CFP: Literature and Media, seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting (Taipei, June 15–18, 2022)
Organized by Renren Yang and Dylan Suher
Submit an abstract: https://www.acla.org/literature-and-media
Deadline: October 31, 2021
Two decades into the twenty-first century, this seminar will look to assess and use a comparative approach to expand the “media turn” in studies of literature. The configurations of literature represented by “new media” has prompted scholars both of contemporary literature and literature of earlier eras not only to emphasize transmedia modes of storytelling, but also to destabilize the very concept of “literature,” “film,” and the media form itself. In the wake of this turn, scholars have begun to scrutinize the role of the material and the technological in literary production, the convergence and divergence between the textual and the audiovisual media, and the renewed contentions over textual authority between writers, readers, and “mediators” (editors, reviewers, publishing houses, platforms, to name just a few). We hope that the ACLA conference in Taiwan will allow for a conversation about this research program that escapes the confines of the Anglophone. We want to think about institutions of literary and cultural production that extend across or were imported across oceans and transpacific/transatlantic networks of writers and readers. We are also interested in exploring transmedia assemblances and practices situated at the intersection of “late capitalism” and/or “post-socialism” (e.g., the legacies of state-managed transmedia assemblages of cultural production and consumption, and their engagement with the postmodern.)
Possible topics could include:
- Representations of other media in literature: Film and media representations of writing; Text-based practices in the fine arts and in film
- Technologies of writing and reading (word processing, electronic writing, algorithmic compositions, digital/analog recording, networked environments, print/digital platforms)
- Media ecologies of literary production: Transmedia storytelling; Participatory literature and media culture; Media mixes and literature as a cultural industry; Challenges to literariness and media specificity
- The making and unmaking of literary and media authorship: Writer-filmmakers/writer-musicians
- Media archeology of literature: Early modern precursors of modern and contemporary media cultures (manuscript culture, collaborative composition, etc.); Comparative conceptions of literary and media IP (e.g. Anglo-European vs. East Asian conceptions of IP)
- Transnational production, circulation, and consumption of popular literature and media
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact:
Renren Yang (renren.yang@ubc.ca) and Dylan Suher (dsuher@hku.hk)