CFP
Call For Papers
60th Annual Comparative World Literature Conference
Legacies: Nostalgia, Adaptation, and Reimaginings
Date: TBA (April 2026)
How do we imagine the past? How can we imagine the future? In our present moment, how do we tell the story of a past that has become just as contentious as the many visions of where we want to go? The concept of legacies allows us to think through the continuum, the spectrum, and the sometimes-chaotic mishmash of the relationship of past, present, and future. The ideas of tradition, innovation, nostalgia, and refashionings can open up texts to consider their temporal, historical, and intertextual contexts.
The theme of this year's Comparative Literature Conference is in celebration of our 60th anniversary: the conference has been held every spring since 1966 (with the exception of the pandemic year 2020). The conference was inaugurated by Dr. August Coppola, who as one of the founding members of our department lent his creative and innovative spirit to everything he accomplished as an academic.
While we celebrate the legacy that Dr. August Coppola left for us, we also would like to make space to problematize the term “legacy.” For instance, how do legacies constrain, oppress, sanction violence, even as they enable and renew the future? Who gets to control the future, and what and how events are remembered, adapted, and reimagined from the past? Legacies also come in different valences: as inheritance, as consequence, and—to borrow a term from our colleagues in computer science—as something needing replacement that might be difficult to replace.
The academic discipline of criticism has experienced so many changes since 1966: New Criticism gave way to structuralism, post-colonialism, new historicism, feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, and the multiverse of contemporary literary theory today. Media and technological advances have changed the way people create and criticize ideas. We invite proposals that consider the concept of legacy with respect to any timeframe: past, present, or future, as well as any theoretical perspective.
Possible themes and approaches include but are not limited to:
Comparative readings of related texts across eras
Disciplinary shifts within Comparative Literature and the humanities overall
CSULB- and Cal State-specific histories of literature and its practices
Classical reception theory revisited
Intertextuality and its changing forms
Speculative fiction, including imaginations of the past and the future
Pedagogy in an era of fraught nostalgia and curricular innovation
Adaptations across mediums and histories
Transnational and transhistorical approaches to literature and ideas
Comparative literature's affinities to other disciplines and movements over the years
Theories, practices, and movements that remain relevant and urgent in our contemporary moment
Video games as the playable past
Post-apocalyptic narratives: the past as future
Visual representations of the past: nostalgia & critique
Timeless characters through the ages: e.g., Superman, Wonder Woman, Archie Comics
Waves of Feminist studies: beyond the Male Gaze
Incomplete Futures: the City as text
Politics of disinheritance
Religion as the past, religion as the future
Nostalgia / homecoming / diasporic literature
Ruptures and representations
War as masculine nostalgia
Chasing the future, curating the past: digital technologies
The fantastic as return of the repressed
Collective memory and National identity
Literary theory: new historicism or anxiety of influence?
Reinventing traditions: our golden past
Translation as survival; translation as testimony
Racial memories: myth or fact?
The fragility of memory; how to acknowledge and protect traditions
Submissions for individual presentations and 75-minute sessions are welcome from all disciplines.
Proposals for 12-15 minute presentations should clearly explain the relationship of the paper to the conference theme, describe the evidence to be examined, and offer tentative conclusions. Abstracts of no more than 300 words (not including optional bibliography) should be submitted by February 1, 2026. Please submit abstracts as a Word document in an email attachment to comparativeworldliterature@gmail.com
NB: Please do not embed proposals in the text of the email. Make sure to indicate your presentation mode of preference (in-person or Zoom) for planning purposes.
While the conference will be hybrid, all Zoom presentations will take place only on one day of the conference, and in-person presentations will take place on the other two days (and will be Zoom-projected). We cannot accommodate pre-recorded presentations.
The conference committee will review all proposals, with accepted papers receiving notification by March 15, 2026.
