Understanding Calligraphy ACLA seminar–cfp

Below, please find the seminar proposal for a panel on “Understanding Calligraphy” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting March 16-19, 2023 in Chicago. To submit a paper for the seminar, please visit the ACLA website. Please e-mail me (cestep@sas.upenn.edu) with questions or for more information. Paper proposals are due by October 31.

Calligraphy is often understood as a literati or religious practice which exists (or did exist) within certain historical social and material networks. But what happens when those networks fall away, or are replaced by new modes of writing and appreciation? In short, when and how does writing become, or cease to be, calligraphy? Much scholarship has been devoted to the ways in which modern modes of inscription, circulation, and consumption, from the typewriter to the periodical, have impacted literary texts, but we do not understand as much about how these modes shifted the boundaries between such categories as “writing” and “calligraphy.”

Fundamental to these questions is the issue of translation. To what extent does “calligraphy” map onto non-English terms and practices including shufa, shodō, seoye, khatt, as well as other modes of writing. In what ways does the English term alter or obscure our understanding of global histories of inscription? How has the translation of the category of “calligraphy” impacted how writers and artists understand their own relationship to writing?

This seminar sets out to grapple with the changing forms and conceptions of calligraphy from a comparative, transnational, and intermedial perspective. Rather than defining certain works or styles of writing as calligraphic or not, we seek to understand the larger stakes of imposing such categories. How do definitions of calligraphy evolve across history? As certain modes of inscription fell away, which other modes arose to take their place, and why? How have different writing styles been ways to express or address relationships to gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and race?  How do different inscriptive practices draw our attention to the varying temporalities, sensibilities, and sensations of writing? How might a comparativist approach to calligraphy challenge naturalized assumptions about calligraphic form in national and regional contexts? How did modern media technologies (such as print, cinema, digital) transform local calligraphic traditions, and how might calligraphy challenge or expand the expressive capacities of these media forms? Rather than focusing solely on the textual and visual dimensions of calligraphy, how might we account for the varied material substrates of calligraphic practice – ranging from stone, paper, to celluloid screen? How do we begin to theorize the materiality of digital calligraphy?

The organizers welcome papers that address the issues raised above or other questions related to the conceptualization of calligraphic writing.

Chloe Estep <cestep@sas.upenn.edu>

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