The Fourteenth Triennial Conference of the British Comparative Literature Association

Literatura comparada, Literatura peninsular, Literatura de los Siglos de Oro, Teoría de la literatura

Call for papers: Proposals are invited for papers, in English, of no more than 20 minutes’ duration, on or in relation to the conference’s theme of Salvage. Proposals, in the form of an abstract of 250 words accompanied by a brief ‘bio-note’ of 50 words at most, should be submitted by email to bcla2016@wlv.ac.uk by no later than 30 September 2015.Keywords 1. Retrieval: recuperation, recovery, rediscovery, exhumation, remembering, recollecting, resurrection, repossession; 2. Saving: rescue, survival, reprieve, restoration, resuscitation, repair, preservation, conservation, consecration, canonization, quotation, re-edition, translation, legitimisation, de-criminalization; 3. Saving the spirit: redemption, salvation, renaissance, rebirth, liberation, emancipation; 4. Re-using: recycling, re-processing, triage, bricolage, ecology, scavenging, transformation, imitation, plagiarising, transmutation, adaptation, metamorphosis, anniversary, commemoration; 5. Reconfiguring: blending, merging, distilling, filtering, abstracting, editing, expurgating, bowdlerising, disguising, distortion; 6. Remains: rubbish, gold under dirt, detritus, ruins, monuments, residue, ecology, collage; 7. The antithesis of salvage: suppression, censorship, stigmatization, defamation, repression, eradication, erosion, disarticulation, oblivion, forgetting. For further information, please see the full conference description on the website.

The theme of the conference is «Salvage», a concept at the very heart of much literary and cultural activity. Translation, reception, re-reading – the vital substance of comparative literary research – all refer to processes by which literature’s significance is activated or released in acts of salvage, acts of saving and, indeed, salvation.Plenary speakers at the conference will include Professor (Emeritus) David Constantine.The year 2016 will see a number of anniversaries from the domain of literary and cultural studies within the European sphere alone. Prominent among these is a shared 400th anniversary, that of the death of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. This anniversary, we envisage, will form a strand running in parallel to the main conference theme.

Reino Unido