CFP – REMAPPINGS/REREADINGS: GLOBAL DIALOGUES BETWEEN EAST, WEST, NORTH, SOUTH MARCH 4-5 2011

The 5th annual Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta will focus on the coordinates of comparison and Remappings/Rereadings: Global Dialogues between the East, West, North and South. Keynote Address by Dr. Zhang Hui, Peking University (others to be confirmed).

In 1799 Germaine de Stael wrote that there are ” two completely different kinds of literature… Southern and Northern… What I am going to call Southern literature includes the Greeks, the Romans, the Italians, the Spanish, and the French of Louis XIV’s time. English works, German works, and a few writings of the Danes and Swedes must be classified as Northern, along with the literature that began with the Scottish bards, Icelandic fables, and Scandinavian poetry.”
For the 5th-Annual Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta: Coordinates of Comparison we seek papers in world literature that expand and challenge Stael’s notion of a European ‘Northern and Southern’ to global points of intersection involving languages, literatures, cultures, economies, and nations.
Our conference invites you to explore and analyze this intellectual terrain from a variety of interdisciplinary critical perspectives. We invite papers for Remappings/Rereadings: Global Dialogues between East and West, North and South.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Occidentalism and/or Orientalism
• Definitions of World Literature
• National divides e.g., Western Canada/ Eastern Canada
• International divides e.g., Northern Hemisphere/Southern Hemisphere
• Indigenous Narratives, Histories, and Politics
• Gender Crossings: Feminisms and Masculinities
• Postcolonialism and Hybridity
• Globalization and/or Transnationalism
• Acts and Questions of Translations
• Theory and Practice of Anthologizing Literature
• Pop Culture on a Local, National or International Scale
• Diaspora and the Centre-Periphery
• Digital Divides and the Multi-Media Means of Communication
• Religious Influences and Anxieties
• Book History as a Comparative Methodology

Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words by December 15th, 2010 to complitconference@gmail.com. Conference participants will be encouraged to expand and revise their papers for submission to the January 2012 issue of /Inquire/, a peer-reviewed international journal of comparative literature. Please check our website for updates and information http://coordinatesofcomparison.blogspot.com/