[Discussion] UPDATE: The New Comparativism (grad) (6/30/05; 10/8/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Center for Comparative Literature and Society <eft2101@columbia.edu>

UPDATE: CFP -  Columbia Center for Comparative Literature and Society

Graduate Student Conference - The New Comparativism, 8th Oct 2005

Extended abstract deadline : June 30th, 2005.

Taking as our point of departure the perceived inadequacy of current 
languages
of comparison-sensed by some as a crisis in the field of literature--we, 
a group
of graduate students from across the humanities and the social sciences 
working
under the umbrella of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at
Columbia University, seek to seriously examine the possibilities of 
charting the
scope of and generating methodologies for a New Comparativism. We call for
papers that discuss and/or demonstrate a re-imagining of the field of
Comparative Literature and its relationship with other disciplines 
engaged in
comparative work, with particular attention to how previous literary 
scholarship
has provided the academy with modes of comparative reading that are becoming
increasingly applicable not only across many of the other disciplines that
comprise the social sciences and the humanities, but also in legal and
architectural studies, and critical studies of economics and finance.

This conference wishes primarily to examine the possibility of 
reformulating the
literary or going beyond current conceptions of the literary, and to elicit
questions that arise from the meeting of two or more disciplinary 
approaches in
order to sketch the outlines of a methodology that may be called the 'new
comparativism'.

Graduate students from inside and, especially, from outside of traditional
literary disciplines are encouraged to participate. We invite 20-minute
presentations that might engage with, but are not limited to, the following
questions:

o To what extent do emergent discourses of global comparison pose a 
different
set of demands on current academic practices and disciplinary boundaries?

o To what extent do area studies, cultural studies and comparative 
literature
lay claim to the same objects and modes of enquiry? How might the points of
convergence between languages of comparison in the social sciences and in
comparative literature be rethought? How could comparative literature differ
from current models of interdisciplinarity?

o To what extent will the literary continue to be central to the object and
govern the methods of a 'new comparativism'; Are the possibilities of a 'new
comparativism' limited by positing its origins in the literary?

o How can we rethink the way in which communication technologies 
structure the
possibilities for new languages and methods of comparison? What is the
relationship between infrastructure and comparison?


Keynote speaker: Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University

Confirmed speakers and discussants include: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 
(Columbia
University), Rosalind Morris (Columbia University), Brent Edwards (Rutgers
University), and many others yet to confirm.

Date: 8th October, 2005

Venue: Columbia University


Abstracts of 250-300 words, accompanied by a brief bio, should be 
e-mailed to
Adam Bund at ahb2004@columbia.edu AND Olivia Harrison at 
och2101@columbia.edu by
30th June, 2005. Selected participants will be informed by 1st August, 2005.


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