Comparative Literature Studies

Special Issues

Modern China and the World: Literary Construction

Guest Editors: Liu Kang & Wang Ning

The authors of this special issue will illustrate how world literature, both as a theoretic concept as well as literary practice, has traveled to China forming its unique version in Chinese; the relations between China and the world are represented in different literatures; how internet plays an important role in linking up China to the present world through literary writing, and how Chinese literary scholars and writers have tried to make their literature among the forest of world literature by first translating Western literary works into Chinese and now translating their own literature into the major Western languages along with China’s economic boom. Therefore, in our opinion, when we use the term “world literature,” we actually endow it with at least the following connotations: (1) A canonical body of excellent literature of all countries. (2) A global perspective and comparative horizon in our study, evaluation and criticism of literature in general. (3) A literary evolution through production, circulation, translation, anthologization and critical studies in different languages (Wang Ning). Today’s literary historiography is thereby pluralistically oriented: not only by means of nation- state, for instance, British literature and American literature, but also by means of languages, such as (international) English literature(s), and (international) Chinese literature(s). As we all know that classical Chinese literature, largely due to China’s long isolation from the outside world, was not influenced by Western literature. It is modern Chinese literature that has developed under direct influence of foreign literature, especially Western literature. So all the articles of this special issue will exclusively focus on modern Chinese literature which will be reconsidered and reinterpreted in the broad context of global culture and world. Obs. Submissions for this Special Issue were solicited by the guest editors.

Submissions deadline: January 1, 2012
Issue to appear in November 2012

Eco-Criticism

Guest Editors: John Beusterien (Texas Tech) & Hsinya Huang (National Sun Yat-sen University)

Ecocritical approaches have increasingly occupied studies in literature, culture and the arts in recent years. The Eco-Criticism issue explores the place of ecocritical theory within the field of comparative literature. To what extent has comparative literature taken the ecocritical turn into account, and what can ecocriticism learn from comparatist practices, literatures, and theories? Comparative Literature provides a unique forum for theorizing and aiming to provide solutions for the environmental crisis. The environmental challenges of pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss affect certain areas of the globe more than others. Credited with first developing in the U.S., ecocriticism must engage comparatist strategies and transcend nation-state organized literary histories. Data from the sciences has certainly been important in identifying ecological problems, but critical approaches from Comparative Literature have and will offer vocabulary for the articulation of the crisis, cross-cultural sensitivity for dealing with the crisis on a regional and global scale, and theoretical depth for describing its complex ethical dimensions.

Send 500-word proposals and brief CVs by 30 June 2012 to John Beusterien (john.beusterien@ttu.edu) or Hsinya Huang (hsinya@mail.nsysu.edu.tw). Submit completed papers (6,000–10,000 words in length) by 1 August 2012. Contributions should conform to the journal's style guide.

Submissions deadline: August 1, 2012
Issue to appear in March 2013

poetry games

Guest Editors: Jonathan Eburne (Penn State University) and Andrew Epstein (Florida State University)

Nearly one hundred years ago, the French avant-garde poet Blaise Cendrars proclaimed that “La poésie est en jeu.” Although the line declares that “poetry is at stake,” Cendrars also insists that a poem is a kind of game (“jeu”), a form of play. This notion that there is an intimate connection between poetry and play has a long history, and in recent years, strategies of play and the idea of poetry as game or project – in which the writer devises an idea, concept, or set of procedures or practices that help generate the work – have become central to contemporary poetry, both for poets associated with self-styled experimental movements, such as Conceptual poetry, and across the field as a whole. As many poets and scholars have noted, discussions of tactics pioneered by earlier avant-garde movements and ideas seem pervasive today: from the constraints of Oulipo, to the machine-aesthetics of Fluxus and Dada; from the radical formalisms of Imagists, Russian Formalists, and minimalists to the collective procedures of Surrealism; and from the proceduralism of Conceptualism to the psychogeography of the Situationist International. We currently find ourselves in an age of the Project: a cultural moment that finds not only writers and artists, but so-called ordinary people as well, engaging in a wide variety of experiments, often using new media and digital technologies, in which certain conditions and rules are established and actions undertaken, tasks accomplished, results recorded, documented, and circulated.

The guest editors and editor-in-chief of CLS seek essays for a special journal issue on project-oriented and procedural poetics. We welcome essays from any time period and language area that consider poetry’s longstanding fascination with games, constraint, chance, generative processes, performative projects, collaborative writing, hoaxes, and other project-based or playful compositional practices. To what extent have particular historical, political, and material conditions encouraged the exploration of such practices and strategies? Does poetry as a genre have a special propensity towards play, in contrast to other forms? Are poetry games merely reactions to new technologies and historical conditions for imaginative production, or do they display the creative, disruptive potential of project-based work? How do poetry games relate to and comment upon central cultural and literary preoccupations, like authorship, originality, language, the nature of the self and subjectivity, or the relationship between art and history, politics, tradition, or popular culture? We welcome essays treating any historical period and language; we are especially interested in discussions that bring together multiple languages and traditions. Submission guidelines: http://www.cl-studies.psu.edu/submissions.shtml

Send 500-word proposals and brief CVs by 1 January 2013 to Jonathan Eburne (jpe11@psu.edu) or Andrew Epstein (aepstein@fsu.edu). Those encouraged to submit completed papers (6,000–10,000 words in length), should do so by 01 May 2013. Contributions should conform to the journal's style guide.

Proposal deadline: January 1, 2013/Completed paper deadline: May 1, 2013
Issue to appear in November 2013

The Gender and Sexual Politics of Translation: Literary, Historical, and Cultural Approaches

Guest Editor: William J. Spurlin (Brunel University, London)

This special issue will explore the gender and sexual politics of translation in literary and cultural texts across multiple languages and historical periods. Overall, the issue will ask some of the following questions: How do we work with translating terms for naming dissident genders and sexualities in comparing texts and cultures of the past which may not be translatable to modern understandings of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer identity? How might we work with the specificity of ‘queer,’ which has its origins in western Anglophonic cultures, when translating texts from non-Anglophonic and non-western contexts? What new translation issues arise when we recognise that in some postcolonial cultures, for example, terms for same-sex sexual identities may not be inscribed discursively in indigenous languages, but may name instead gender-defined performances of same-sex desires for which equivalent terms may not exist in modern European languages? At the same time, the essays collected in the proposed special issue will not only be concerned with gender and sexuality alone as axes of investigation in translations studies, but will ask how translation theory may be broadened through the pressures of queer theoretical orientations, while asking the extent to which translation operates as a queer praxis.

Send abstracts or complete papers to William.Spurlin@brunel.ac.uk by 01 February 2013. Contributions should conform to the journal's style guide.

Submissions deadline: February 1, 2013
Issue to appear in March 2014