporality, chronotope, heterotopia

• Affective and existential and experiential/phenomenological categories for literary studies

• Canons: making, unmaking and beyond

• Dismantling hierarchies in differences

• Aesthetics: poetics and politics

• Identity and difference: comparative perspectives vis-à-vis literature

• Disability as difference

• Discourses of identity and comparative literature: caste, class, race, religion,  gender, sexuality, marginality 

• Virtuality and literariness: new forms and modes of writing

• Orality, oratures, oral and performance traditions

• Narratology, narrativization and narratives of the other/ othered narratives

We expect the papers to deal with the practical aspects of Comparative Literature and demonstrate how the comparative approach shapes their actual practice of engaging with and reading literary and cultural texts, practices and phenomena. In other words, we expect to see the application of the comparative approach in reading of particular ‘texts’ in the papers and not just an exploration of theoretical ideas. Research scholars working in any discipline, particularly those working in literary studies in any language from a comparative perspective, are encouraged to send in their abstracts. Language of presentation will be English only due to logistical reasons. 

15%

Comparative English Literature

₹595.00

14%

Comparative literature

₹3,592.00

19%

Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

₹895.00

22%

Studies In Comparative Literature

₹695.00

13%

Glimpses Of Comparative Literature

₹595.00

15%

MEG-15: Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice (IGNOU Study Guide Book)

₹350.00

20%

Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturism (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

₹3,800.00

35%

NEERAJ MEG-15 Comparative Literature : Theory And Practice- English Medium for MA- IGNOU - Chapter Wise Help Book including Solved Sample Papers – Published by Neeraj Publications

₹320.00

34%

Gullybaba IGNOU 2nd Year MA (Latest Edition) MEG-15 Comparative Literature : Theory and Practice IGNOU Help Book with Solved Previous Years' Question Papers and Important Exam Notes [Paperback] Gullybaba.com Panel

₹300.00

Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization

Abstracts of about 300 words with a title and 5-6 keywords may be uploaded to https://forms.gle/dwt7tKGxgnWiJTLeA  by  25th January 2024.

RAW.Con or Researchers at Work Conference is an annual offline event organized by the students of the Centre for Comparative Literature (CCL) at the University of Hyderabad. The conference is open to students who have registered for Ph.D. or aspiring PhD scholars (a few slots are available for MA students). As per practice, some of the eminent scholars will also be invited as resource persons for the conference. Candidates whose abstracts have been selected will be informed by 10th  February 2024. If your abstract is accepted after review, you will be required to email the full paper by 24th February 2024. Selected paper presenters will be provided bed and board, and often train fare as well, if the budget allows.

Organizing Team: 

Asit Kumar Biswal 

Jomina C. George 

R. Lalhriatpuii