CFP: World Novels and 21st-Century Media (ACLA 2016, abstracts due Sept 23)
1 voice, 0 replies
Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
- Only members can participate in this group's discussions.
We welcome submissions to the “World Novels and 21st Century Media” seminar at ACLA 2016. Please find the CFP reproduced below; it’s also available through this link: http://www.acla.org/seminar/world-novels-and-21st-century-media. Abstracts are due by September 23, 12am PST, and must be submitted through the ACLA online portal at http://www.acla.org/node/add/paper.
—
2016 Annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association
Harvard University
March 17-20, 2016
Seminar: “World Novels and 21st-Century Media”
Organizers: Annie Galvin, University of Virginia (ahg8cy@virginia.edu) and Jap-Nanak Makkar, University of Virginia (jkm5ar@virginia.edu)
As Jessica Pressman and Sven Birkerts have noted, digital media technologies challenge the cultural priority we give to book-bound texts. To a reader of a novel, the book is just one reading format among others in our twenty-first-century media landscape. At the same time, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, John Johnston and Daniel Punday have considered the fate of literary fiction in a cultural environment saturated by a variety of visual media, including television, film, the internet, surveillance apparatuses and video games. These latter scholars suggest that novels compete with other media to remain a culturally significant conveyor of meaning and narrative. Challenges have been issued to both the novel’s materiality and its representational strategies in the contemporary media ecology.
But rather than accept their inevitable displacement or even expiration, novels respond by incorporating, using or refusing new media. Certain texts that exhibit an awareness of twenty-first-century media have done so while intervening in global political conditions, mobilizing the form of the novel while incorporating visual media as part of their narrative and representational approaches. Texts by authors including Ruth Ozeki and NoViolet Bulawayo, among many others, render our new media environments an issue of world politics. Other authors, such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Ali Smith, respond to our media-rich environment by exploring new storytelling potential within the medium of the book, their stories often hinging on the materiality of the object in the reader’s hands.
This seminar invites reflection on the capacity of novels to narrativize, use, or otherwise represent the contemporary media ecology. We welcome papers that address the following questions or pursue any related lines of inquiry:
Please submit abstracts through the ACLA online portal, which opens September 1 and closes at 12am PST on September 23rd: http://www.acla.org/node/add/paper. Submitters are advised, also, to familiarize themselves with the unique structure of the ACLA conference by visiting http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting. Please contact the seminar organizers with questions or concerns.