2018 Literary Studies Convention  4-7 July, 2018

    Australian National University, Canberra.

Jointly held by the Associa1on for the Study of Australian Literature, the Australasian Associa1on for Literature, the Australasian Universi1es Languages and Literature Associa1on, and the Australian University Heads of English.

Submissions due 1 July, 2017.

Abstract of 150 words Biographical note of 100 words to: julieanne.lamond@anu.edu.au

An interface describes a surface or plane that lies between or joins two points in space, but it also refers to ‘a means or place of interaction between two systems’ and ‘an apparatus designed to connect two scientific instruments so that they can be operated jointly’ (OED).

This convention will bring together scholars working across the broad field of literary studies to discuss the literary as an interface between different forms of knowledge and processes of knowledge formation, looking at questions of how and through what means the literary is communicated, represented, negotiated, and remade. By placing the concept of the literary centre-stage while at the same time interrogating its role as an interface, we wish to open up for discussion questions about the role, dynamism, and value of the literary in a time of institutional change and ongoing disciplinary formation. We would also like to debate the role of the literary text - and literary studies as a discipline - as a site of encounter between diverse languages and potentially alien modes of reading and writing.

We invite papers and panel proposals, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Mediation, remediation, and transmediation
• Literary Formalism - its past, present and/or future
• Multimedia forms as interfaces
• The relationship between forms, networks, and hierarchies
• Encounters between readers and modes of reading
• Translation
• The relationship between literary studies and other disciplines, e.g., environmental studies, maths, ethnography, science
• The interface between academic and public critical cultures
• Spaces of reading (online and otherwise)
• The negotiation of literary value
• The classroom as literary interface
• Literary objects as interfaces: circulation, reception, paratexts
• The stage and other spaces of performance as interface between temporalities, bodies, performers, writers and audiences
• Cultural interfaces
• Languages of colonialists/ postcoloniality
• Transnationalism and minor transnationalism.