Please consider submitting your abstract to this ACLA panel “Love at Large: Eros in World Literatures and Cultures.” Here is the submission link:
https://www.acla.org/love-large-eros-world-literatures-and-cultures
Organizer: Fatima Moolla
Contact the Seminar Organizers
Romantic love appears to be a cultural universal with expressions in literatures across geographies and histories. But love as passion has also been disproportionately associated with European culture through transformations in personal relations linked with courtly love. Culturally specific forms of valorization of largely heterosexual romance have led to the conception of romantic love as the “religion” of European secular modernity. Paradoxically, love in the contemporary era of online dating and “hook-ups” may have reduced the “civilizational” significance of love to just sex – eros morphed solely into the erotic. Through colonization, imperialism and globalization, Anglo-American specificities of love in various periods emerge universally as normative and normalized. Reading for romance in world literatures and cultures opens up the diversities of love. Against a broad cultural history of love, papers are invited which consider, but are not limited to, the following conjunctions:
- Love in oratures
- Grand myths of love: Vis and Ramin, Radha and Krishna, Tristan and Isolde, Laila and Majnun, Romeo and Juliet,
- “Foundational fictions”: love as national allegory
- Distant love”: transnational romantic allegories
- Love and marriages monogamous and polygamous
- Love and revolution; love or revolution: eros and social justice
- Boundary-breaking love
- Popular romancing the world
- Digital romance
- Love and war
- Romance and feminisms
- Love and the non-human
- The materiality of love
- Writing romance
- Non-normative loves
Posted by: Sijia Yao <syao@soka.edu>