COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND



First International Conference
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK
IRELAND
28-30 June 2012

Call for Papers

Transitions in Comparative Studies


The comparative gesture performs both the act and the question of
transition between the terms compared. Understood as an intercultural
practice, comparative literature may thus also be understood as both a
transitive and transnational process – creating its own object/form of
knowledge as it identifies and analyses lines of relation and exchange
between literary cultures. When navigating between languages, it
becomes critically engaged with the possibility and methods of such
navigation. Meanwhile, interdisciplinary and inter-medial versions of
comparative studies likewise centre about transitions which may
themselves remain under-analysed.
The very diversity of comparative practices enumerated, and the
attendant versions of comparative discourse, indicate a field of study
that is itself faced with the reality of transition. As CLAI
(Comparative Literature Association of Ireland) establishes a new
space for interaction between comparativists of local and global
provenance, the possible directions of this transition are of central
concern to this first international conference of the Association.
The methodological and definitional nature of transition in
comparative literature resonates urgently with the transitional
processes both in Ireland and around the world at the present time. As
a thematic concern in comparative work, transition is thus also –
within whatever historical period or other configuration it is charted
and analysed – key to the renewed relevance of comparative literary
scholarship and study today.

Proposals are invited for panels and individual papers engaging with
transitions in comparative literature at one or more of the levels
outlined above. Proposed subjects for panels currently include Day and
Night, Animals and Animality, Writing with/and Style, and the
transaction between literary and visual cultures.

Deadlines:
Panel proposals – 20 January 2012.
Individual proposals – 16 March 2012.

Send abstracts of 300 words and a short biography to

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Please visit the Association webpage: www.complit.org


-- 
Dr. Kerstin Fest
Department of German
School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
University College Cork
Cork, Ireland

Tel.: +353-87-2810655
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web: http://ucc-ie.academia.edu/KerstinFest