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Tenth-Annual

Call For Papers
The 10th Annual
Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature
at the University of Texas at Austin


What We Read
Materiality, Narrative, Text
Friday, October 11th, and Saturday, October 12th
Keynote Address by Dr. N. Katherine Hayles
Duke University


We begin with narrative. Reaching backwards, we explore the way that history meets historiography and myth and novel. These stories travel over time and across borders, moving between nations and languages, but also between forms. They become fixed or transfixed as they take shape, embodied in manuscripts and pictorial narratives, photos and films and digital code. This year's conference is located at the intersection between narrative and material form.


In How We Became Postmodern, N. Katherine Hayles writes of the implications of dematerialization in the digital age. This conference addresses questions of materiality and narrative, the relationship between image and form, between form and content. Starting with the contemporary moment, we invite papers that take these concerns and explore them across literatures and historical contexts, looking at avant gardes past and present, at manuscript and book history, archival studies, non-written textual culture, and contemporary media studies. Dr. Hayles writes that “now almost every aspect of work in the humanities can be envisioned differently.” In this conference, we encourage participants to embrace the possibilities for formal experimentation in their own work. We also strongly encourage applicants to propose panel topics to accompany their work, or to propose a panel in collaboration with colleagues.


We are particularly, but not exclusively, interested in seeing papers that address the following themes
The state of the field:

  • implications of the
  • Translation across media
  • digital age for literary scholarship
  • (De)colonial journeys
  • Writing without words
  • Archive and memory
  • Silence and sound
  •  Utopia and dystopia
  • Concrete and visual poetry
  • Textual production, textual consumption
  • Hypertext and the digital humanities
  • Queering form, queering bodies
  • Cartoons, comics, and graphic novels
  • Zombies, vampires, cyborgs
  • The theatricality of space

The deadline for Individual Abstracts is September 15th, 2013. All proposals should be submitted via email attachment to graclsconference2013@gmail.com. Panel Proposals may include 3 or 4 speakers and must be submitted by May 15, 2013. The panel leader must email the proposed title, topic, moderator (if available) and presenters for the panel. Each member of the panel must also submit their abstract via email.

For additional information about the conference, please contact conference organizers Cory Hahn and Hannah Alpert-Abrams at graclsconference2013@gmail.com or visit UT’s Program in Comparative Literature website: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit/.