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Venue: California State University, Long Beach. Hybrid. 

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Dates: Tuesday and Wednesday, April 16-17 (in-person presentations only with Zoom projections), Thursday, April 18, 2024 (Zoom presentations only)

Plenary Speaker: Christopher Goffard, author and senior staff writer, Los Angeles Times

Conference program 

Family crises, exilic conditions, forced migrations, excessive poverty, armed conflicts, political warfare, environmental calamities, workers’ exploitation, pandemics, and all manner of natural or man-made disasters have been rising to unprecedented levels over the last decades. How are extreme situations or situations so extraordinary as to defy imagination represented? What are the poetics underlying them?

We welcome conversations about how extreme conditions and situations, (individual, collective, or global) are expressed, analyzed, and engaged from a multidisciplinary perspective, including but not limited to:  Literature, Journalism, Geography, Anthropology, Political Science, Criminology, Linguistics, Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Disability Studies, Media Studies, Geology, Human Development, and more.

This conference invites paper and panel proposals on all aspects of extreme situations. Possible topics can include but are not limited to:

-Literature of extreme situations

-Investigative Journalism

-Trauma literature

-Literatures of genocide

-Holocaust memoirs

-Feats of survival

-Crime narratives

-Narratives of addiction

-Natural and man-made disasters

-Innocent Project LA

-Victims speak up: truth to power

-The rise against femicide

-Wars and exilic narratives

-Refugee narratives

-Pandemic narratives

-Medical malpractice and botched surgeries

-Ethics of survival and survivors’ guilt

-The Family Secret and the wounded individual

-Dementia and violence: nursing homes

-Perpetrators and victims

-Asylum seekers and their fate in the US

-Ethical ordeals: surviving the unimaginable

-Memory as a repository of horror

-Collapse of ethical systems in a digital world

-Institutional responses to catastrophes

-Crossing the Mediterranean: the Syrian refugee crisis

-Extreme geo-political conflicts

-Journalism at work: covering extreme conditions

-“The Banality of Evil” in urban settings.

-State terrorism and extreme-isms

-Millennial fatigue and extremist stances

-Monuments of shame

-The Kafkaesque in our daily lives

-Systemic risks in the 21^st Century

-Extreme environments

-Soft White Underbelly: Mark Laita interviews

–The Trials of Frank Carson Podcast (Christopher Goffard)

-Deaths in the Grand Canyon and Other National Parks.

We are thrilled to announce that the plenary talk will be delivered by Christopher Goffard, Pulitzer Prize winner, journalist for the LA Times, novelist and podcaster, on Wednesday, April 17^th, at 2PM (PDT). The title of his talk is:

“Crossing the Impossible Bridge in a Dynamite Truck: Observations on Film, Friendship and Collaboration”

In “Crossing the Impossible Bridge in a Dynamite Truck,” Goffard will reflect on his friendship and collaboration with one of cinema’s great poets of desperation and obsession, William Friedkin, and of their efforts to bring some of Goffard’s riskier stories to the screen. As a crystallization of Friedkin’s danger-courting artistry—and as a metaphor for their quest to get controversial projects made— Goffard invokes an image from the filmmaker’s 1977 masterpiece Sorcerer, in which a truck laden with nitroglycerin attempts to cross a crumbling suspension bridge in the South American jungle.

Submissions for individual presentations and 90-minute sessions are welcome from all disciplines and global / historical contexts that engage with historical, personal, or social instances of extreme conditions and situations.

Conference Program 

Venue: California State University, Long Beach. Mainly in person with some Zoom participation.

Dates: Wednesday and Thursday, April 19 and 20, 2023

Keynote Speaker: Cassius Adair (Assistant Professor of Media Studies, The New School), “Reverse Engineering: From Trans Tech Histories to Radical Trans Futures.”

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Technology and forms of expression continue to evolve in the digital age. What new frameworks have emerged to grasp, interpret, and challenge issues raised by these advancements? We invite conversation in and around digital humanities research and practice and other approaches that broadly explore “the digital.”

We welcome conversations on how past and present social contexts—i.e. the stresses of a global pandemic, structural racism, climate crisis, and anti-war and human rights struggles—have created new configurations of how we participate in, relate to, and are affected by technology, media, and various digital spaces. We also encourage explorations of how technology and technoculture upholds or challenges the status quo and other structures of exclusion and marginalization, and how digitally-informed inquiry can expose and subvert social inequities and systems of oppression.

Submissions for individual presentations and 90-minute sessions are welcome from all disciplines and global / historical contexts that engage with “the digital,” i.e. digital studies / humanities, new media studies, literary studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, American Indian studies, Asian American studies, Black / African studies, Middle East / North African studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, women and gender studies, disability studies, science and society studies, et al.

Possible proposals topics include, but are not limited to:

• Digital humanities approaches to literature and cultural studies
• Electronic literature, web-based narratives, and other forms of digital curation
• Digital forms of journalism, protest / organizing, activism, and archives
• Digital environmental humanities approaches to climate crisis and narratives
• Ethnographic approaches to technological mediations and experiences
• Online communities, social media platforms, identity making, and emerging forms of digital representation and art, i.e. NFT and crypto art markets
• Reflection on the use of the digital in the diasporas: maintaining domestic space, sense of home and homeland in Asia and Africa; the use of the digital in maintaining cultural and historical homeland. 
• Intersections with racial and criminal justice; surveillance studies 
• Infrastructural and social inequities in technological access, digital cultures, and cyberspaces; anti-racist methodologies
• Ethics of Big Data, A.I., coding, automation, etc.
• Digital neo-colonialism and decolonization, Indigenous data sovereignty
• Globalization, labor demand/markets, and inequity/exploitation in technological production
• Feminism in Digital Spaces: use of the digital help in feminist coalitions across different spaces and nations; building movements via digital spaces
• Cyberfeminist critiques, new approaches to cyborg theory
• Queer digital cultures
• Disability justice, access, technology, and media
• Pedagogical approaches to digital humanities, digital literacy, and other multimodal practices and skills
• Video games/gaming rhetorics, augmented reality, and simulation-based learning
• New forms of media and digital storytelling, databases, and means of connectedness
• Using the digital to preserve languages: digital spaces of translation; the conservation, circulation, production of digital media; using machines to translate; the digital futures of languages and literatures
• Digital religion and spirituality: understanding religious or spiritual  practices in a digital world
• Digital archives: gatekeeping; what is lost in digitization
• Digital dystopia
• (Future) digital landscapes used / addressed / predicted in science fiction and speculative fiction
• Social media representation in narratives: where the digital usurps the personal
• Streamer culture and digital fandom

Proposals for 15-20 minute presentations should clearly explain the relationship of the panel or paper to the conference theme, describe the evidence to be examined, and offer tentative conclusions. Panel proposals should articulate how the panel fits into the conference theme. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words (not including optional bibliography). 

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Conference Program 

Venue: California State University, Long Beach. Mainly in person with a handful of sessions on zoom.

Dates: Wednesday and Thursday, April 13 and 14, 2022

Coined  in the eighties, the term “culture jam”  refers to the appropriation by social activists of the linguistic trends characteristic of consumerist capitalist societies. In an effort to disrupt mainstream cultural institutions, culture jamming organizations and the individuals behind them subvert and expose the tactics used by media culture and its affiliates. In so doing, the jammers borrow the very language of corporations, political discourse, and mass advertisements. Identity correction, media pranks, modification of billboard advertisements, memes, pastiches of company logos, street protests, hoax news, fake commercials, are some of the activities geared towards disrupting the status quo and questioning egregious political and social realities. The Yes Men, Burning Man, Cacophony Society, Guerilla Girls, Graffiti Research Lab, Billionaires for Wealthcare, Billboard Liberation Front, Church of the SubGenius, Regurgitator, The Bubble Project—. Those are some examples of culture Jamming organizations that have emerged over the last three decades.

A 2017 collection of papers titled Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (New York University Press) demonstrates that the concept of culture  jamming, far from being ��é�貹����é, has continued to be deployed in a variety of ways, notably in 2020/2021, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and global movements. Have cultural jammers succeeded in undermining the social firms targeted?

This conference invites paper and panel proposals on all aspects of culture jamming. Possible topics can include but are not limited to:

-Borat the character and Ali G
-Intellectual impostures and the Bricmont-Sokal hoax
-The Yes Men and their hoaxes
-Memes, counter memes, and meta memes
-Underground presses
-Meme hackers of the 70s and 80s
-Reality as simulacrum
-Pranksters and tricksters in art and literature
-Epic pranks in Greek/World mythology
-Cyberspace and the end of privacy
-Banksy’s street art and the politics of space
-Corporate satire in popular culture
-The Guerilla Girls
-Occupy Tahrir
-The Poetics of Subversion
-The Yes Lab and Me
-Covid19 vaccination as metaphor
-Marcel Duchamp’s LHOOQ
-Harry Potter and real magic
-Civil disobedience as art form
-The art of appropriation
-Activism and speaking truth to power

We are thrilled to announce that the plenary talk will be delivered by Jacques Servin, co-founder of the Yes Men, on Wednesday, April 13^th, at 2PM (PDT). The title of his talk is: “Never Lie, Little One: The Use of Humor in Telling the Truth.”

Proposals for 15-20 minute presentations should clearly explain the relationship of the paper to the conference theme, describe the evidence to be examined, and offer tentative conclusions. 

Wednesday and Thursday, April 7-8, 2021

Conference Program 

The Comparative World Literature Program at California State University, Long Beach, invites abstracts for presentations at its 55^th annual conference in Long Beach, California on the topic of Outcasts and Outliers. In accordance with university policy, this conference will be virtual. It is the hope of the conference committee that this virtuality will enable a more diverse group of academics to participate.

From the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s to the debates over the place of genre fiction, popular culture, and digital media in the classroom, to the more recent amplification of critical race and ethnic studies and the appreciation of creative production by people from historically marginalized groups, the question of what to include—and what to omit—continues to provoke debate and response. But what do we do with those texts, topics, and people who have been cast out, or those who are such outliers that they were never included? Likewise, how do we challenge the authority of those who wield the power to decide who / what is included?

This conference will focus on examining and interrogating the notions of outcasts and outliers of literature, music, and the visual arts. That may mean attention to little-known texts, genres that are not typically addressed in a Comparative Literature context, characters and communities pushed into the margins, and the notion of marginality itself. We encourage papers centering the perspectives of Black, indigenous and racialized people of color and other marginalized communities.

We invite papers on the following topics:

Ambivalent, hybrid, fragmented, or conflicting identities

Mixed race and interracial interactions

The interstices of ethnicity, gender, and race

Intra-racial and inter-racial discrimination

The alienated “other” as a trope

Vulnerability and precarity in the time of COVID-19

Sites of erasure and institutional violence (e.g., deportation centers, police brutality, healthcare policies, lack of emergency response to natural disasters)

Questions of trans and genderqueer identity

Settler-colonial legacies of injustice

Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, and inclusive futures

The concept of misfits and misfitting

Intersections with disability justice, crip time, and embodied difference

Kinship, community, and the politics of care in the margins

The exilic intellectual (e.g., Said)

We are thrilled to announce that the Plenary Talk will be given by Dr. Theri Pickens, Professor of English and Chair of Africana at Bates College. The title of Dr. Pickens’ talk is: “After almost 100 days: Race, Disability, and A Head.”  

Proposals for 15-20 minute presentations should clearly explain the relationship of the paper to the conference theme, describe the evidence to be examined, and offer tentative conclusions. 

Wednesday and Thursday, April 24-25, 2019

California State University, Long Beach

Conference Program 

The Comparative World Literature Program at California State University, Long Beach, invites abstracts for presentations at its 54^th annual conference in Long Beach, California. This year we would like participants to consider the relationship between trauma and memory, both individual and collective memory and their intersections, within a variety of disciplinary contexts. How is a cultural memory formed, or how do cultures remember the past? How do different voices/media contribute to constructing a cultural memory? How does the act of commemorating trauma affect or even alter the way that an experience is remembered?

We invite papers on the following topics, which can include but are not limited to:

between memory and history: cultural memory as representation

in tension with the past: absence and memory

embodied memory: the body as container and conveyer of memory

the role of objects in preserving cultural memory

cultural memory, trauma, and ritual: the role of religion

individual experience and cultural memory: post-colonial approaches

transmitting traumatic memories: the role of culture

the female/trans/queer/etc. body as a carrier of memory

the phenomenon of Holocaust deniers / deniers in general: contesting cultural memory

testimonials / bearing witness: the importance of oral tradition within cultural memory

cultural cognition: how cultural values shape risk perception

the role of culture in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

dealing with trauma through comedy & mediated memory

The Plenary Talk will be given by Dr. Valerie Orlando, Professor of French and Francophone Literatures and Head of the Department of French and Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park. The title of Dr. Orlando’s talk is: “The Trauma of Mediterranean Crossings When a ‘Global Subject’ Is Not One: Depictions of Race and Immigration in Algerian Cinema.”

Proposals for 15-20 minute presentations should clearly explain the relationship of the paper to the conference theme, describe the evidence to be examined, and offer tentative conclusions. 

This conference inspired Genre Volume 39: Borders, Place and Translation (2020).

Dates: April 25th-26th, 2018

Location: Anatol Center, California State University, Long Beach

From Starbucks’ retail-branding as a “third place” between home and work to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, the places of our lives are simultaneously locations and conceptions. To be in a place is to do the representational work of defining that space’s affective and pragmatic borders.

That work might be personal, such as Proust’s cork-lined room, or literary, such as Homer’s portrayal of the Mediterranean. Or it might be political: the American borders, the boundaries of the EU, and contested areas such as Kashmir. Often, of the representational work of defining a place is the work of defining the other through translations both linguistic and cultural.

The Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics at California State University Long Beach invites 250-word proposals for 15-20 minute individual presentations or one-hour panel discussions with up to 4 speakers on the topic of borders, place, and translation, broadly conceived.

As always, the conference organizers welcome paper proposals from faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

 --Political places such as the border, the city, the region, and the nation

--Personal places in literature, film, and other media

--Speculative and conceptual places such as haunted houses, mazes, and fictionalized landscapes

--Digital spaces, social media, and the borders of selective community discourse

--The concept of borders and their relationship to diaspora studies and identity studies

--The locus classicus, or the “places” of literary texts

--The relationship of language translation to place

--The concept of translation beyond the linguistic

This conference inspired Genre Volume 38: Identity (2020).

April 11-12, 2017
California State University, Long Beach

Conference Program

Identity is inescapable and in constant flux. It can be located in the body, in the discourse that surrounds and determines bodies, or in the more nebulous realm of language. From race, class, gender, and orientation to professional, personal, familial, and cultural identities, we all negotiate multiple aspects of identity in our daily lives and our conceptions of ourselves.

The Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics at California State University Long Beach invites 250-word proposals for 15-20 minute individual presentations or one-hour panel discussions with up to 4 speakers on the topic of identity.  A proposal could be an interpretation of a single text, a comparison of multiple texts, or a thematic or theoretical exploration.

Examples of potential topics or areas of inquiry:

--Social media and identity politics
--Identity in the premodern era
--The relationship between humanism and identity
--Identity in a posthumanist age: are we all cyborgs?
--Intersectional identities
--Individual identity and a multicultural society
--Representations of marginalized identities in pop culture
--The portrayal of individual or communal identity in various texts and their cultural contexts

April 27-28, 2016 California State University, Long Beach

Health has been a concern of representation from the earliest known images and narratives, and remains a topical subject. Representations related to the body, the mind, illness, trauma, bodily transformation, psychological stress, personal relationships, and many aspects of human behavior, represent how individuals and communities form their identities, how they cope with stress, distress, physical and psychological health. Interdisciplinary and comparative methodologies can fruitfully address literary and cultural representations of medical states and situations, lifespan development, ethics and education, and empathy issues. We invite abstracts (max. 250 words) for 15-20 minute individual presentations or one-hour panel discussions with up to 4 speakers on any topic that is appropriate to the theme. A proposal could be an interpretation of a single text, a comparison of multiple texts, or a thematic or theoretical exploration.Examples of potential papers/panels:

• Literary and cultural representations of medicine
• Illness narratives
• Stories of resilience and perseverance
• Graphic Medicine
• Comparisons of narrative styles (i.e., in adaptation from text to screen , such as Love in the Time of Cholera, or The Fault in Our Stars)
• Medicine in the Classical World, the Medieval World, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment
• Cultural Representation and Public Health Issues
• Metaphors of Medicine (cyborgs and the posthuman, zombie apocalypse, dystopian worlds)

In addition to these potential topics, we are particularly interested in examples of effective interdisciplinary research and analysis, in Comparative Literature or other academic fields.

April 15-17th 2015

California  State University, Long Beach

Conference Program

Comparative Literature is a dynamic, interdisciplinary field with a global reach. Its roots can be traced to classical philology, but its modern incarnation can probably be found in Goethe’s early 19^th-century concept of “world literature” (Weltliteratur), in which he refers to the international circulation, reception, interpretation, and influence of ideas and the arts beyond cultural boundaries, an idea both poignant and prescient in our age of global communication.

Interdisciplinary comparative methodologies enable the field to address historical cultural production but also emergent questions about how humans represent and form their identities and how they interpret and construct meaning(s) in historically and culturally specific contexts.  More recently, Comparative Literature provides a space to go beyond “traditional” literature and incorporates film, graphic novels, music, popular culture, digital culture and almost any form of representation as part of its field of study. It also analyzes the discourse that underlies fields not typically associated with the Humanities, such as medicine and engineering–that are produced worldwide, and now have wider distribution and influence than ever.

We invite 250-word proposals for 15-20 minute individual presentations or one-hour panel discussions with up to 4 speakers on any topic that is appropriate for Comparative Literature.   A proposal could be an interpretation of a single text, a comparison of multiple texts, or a thematic or theoretical exploration.

Examples of potential panels:

Developing fields of study (i.e., World Cinema, Digital Humanities, Medical Humanities)

Comparisons of narrative styles: i.e., between Literature and Film, or in adaptation from text to screen.

Genres: fairy tales, travel, mythology, creation stories, historical fictions, superheroes

Classics in the 21^st Century

The importance (or not) of translation

Thematic issues and their representation: for example, “technology,” “energy,” “medical care,” “poverty,” “violence,” “the environment,” or “migration.”

New literary and cultural voices in the 21^st Century

Reflections of and resistance to “global” capitalism in the 21^st Century

Reflections on spatial connections in the 21st Century: the Pacific Rim, the Mediterranean World, Eurasia, the cross-Atlantic

In addition to these potential topics, we are particularly interested in examples of effective interdisciplinary research and analysis, in Comparative Literature or other academic fields.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 35: Connections and Intersections: Interdisciplinarity Within and Among Disciplines (2015).

April 24 and 25, 2014

Conference Program 

Our global world presents us with complex issues that can be investigated only from multiple perspectives, resulting in the adoption of interdisciplinary approaches in many traditional academic areas and the formation of many new interdisciplinary fields.  Arguably, it is hard to accomplish substantial research in any discipline without addressing “interdisciplinarity” and using some interdisciplinary methods.

Comparative Literature has been an essentially interdisciplinary field since its formation as an academic discipline.  Comparatists examine representations across linguistic and cultural borders but also incorporate methodologies from related and diverse fields such as history, psychology, linguistics, political science, art history, and many others.   Interdisciplinarity enables comparatists to examine difficult and timeless but at the same time urgent or emergent questions on how humans represent and form their historical and cultural identities and how they interpret and construct meaning(s) in historically and culturally specific contexts.

We invite 250-word proposals for 15-20 minute individual presentations or one-hour panel discussions with up to 6 speakers on interdisciplinary connections and intersections in Comparative Literature and other academic fields.  Specifically, the proposals might address some of the following issues and topics:

What are the specific challenges of interdisciplinary research within Comparative Literature and other disciplines that envision themselves as “interdisciplinary”?

How do Comparative Literature theorists or other academic disciplines define and use “interdisciplinarity”?  What are the similarities and differences between different definitions of “interdisciplinarity” among different academic areas?

Which specific interdisciplinary connections prove the most useful in research and pedagogical practice?

How can the increasing urgency of global issues such as “technology,” “energy,” “medical care,” “poverty,” “violence,” “environment,” or “migration” not only benefit from but also demand “interdisciplinary” approaches?

How do professors employ “interdisciplinarity” in their university classrooms?

How does the new push toward the use of “on-line technologies” relate to and benefit from “interdisciplinary” approaches?

How do administrators envision “interdisciplinarity” and how is it valued in current university models?

Does “interdisciplinarity” relate to “marketablility,” especially for students with degrees in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

In addition to these potential topics, we are particularly interested in examples of effective interdisciplinary research and analysis, whether in Comparative Literature or other academic fields.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 34: Popular Culture(s) (2014).

“We cannot attribute any purity of political expression to popular culture, although we can locate its power to identify ideas and desires that are relatively opposed, alongside  those that are clearly complicit, to the official culture.” ~ Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture

“His [the pedestrian’s] elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts his at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.”   ~ Michel de Certeau
 

“At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called.” ~ José Saramago
 

“The ancestors of printed comics drew, painted and carved their time-paths from beginning to end, without interruption, … the infinite canvas.” ~ Scott McCloud 
 

“This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.” – Derek Walcott 
 

“Popular Culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.” ~ Camille Paglia

Popular Culture(s) ~ Thursday, April 25th – Friday, April 26th, 2013 

Popular culture has been defined as everything from “common culture,” to “folk culture,” to “mass culture.” While it has been all of these things at various points in history, popular culture is undeniably associated with commercial culture and all its trappings: movies, television, radio, cyberspace, advertising, toys, games nearly any commodity available for purchase, many forms of art, photography, games, and even group “experiences” like collective comet-watching or rave dancing on ecstasy.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to examine and critically engage with issues related to “Popular Culture” across various time periods, cultures, concerns and mediums. The conference hopes to explore the ongoing analysis of the varied creative trends and alternative cultural movements that comprise popcultures and subcultures within both cultural and political contexts. Of particular interest are papers that pertain to the various forms of popular culture, including literature, music, film, television, advertising, sports, fashion, toys, magazines, video games, games and comic books, and the medium in which this message moves, cyberculture.

“Popular Culture(s)” is the 48th Annual Comparative Literature Conference, an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars, artists, and practitioners from all walks of popular culture, the arts and the academy, that aims to consider Popular Culture in a broad scale across time periods, disciplines and languages. It seeks to examine literature, images, visual objects and mechanisms, the political and social events from diverse cultures, across national boundaries, and within global contexts.

Plenary Talk: “Literacy, Democracy, Comics”

Hillary Chute, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago

Friday, April 26th, 2013 at 2:00 pm  ~ Karl Anatol Center

Dr. Hillary Chute is one of today’s preeminent scholars in comics and graphic narratives. Presenting, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Chute has widely published on graphic narratives. Her book Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia Univ. Press, 2010) examines the graphic narrative work of five authors, including Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi, and argues that the medium of comics has opened up new spaces for nonfiction narrative—particularly for expressing certain kinds of stories typically relegated to the realm of the private. She is also the Associate Editor of a MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011), a book by Art Spiegelman, which examines the making of his terrain-shifting graphic narrative Maus.

In 2009 Dr. Hillary Chute founded the MLA’s Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives. Most recently, Dr. Chute collaborated with Inaugural Mellon Fellow Alison Bechdel, through the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, and organized the “Comics: Philosophy and Practice” conference at the University of Chicago in May 2012.

Special Event Screening: Documentary On Photographer Julius Shulman

Thursday, April 25th, 2013 at 7:00 pm ~ University Theater (UTC 108) 

“Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman” won the Mercedes-Benz Audience Award for best documentary at the Palm Springs International film Festival, the Audience Award for best documentary at the Austin Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the Lone Star International Film Festival and Outstanding Achievement in documentary filmmaking at the Newport Beach Film Festival.

The film about architectural photographer Julius Shulman will be introduced by Industrial Design’s David Teubner, and the film’s director Eric Bricker will be interviewed by Film and Electronic Arts Chair Jerry Mosher. Admission is free.

Sponsored by the Film and Electronic Arts Department and the Department of Industrial Design’s Duncan Anderson Design Lecture Series.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 33: CENSORSHIP (2013).

“Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write.” ~ Hugo L. Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1963

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches” ~ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Censorship is never over those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.” ~ Nadine Gordimer

“Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise.” ~ Chuck Palahnuik

“Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art. “ ~ Pablo Picasso

Drawing the Line(s): Censorship & Cultural Practices ~ March 1st – 3rd, 2012

The history of human culture has always been engaged with classifying and upholding the politically and socially acceptable, ethical and moral. On the flip side, it has also been equally engaged with what is deemed as forbidden, shocking, inappropriate, tasteless, improper, reprehensible and even scandalous. Censorship and freedom of expression are not just modern-day issues or debates. To be heard, seen, erased or silenced in written, spoken or visual form has vexed humanity since the Ancient and Classical debates on good governance and freedom of speech. In fact, from early Jewish, Christian and Islamic notions of iconography, destruction of books in Ancient China, Medieval inquisitions, Galileo’s defense of Copernican theory, Counter Reformation, Salem Witch trials, McCarthyism to the Culture wars of the 1980s and today’s concerns about technological communication, surveillance and scientific advancements, censorship has been at the forefront of cultural practices globally and through time.

“Drawing the Line(s): Censorship and Cultural Practices” is the 47th Annual Comparative Literature Conference, an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars, artists, and practitioners from all walks of the arts and the academy, that aims to consider censorship in a broad scale across time periods, disciplines and languages. It seeks to examine literature, images, visual objects and mechanisms, the political and social events from diverse cultures, across national boundaries, and within global contexts.

Plenary Talk: In Praise of Censorship

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, Amherst College

Friday, March 2nd, 2012 at 2:00 pm ~ Karl Anatol Center

Dr. Ilan Stavans is one of today’s preeminent essayists, cultural critics, and translators. A native from Mexico, his books include The Hispanic Condition (HarperCollins, 1995), On Borrowed Words (Viking, 2001), Spanglish (HarperCollins, 2003), Dictionary Days (Graywolf, 2005), The Disappearance (TriQuarterly, 2006), Love and Language (Yale, 2007), Resurrecting Hebrew (Nextbook, 2008), Mr. Spic Goes to Washington (Soft Skull, 2008), and Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (Palgrave, 2010).

His play The Disappearance, performed by the theater troupe Double Edge, premiered at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and has been shown throughout the world. His story “Morirse está en hebreo” was made into the award-winning movie My Mexican Shivah (2007), produced by John Sayles. Stavans has received numerous awards and honors, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Jewish Book Award, the Southwest Children Book of the Year Award, an Emmy nomination, the Latino Book Award, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the Rubén Darío Distinction, and the Cátedra Roberto Bolaño. He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans (2001-2006). His work has been translated into a dozen languages.

B-Word Project Event: An Evening with Azar Nafisi

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012 at 8pm ~ , �°������ϲ�����

Best-known as the author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books—which electrified readers with its incisive exploration of the transformative powers of fiction in a world of tyranny—Azar Nafisi provides a global context of censorship as well as insight into a culture, speaking out against authoritarianism and repression. Nafisi appears on the heels of her January 2012 release, That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile.

Traveling Exhibition: Writing Resistance in Crisis and Collaboration

February 27th – March 12th, 2012 ~ Fine Arts Building 4, 1st Floor

In 1985, Ergo Sum emerged as one of the most innovative illegal publishing initiatives in South America. Founded by Pia Barros, Ergo Sum publishing collective used recycled materials such as cardboard and food sacks to represent modes of political resistance and psychological asylum for individuals under siege by a military junta.

The traveling exhibition Writing Resistance in Crisis and Collaboration consists of “book-objects” in Spanish by Ergo Sum, visual and literary productions made by feminist Chileans under the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1980s.

This exhibition will be on display on the first floor of the FA 4 building on the �°������ϲ����� campus from February 27th through March 12th, 2012.

Writing Resistance in Crisis and Collaboration is curated by Lucian Gomoll and Lissette Olivares.

Conference Organizers

Please direct all inquiries to conference organizers:

Dr. Nhora Serrano, Dept. of Comparative World Literature & Classics

Dr. Nizan Shaked, Dept. of Art

Banned, Blacklisted & Boycotted: Censorship and the Response to It ~ The B-Word Project

This conference is part of Banned, Blacklisted & Boycotted: Censorship and the Response to It (The B-Word Project), a campus-wide initiative coordinated by the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at California State University, Long Beach. The B-Word Project is made possible in part by a grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Website: 

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke. ~ Herman Hesse

The Comic Spirit in the Modern Age ~ April 13-14, 2011

The history of the evolution of comic forms is variegated and complex. Yet, it is a history that continues to inform the various manifestations and applications of humor within contemporary social discourses. Whether it is delivered in the form of stand-up, on the screen, or in the genre of theater, prose or poetry, the conventions by which modern day comedic practice is established are the result of the re-finement, re-negotiation and re-configuration of traditions harking back to Classical, Renaissance and even early 20th century sensibilities.

“The Comic Spirit in the Modern Age” seeks to examine the relationship between present-day conventions of humor and comedy, and the preceding traditions by which they were inspired.

Wednesday Plenary Speaker: Judy Carter, Comedian and author of The Comedy Bible

Plenary Talk: Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 at 2:00pm

Thursday Plenary Speaker: Ray Lacoste, Former Lecturer of Comparative Literature, �°������ϲ�����

Plenary Talk: Thursday, April 14th, 2011 at 2:00pm

This conference inspired Genre Volume 31: Visual Culture (2012).

March 4-6, 2010
Plenary Speaker:
W. J. T. Mitchell, Prof. of English & Art History, University of Chicago

The contemporary situation in humanities and social sciences is often characterized by the so called "visual turn", or the increasing emphasis of theory on the power and scope of the visual in everyday life, science, literature, media and the arts. Visual Culture as well as the formation of the field of Visual Studies stems from this renewed focus upon pictoriality and the power of the image, and its expression through various linguistic, visual and media forms.

"Visual Culture & Global Practices" seeks to examine literature (across time periods and languages), images, visual objects and mechanisms, and events from diverse cultures, across national boundaries, and within global contexts. Among the questions to be explored are:
• What are the visual codes of cultural works?
• What is the relationship between these works and their conditions of consumption, production and reception?
• How do images function within political, social, and economic forces?
• What is the cultural work that images do?
• How do we theorize visual culture?
• How do we read images?

The conference will take place at California State University, Long Beach, March 4-6, 2010. Plenary Speaker is renowned Visual Culture scholar W. J. T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, whose works Iconology (1986), Picture Theory (1994), and What Do Pictures Want? (2005) focus on media theory and visual culture.

We invite proposals for papers that deal with the power and role of the image and its relationship to literature and other disciplines and methodologies. Participants from different fields—literary theory and philosophy, aesthetics, film studies, art history and theory, theater, fine arts, graphic design, culture studies, visual and media studies, digital media and electronic arts, sociology, psychology, and cognitive science—are invited to submit an abstract.

Given the topic of this conference, you can also or alternatively represent your work in a poster session. Posters are graphic and textual representations of research. This format, more typical in the sciences than in the humanities, allows for research to be presented to audiences in visual formats throughout the conference rather than at single sessions. Posters are welcomed and encouraged on any aspect of visual cultural study or practice.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 30: Beyond genre (2010).

This conference will address how literature and the arts depict, incites, criticize, and mitigate political conflicts either throughout history or within contemporary societies. We are particularly interested in the way artists and art engage real and surreal concepts of armed struggle.

Sample Paper Topics:

• Literary or artistic expressions of current or on-going conflicts (ex. Drug cartel wars in Northern Mexico)
• Representations of War
• Literature as a form of social critique - Marxisms and war
• Artists inciting peace/anti-war
• Artistic Incitement of revolution
• Post-colonial literature and emergent literature about conflict
• War and the artistic psycho, social responsibility
• Artist involvement on the battlefield
• War narratives, from Classical expressions to contemporary
• Education/Academia and its relation to war (ex. Exile literature)
• The artist on urban warfare/urban terrorism
• Representation of border issues (ex: East & West Germany)

This conference inspired Genre Volume 29: arrivals and departures (2009).

This conference welcomes submissions of papers on a wide range of topics pertaining to figurative, literal, emotional, intellectual, and all manner of journeys and
trajectories involving the dialectic of motion and stillness, including aborted arrivals and failed departures. From traditional travel narratives to accounts of Exile's Return, reverse migration, and diaspora, the theme is open to a full spectrum of possibilities of interest to comparatists.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 28: Women, Sexuality, and Early Modern Studies (2008).

15-16 March 2007

This conference inspired Genre Volume 27: Ancient and Modern Narrative (2007).

March 9-11, 2006

This conference will combine the traditional and the emergent aspects of Comparative Literature, which began as a philological and
classically-oriented discipline and now encompasses a more emergent, global perspective. It will emphasize modern literary echoes of the
classical world and direct adaptation of ancient literature. It can include the study of canonical western texts (such as James Joyce's
adaptation of The Odyssey in Ulysses) and postcolonial appropriations (i.e. Derek Walcott's Omeros). Possible Panel Topics: Rewritings of
Classical Texts, Retellings of Classical Myth, Mimesis and Concepts of Imitation, The Classical Heritage in Non-Western Contexts, The Exilic
Imagination, The Adaptation of Comic Forms, Representations of Classical Realities, Genre Theory, Satire Across the Centuries, The
Classics in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (i.e. film), The Western Tradition in a Global Context. Papers should be 15-20 minutes. Plenary
speaker: Georgia Ladogianni, Professor of Philology at the University of Ioannina, Greece. Title of plenary talk: "Ancient and Modern Greece;
Myth in Poetry and Drama of the 20th Century". Conference activities include a trip to the Getty museum.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 26: THE GLOBAL EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (2006).

Conference papers might deal with any aspect of eighteenth-century studies, but we are particularly interested in presentations
which utilize an interdisciplinary methodology, use critical theory to analyze traditional texts, or work outside the traditional European nexus.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 25: Film, Ideology, and Culture: Lessons from the 20th Century / Issues for the 21st Century (2005).

Conference papers might deal with any aspect of film/literature/ideology/culture, but we are particularly interested in presentations which use critical theory to
analyze the cultural influence of film, which examine the relationship between film and literature, and which deal with world cinema and global issues in film.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 24: Imagined Cities (2004).

Conference papers might deal with the topic of representing urban life broadly, but we are particularly interested in essays which use critical/cultural theory to
focus on specific cities. The list of possible cities is virtually endless: How have authors and artists imagined Athens, Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, Berlin, Sao Paolo, Prague, Mexico City, Tokyo, New Delhi, New York, Lagos, Brussels, Madrid, San Francisco, Lisbon, Moscow, Johannesburg, Beijing . . .

Topics might include the imperial city, the colonial/postcolonial city, the utopian/dystopian city, cities as contested space for race/class/gender issues, future cities, cities in film, cities as spaces of enclosure or freedom, urban subcultures, or cities within cities.

We welcome interdisciplinary submissions and graduate student submissions are encouraged.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 23: Cosmopolitanism: Citizens of the World (2003).

March 1-2, 2002

Proposed topics include but are not limited to:

*       redefining cosmopolitan identity

*       The politics of cosmopolitanism

*       citizen of the world and the end of frontiers

*       oppositions to ethnic and cultural chauvinism

*       cosmopolitanism and intellectual freedom

*       ancient philosophy and the state

*       urban odysseys

*       redefining city walls and boundaries

*       the image of the ancient and modern iconoclast

*       asceticism and the cosmopolitan

*       contemporary culture and the travel of thought

*       information without borders

*       cosmopolitan topography

*       invisible cities and cosmopolitan fantasies

*       the dandy as a cosmopolitan trope

*       the fool in the city

*       aesthetics of the city and the cosmos

*       cityscapes and escapes in art and literature

*       celluloid cities and citizens

*       Hotel California and nowhere man

*       city of signs and the simulacrum

Suggestions for additional session topics are invited. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes in length. 

This conference inspired Genre Volume 22: Post-Colonialism: The Dislocation of Culture (2001).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 21: The Community in Literature (2000).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 20: The Self in Literature (1999).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 19: Madness & Literature (1998).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 18: The City: Translating Urban Images (1997). 

This conference inspired Genre Volume 17: Love & Power: Worlds of Dissonance and Harmony (1996).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 16: The Interpretation of Culture: Images and Ideologies (1995).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 16: The Interpretation of Culture: Images and Ideologies (1995).

***CALL FOR PAPERS*** 

Interpretation of Cultures: Images and Ideologies

Comparative Literature and Classics
Thirtieth Annual Conference
April 21 & 22, 1995

The Department of Comparative Literature and Classics at California State 
University, Long Beach invites submission of abstracts on the following 
session topics:

1) "The Intersection of Cultures: The Caribbean Example"

2) "The New World Reimagining the Old: Interpretations of Classical Themes"

3) "Postcolonialism: Cultural Ideologies and Images"

4) "Postmodernist Culture and Theory: Ethical Interpretations"

5) "Politics of Cultural Representation: National Identities"

6) "Literary Imagination and Cultural Geography: New Mappings of 
Time & Space"

*Please submit one page abstracts for papers, suggestions for additional 
session topics, or inquiries by February 3, 1995.

This conference inspired Genre Volume 15: Nourrir (1994).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 14: Flux (1992).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 13: Linguavideo: The Language of Images (1991).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 12: Muses: Words into Music (1990).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 11: Eroticism: From the Sublime to Grotesque (1989).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 11: Eroticism: From the Sublime to Grotesque (1989).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 10: Vox Feminae: Woman as Creator and Created (1987).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 9: Marginality: Voices from the Periphery (1986).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 9: Marginality: Voices from the Periphery (1986).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 8: The Fantastic: Celebrating the Imagination (1984).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 7: The Comic Spirit (1983).

This conference inspired Genre Volume 6: Visions of Peace (1982).

This conference recognized the importance of Latin American literature for the academy.

This conference followed the previous year's trend, reflectingin the late 70s and early 80s.

The second time that Dr. Campbell was the keynote speaker at this conference! The talk that Campbell gave perhaps was thematic with , on "Psyche and Symbol." It’s also the title of an .

This conference looked ahead to when the department would change its name from Comparative Literature to Comparative World Literature.

Dr. Brooks was notably the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her  in 1950.

Dr. Dundes in the academy. was a prominent American folk singer.

March 6, 1975

This conference celebrating the quincentenary of Michelangelo's birth honored Irving Stone as its keynote speaker for his 1961 novel , a biography of the artist.

The first time that Dr. Campbell gave the keynote at this conference! The title of this lecture is similar to those of . 

John Ciardi produced a notable . Known for her work with director Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullman came to this conference fresh from her Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her work in . 

This conference was perhaps inspired by the of Northrop Frye. 

This conference might have been inspired by Dr. August Coppola's interest in .

Dr. Obichere was a distinguished . Dr. Miner was an authority on as well as on Dryden. 

Sterling Brown was an of African American life. 

Dr. Chen was a well-known professor of Chinese literature. 

was the brother of one of the department founders, Dr. August Coppola. Arthur Knight was a and .

This conference inspired Genre Volume 1: Genre (1967).