ACL(x) 2016: Extra-Disciplinarity
The experimental conference of the ACLA will convene September 23-24, 2016 on the University Park campus of Penn State, with arrival Thursday afternoon or evening and sessions on Friday and Saturday.. Each of its eight panels will address, experimentally, the topic of Extra-Disciplinarity.
Some questions implicated in the topic, “Extra-Disciplinarity,” are as follows: What if disciplines were organized differently — or didn’t exist at all? Or existed, but none of us “belonged” to one? What if literary scholars were to go about interdisciplinary work the way scientists do, building large teams from distinct disciplines to produce work with many co-authors? How do other disciplines reach their audiences? What disciplines are crucial partners for comparative literature now, or in the future?
The “extra-” in the conference theme points in multiple and sometimes contradictory directions. “Extra-” is the antonym of “intra-” and thus gestures towards a space outside of any discipline. But in common parlance, “extra” means something supplementary — in addition to — and would thus point towards training in or collaboration between scholars in more than one discipline, so the realms of possibility contemplated in the conference rubric are several.
Concepts and practices developed in and around ACL(x) are designed to potentially carry forward into the ACLA’s official spring/summer conference, as well as to make their ways into journals, workshops, and individual or collaborative acts of scholarship or conversation. The editors of four journals — ASAP, CLS, Trafika Europe, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias — will all be present at the conference and in some cases sponsoring panels.
This conference is made possible thanks to the generous support of the American Comparative Literature Association and Penn State University, its Department of Comparative Literature, its School of Global Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the College of Liberal Arts.