Standing Session

World Literatures and Comparative Studies / Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion

Andrew Henderson (University of California - Santa Barbara)
amhe@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This Comparative Literature session, like its namesake discipline, strives to be broad, inclusive, and interdisciplinary. We therefore welcome proposals that touch on multiple works of literature and strive to make use of more than traditional comparative studies, borrowing analytic or interpretive practices from other disciplines such as philosophy, film and media studies, digital humanities, cultural or art history, etc.

This Comparative Literature session, like its namesake discipline, strives to be broad, inclusive, and interdisciplinary. We therefore welcome proposals that touch on multiple works of literature and strive to make use of more than traditional comparative studies, borrowing analytic or interpretive practices from other disciplines such as philosophy, film and media studies, digital humanities, cultural or art history, etc.

Proposals that explore the conference theme, "Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion," are welcome. Some topics of interest include:

· Multivalent cityscapes and memory

· Visions of the metropolis (for example– postmodernism and the city or lost cities in literature)

· Streets, Neighborhoods, and Forgotten Spaces in Literature

· Flâneurs and modern flânerie

· Cataclysms, scarification, and healing

· Memory, forgetting, memorialization, misprision, misreading, and revision

· Censorship and attempts at erasing, hiding, revising, contesting, forgetting, and reviving texts and narratives of the past

· Speculative history, speculative fiction, and aesthetic anachronism

· Postmodern, transtextual or intertextual works, like Wide Sargasso Sea, Wicked, and Midnight’s Children

· Historical narratives and appropriations of memory

· Fragmentation and reconstruction; Inventions and reinventions

· Enigmas and traces in detective fiction and beyond

· Mentors and Disciples in writing