The Literary Interface

The Literary Interface

2018 Literary Studies Convention: The Literary Interface

The Convention will be held at Australian National University, Canberra, from 4-7 July 2018.

This convention will bring together scholars working across the broad field of literary studies to discuss the literary as an interface between different forms of knowledge and processes of knowledge formation, looking at questions of how and through what means the literary is communicated, represented, negotiated, and remade. By placing the concept of the literary centre-stage while at the same time interrogating its role as an interface, we wish to open up for discussion questions about the role, dynamism, and value of the literary in a time of institutional change and ongoing disciplinary formation. We would also like to debate the role of the literary text – and literary studies as a discipline – as a site of encounter between diverse languages and potentially alien modes of reading and writing.

Invoking the possibility of melding, soldering, and/or merging different elements, the literary interface suggests the resilience as well as the suppleness of disciplinary boundaries. It conjures the possibility of new meeting points; zones of contact and interaction but also sites of contention and disruption that might challenge received platitudes yet help us to bring to the surface new meanings.

We invite papers and panel proposals, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • Mediation, remediation, and transmediation
  • Literary Formalism – its past, present and/or future
  • Multimedia forms as interfaces
  • The relationship between forms, networks, and hierarchies
  • Encounters between readers and modes of reading
  • Translation
  • The relationship between literary studies and other disciplines, e.g., environmental studies, maths, ethnography, science
  • The interface between academic and public critical cultures
  • Spaces of reading (online and otherwise)
  • The negotiation of literary value
  • The classroom as literary interface
  • Literary objects as interfaces: circulation, reception, paratexts
  • The stage and other spaces of performance as interface between temporalities, bodies, performers, writers and audiences
  • Cultural interfaces
  • Languages of colonialists/postcoloniality
  • Transnationalism and minor transnationalism.

Deadline for submissions: 25 August 2017.

Please send an abstract of 150 words and biographical note of 100 words to [email protected].

Jointly held by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the Australasian Association for Literature, the Australasian Universities Languages and Literature Association, and the Australian University Heads of English.

Please note that Early Bird registration closes on 30 April 2018.

Website: http://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/events/2018-literary-studies-convention