Literary Networks Convention – AULLA, ASAL & AAL
University of Wollongong
7–11 July, 2015

Literature is a meeting point for intersecting lines of thought and feeling about the world. As the German critic Theodore Adorno observes in his Aesthetic Theory: “Art is autonomous and it is not…. The great epics, which have survived even their own oblivion, were in their age intermingled with historical and geographical reportage.”

Like its object of study, the discipline of literary criticism survives by making connections to other disciplines and to other ways of thinking and feeling about the world. Literary thinking, in this sense, is networked thinking. It is intermingled with other modes of discourse such as the philosophical, the linguistic, the political, the social, the geographical, the theological and the sexual.

We invite papers that engage with literature and literary criticism as a network where a network, is understood very broadly as a group or system of interconnected people or things. Given that this conference seeks to bring together scholars who work in and between a variety of national literatures, literary, media and cultural histories, we encourage submissions that engage with and exemplify the rich variety of critical and creative practices currently being undertaken under the aegis of ‘literary studies’ in a contemporary Australian context.

Papers might consider literature’s engagement with any of the following:

• Acoustics, aesthetics or the visual
• Affect, emotion or contagion
• Animals, the environment or space/place
• Appetite, consumption or food
• Communities or creative practice
• Communication, technology, transport or trade
• Festivals, public events or publishing
• Film, media, new media or television
• Gender, sexuality or corporeality
• Indigeneity, ethnicity, citizenship or diaspora
• Institutions – writers, students or scholars
• Neurology, cognition or the body
• Reading, reception or research

Due date for proposals: 31 January, 2015
Notification of acceptance: 1 March, 2015
Email: Leigh Dale – ldale@uow.edu.au

Proposal should include title, abstract (150 words), followed by name and email address, included in the email (not as attachments). Abstracts should be accompanied by a 100-word biography, which starts with the presenter’s name.

For more information, please refer to the online call for papers.