OCCT—Week 5 Updates

On Monday 15 November, we welcome Ayoush Lazikani (Oxford) to our Discussion Group. In this talk, Lazikani will speak about her recently published book, Cry of the Turtledove: Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts. Join us for an exciting discussion ranging from the poetry of Sufi Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari to the anonymous prose meditation known as the Wooing of Our Lord. At our next scheduled event, on Saturday 10 November from 2pm to 3:30pm, join Sophie Seita and Stuart Bell at St Anne’s for a practice-based workshop—the first of two linked events on contemporary queer poetry—in which we will experiment with various translational and translingual techniques of writing and making.

For more information about all our events, please follow this link.

This week featured the Michaelmas Term meeting of the Fiction and Other Minds Seminar. On Wednesday, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei (Johns Hopkins) spoke about ‘Cognitive Ecology in Literature: Ecocritical Thinking in the Poetics of Modernism’. Thank you to everyone who attended this exciting and far-reaching discussion.

Calls for Papers and Events

[1] CfP: Literature and Global Responsibility

The American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) has extended the abstract submission deadline for the 2022 Annual Meeting, which will take place at the National Taiwan Normal University on June 15-18, 2022.

Please consider submitting an abstract to the panel on “Literature and Global Responsibility”. The ACLA Annual Meeting

You can submit your abstract by logging in to the ACLA website here

The new deadline is November 30

The details of the CFP are posted below. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at stefano.bellin@warwick.ac.uk

Organizer: Dr Stefano Bellin (University of Warwick) stefano.bellin@warwick.ac.uk

More information on the ACLA Annual Meeting available here.

Please note that The ACLA Conference Committee will review all seminar proposals and notify seminar organizers of acceptance or rejection on or around December 15, 2021.

Seminar title: Literature and Global Responsibility

Seminar Abstract: Many of the problems of today’s world are global in nature and scope, and thus need to be approached in a global fashion. Yet, as the reaction to the current pandemic shows, we struggle to think and act in truly global terms. This seminar will explore how literature can help us to develop a theoretical framework that enhances our understanding of global responsibility. ‘Global’ stands here both for worldwide and comprehensive: it draws attention to our global relations of interdependence and to the complex networks of actions and inactions that create the conditions of possibility for oppression. Focusing on literary case studies that illuminate some the most consequential forms of global injustice (e.g., imperialism, human rights violations, wars, narcopolitics, exploitation, and ecological disaster), this seminar aims to foster a debate on the macro-structures that enable and perpetuate global injustice. The goal is threefold: to explore which forms of literary writing are better suited to cultivate a sense of global responsibility; to debate how and to what extent ordinary citizens are responsible for large-scale forms of violence and injustice that, although vast and global in their nature, involve us in very tangible and material ways; and to discuss how our imagination can be engaged critically in order to come to terms and resist our own complicity with systemic violence and oppression.
Some of the key questions this seminar seeks to address are: How can literature facilitate our critical and political engagement with forms of violence and injustice that are global in nature and scope? Which literary tools are more effective in developing our political imagination and sense of responsibility? How can literary texts sensitise us to our implication in large-scale structures of violence and oppression? How can literature address the representational challenges posed by forms of violence and injustice whose causes are dispersed, incremental, and relatively invisible? To what extent can we afford – in social, political, and psychological terms – to feel responsible in a ‘global’ sense? How can literature help us to clarify and bring into focus the notion of ‘global responsibility’?
This seminar welcomes scholars working in all languages, geographical areas, and theoretical frameworks, and encourages proposals that take an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach.

[2] Event: Receptions and Comparatisms

A quick reminder that we are halfway through our online research seminar, Receptions and Comparatisms, convened by Fiona Macintosh (Oxford), Justine McConnell (KCL), and David Ricks (KCL). We have four seminars remaining which you are very welcome to join, and four past seminars available to watch on the APGRD YouTube channel.
Please email apgrd@classics.ox.ac.uk if you would like to join any of the remaining sessions which take place on Zoom on Mondays at 5pm UK time:

Decolonisation | Monday 8 November - 5:00pm
•   Phiroze Vasunia (UCL)
•   Francesca Orsini (SOAS)
•   Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Lancaster)
•   Maddalena Italia (UCL)

Decoloniality | Monday 15 November - 5:00pm
•   Marchella Ward (Oxford)
•   Mathura Umachandran (Cornell)
•   Joanna Page (Cambridge)

Posthumanism | Monday 22 November - 5:00pm
• Clara Bosak-Schroeder (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Alexander Beecroft (University of South Carolina)

Anthropocene | Monday 29 November - 5:00pm
• Brooke Holmes (Princeton)
• Ben Hutchinson (Kent)

The four previous seminars are available on YouTube and related handouts can be downloaded from the APGRD's website:

Disciplinarity | Monday 11 October
•   Emily Greenwood (Princeton)
•   María del Pilar Blanco (Oxford)
•   Watch on YouTube >

Temporalities | Monday 18 October
•   Tim Rood (Oxford)
•   Adhira Mangalagiri (QMUL)
•   Watch on YouTube >

What is a language? | Monday 25 October
•   Lucy Jackson (Durham)
•   Matthew Reynolds (Oxford)
•   Watch on YouTube >

Orality and script worlds | Monday 1 November
•   Patrice Rankine (University of Chicago)
•   Haun Saussy (University of Chicago)
•   Watch on YouTube >

The APGRD Research Seminar is co-organised with The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA), and with the support of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation research centre (OCCT).

[3] CfP: Sixth International Conference on the Ancient Novel

FINAL CALL
The Sixth International Conference on the Ancient Novel (ICAN VI), with the theme ‘Roads less travelled’, will take place from 21st to 24th September 2022 and will be hosted in hybrid form, both in Ghent (Belgium) and online.

Proposals are hereby invited for papers and panels. The conference is open to all areas of study related to the ancient novel.

If you wish to present a paper or panel at ICAN VI, you are requested to submit an anonymized abstract with a maximum of 400 words. The deadline for abstract submission is 30th November 2021.

Further information and submission guidelines can be found here.