Worldmaking
37th Congress of AULLA (Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association).
University of Queensland, St Lucia.
10-12 July 2013
Keynote speakers: Prof. Simon During (UQ), Prof. Elizabeth Schafer (Royal Holloway UL), and Prof. Anthony J. Cascardi (UC Berkeley).
The theme of the 37th Congress of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA) is ‘Worldmaking’.
In 1978 Nelson Goodman explored the relation of ‘worlds’ to language and literature. He asked how a world is made, what it might be made of, and how the process of making a world relates to understanding it. Ways of Worldmaking showed that there was no one language to express and understand the world, but many languages, many ways in which ‘universes of worlds as well as worlds themselves may be built’. Goodman’s pluralistic vision has been taken up in a range of disciplines concerned with issues of globalisation from Gayatri Spivak’s work on the subaltern and the process of ‘worlding’ to Pheng Cheah’s exploration of the value and limits of ‘world literature’.
This Congress will explore how worlds and worldmaking feature in language and literature and in humanities scholarship. It asks what our various disciplines identify as the worlds we make in connection to ‘the world’ at large. How is worldmaking defined and articulated? What is at stake in the process? What does it mean to make, unmake, or remake a world, to experience, feel, or belong to a world? How might we understand – or make bridges between – natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic and virtual worlds?
AULLA invites submission of abstracts for papers and panels relating to ‘Worldmaking’. There will be opportunities for delegates to have their papers considered for refereed publication.
Please submit a 200-word abstract for papers and any themed panels online. Abstracts due by 31 January 2013.