CONGRESS OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, CARLETON UNIVERSITY Ottawa, Ontario, May 23 - 25 2009

Comparative Spaces: Changing Territories

2009 marks the 40^th anniversary of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. Join us at Carleton University to celebrate the discipline of Comparative Literature in Canada.

Espaces comparés : changement de territoires et territoires en changement

L’année 2009 marque le 40^e anniversaire de l’Association canadienne de littérature comparée. Nous vous attendons à l’Université Carleton pour célébrer ensemble la présence du comparatisme au Canada.

In the words of Fredric Jameson, globalization, a concept with no “privileged context,” “falls outside the established academic disciplines,” thus necessarily calling for an interdisciplinary perspective and methodology and questioning the limits of traditional disciplinary areas. How does Comparative Literature respond to and participate in the discourse on and of globalization? We invite you to explore globalization – a complex political rhetoric, a leading social force, and a growing cultural practice – as a space of tension and a site of resistance and to investigate its evolving theoretical paradigms and specific practices: forms and channels of cultural exchange and communication, local and global audiences, borders – material and virtual, homogeneity and diversity, local and global subjectivities, transculturality and transnationality. We invite papers for “Cultures Across Borders: Negotiating the Global and the Local,” the 3rd Annual Comparative Literature Graduate Conference of the Comparative Literature Program (University of Alberta, 13-14 March 2009).

Transnationalism, transculturation, diaspora, migrancy, postcoloniality, ethnicity, multiculturalism, mestizaje, creolization, these are only some of the rubrics that literary critics employ as a corrective to the national paradigm of literary study and to call into question singular cultural, national and linguistic allegiances. Such terms are variously evoked in discussions of immigration, mobility, temporary and permanent forms of displacement, and other forms of cultural and geographic flow. Indeed, closely related phenomena connected to globalization are being analysed through divergent theoretical frameworks and the vocabularies that attend these frameworks. This panel will explore the root causes of these divergences in terminology.

THE CHALLENGES OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: TRANSFORMING AND REDEFINING LITERARY AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPES Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec – March 26th, 2009 This conference will explore the role of comparative studies in understanding the trans/formation(s) and re/definition(s) of Canadian and Québécois literatures. We are interested in identifying the strengths and limitations of comparative literature and therefore we invite proposals that shed light on its pertinence as critical, cross-cultural, political, and formal tool. The conference encourages a re/thinking of the theories, aesthetics and politics of comparative literature.

The publication seeks articles that explore emerging concepts about the representation of the self and identity in contemporary film/television, fiction/non-fiction, and the visual arts.

The publication seeks articles that explore emerging concepts about the representation of the self and identity in contemporary Iranian film/television, fiction/non-fiction, and the visual arts.

The Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne (CLC) at the University of Alberta seeks to bring together researchers who are interested in the ways in which the literatures of Canada can be said to “travel” or “move” from one “place” to the other. Lest anyone be put off by this preponderance of “scare quotes,” let us just say that we are hoping to welcome all manner of scholarship devoted to the mutability and flexibility of Canada’s literatures. In honour of our 2009 Kreisel Lecturer Dany Laferrière, who will speak at the University of Alberta on the eve of the colloquium (March 5), we would especially welcome work on his writing, and the multiple transplantations (from Port-au-Prince to Montreal to Miami, from novel to film, from journalism to fiction) that his work illustrates.

The joint conference looks for presentations that investigate new meanings, assumptions, and implications of migration, border crossing, and nation building as well as papers that explore the representations of emigration, borderlands, and nation-states in different cultural forms, literary genres, and technological media. We welcome both proposals that examine the interrelations among migration, border, and the nation-state in political and historical terms and projects that offer innovative interpretations of cultural productions that foreground the new dynamics in relation to our everyday life, social practice, and planetary awareness.

The Departments of Literature and English at Uppsala University, in collaboration with the University of Oslo, will host a conference in Uppsala, Sweden, on 11-13 June 2009 on this theme. Papers should address, mutatis mutandis, each of the terms “literature”, “geography” and “translation” within a transnational frame. Deadline for submissions: 1 October 2008.

International Conference
April 24-26, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
CALL FOR PAPERS

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis
distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based
media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable,
while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as
portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of
transmission, diffusion, connections across space. Speculating on
this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded