[Air-L] CfP ACLA 2016: Literary Boundary Work: Big Data and Comparative Non-Literature, abstracts 9/23

[Scott Kushner]

CALL FOR PAPERS
Literary Boundary Work: Big Data and Comparative Non-Literature
A seminar proposal for ACLA 2016, next March 17-20 at Harvard
Abstracts by September 23 and further details at
http://www.acla.org/node/5114
Questions to Scott Kushner, scottkushner at uri.edu

Convened by Scott Kushner (Communication Studies, URI) and Jonathan Abel
(Comp Lit, Penn State)

Literary study draws its boundaries too narrowly.  This is why as the
discipline that continually seeks "literature plus ______” (another
language, a new theory, a different medium), comparative literature shines
brightest when it engages methodologies and objects from both within and
beyond the traditional limits of literary studies.

A new century brought novel forms of writing and criticism, though many
practitioners of literary study still tread gingerly around status updates
and comments, TEI and corpuses.  Recent critical techniques for textual
interpretation may reveal as illusory close reading's long monopoly on
research and pedagogy.  New textual cultures in everyday networked media
continue to trouble the discipline's notions of the literary.  Taken
together, such shifts in methodology and object can reshape and rejuvenate
literary studies.

This seminar will ask what is new and what has stayed the same in
comparative literature.  Papers will map emergent and resilient
methodologies, survey the current boundaries of the field, and inventory
the professional practices that legitimize the discipline.  As scholars
apply new tools to new texts in new ways, what continues to hold
comparative literature together and distinguish it from neighboring fields?