Call for Papers
ACLA Chicago (March 16-19, 2023)
The Politics of Reading and Writing in Chinese and Sinophone Literature
Organized by Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai and Cara Healey
This seminar explores depictions of reading and writing in Chinese and Sinophone literature across time and space. Chinese literary traditions – from Confucian and Daoist canons to Lu Xun’s “madman” reading between the lines to the formal innovations of contemporary authors like Mo Yan and Dung Kai-cheung – draw attention to the dynamics among readers, writers, and texts. Authors mobilize intertextual, metatextual, and paratextual techniques to elucidate the multiplicity and fragmentation of narrative, history, and reality. This seminar probes the politics and ethics of reading and writing, at both the textual level and the levels of literary production, circulation, and consumption. It explores conceptions of truth and challenges creations of meaning through language.
We welcome papers on topics including but not limited to:
- Truth in literature, including unreal truth, unjustifiable truth, truth beyond reality, anti-truth, and more.
- Intertextuality and metatextuality, within and across Chinese and Sinophone literature, broadly conceived, including comparisons with other literary traditions.
- Formal interventions such as allusion, allegory, ambiguity, commentary, self-referentiality, palimpsest, texts-within-texts, unreliable narrators, and self-censorship.
- Reading and writing as means of identity construction across intersections of ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, region, class, and ability.
- Questions of authorship and textual authority, including issues of translation and adaptation.
- Censorship and literary innovation.
- Reading and writing as tools to (re)shape history and memory, including non-human or posthuman memories or ways of being.
- Connections and tensions between written and oral traditions, including issues of language sovereignty.
If you are interested, please submit your paper proposal to this seminar via the ACLA website by October 31, 2022. If you have questions, please contact the organizers, Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai (ytsai@citadel.edu) and Cara Healey (healeyc@wabash.edu).