ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar intends to examine the role of books in the cultural and social circuits of various local spheres at different historical stages, and the critical implication of this sociological context to our readings of traditional or modern literary texts. The panel will welcome diverse representations of how historical considerations of the production and circulation of books can be fruitfully applied to interpretations of specific literary examples or social phenomena. Overall, it is hoped that the seminar might bring out a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exploration about the interplay between the objective existence of books and the formation of identities and meanings.

Friday, March 24

Suyoung Son, University of Chicago
“Writing for Print: Literati-Publishing of Seventeenth-Century China”
Eva-Marie Kroller, University of British Columbia
“The Publisher’s Memoir: Doubleday Publishers in WW I and II”
Sean Grattan, CUNY Graduate Center
“The Obfuscation of Love: Copyright, Community, and Friendship in Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote”

Saturday, March 25

Ikram Masmoudi, Princeton University
“From an otherness to another: Sheherazade and her book 1001 Nights seen by Arabs and Others”
Brian Doherty, University of Texas
“Three Things Fall Apart(s): Anthologies and the Directed Canon”
Alexandra Parfitt, Yale University
“I, the reader: Self-Identificatory Fiction in Jhumpa Lahir”

Sunday, March 26

Gabriela Carrion, Bard College
“Sacred and Secular Books in Don Quijote”
Susan Mooney, University of South Florida
“Censorship, Polymodal Discourse, and the Spanish Novel under Franco”
Jennifer French, Williams College
“To Read/Write in the Red-Light District: Books, Democracy and the Market in Contemporary Paraguay”