Announcing the XXIV AILC-ICLA Triennial International Congress: “Comparative Literature and Technology”. Call for proposals
Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée / International Comparative Literature Association
XXIV Congress, July 28 – August 1, 2025
Dongguk University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
In collaboration with
EAST-WEST Comparative Literature Association (KEASTWEST)
TransMedia World Literature Institute/Digital Humanities Lab
Congress Venue: KINTEX, Goyang City/Main Building Auditorium, Dongguk University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Congress website: https://icla2025-seoul.kr
Congress Theme: “Comparative Literature and Technology”
The Congresses of the ICLA welcome papers and panel sessions on all aspects of comparative literature. Without precluding this inclusivity, they also set a theme or themes as special focus for our triennial gathering. The theme chosen for the XXIV Congress in 2025 is “Comparative Literature and Technology”, a relationship that raises important and even urgent questions today, but which has been relevant through the history of literature and culture.
The circulation of literature transcends its cultures and languages of origin in rhizomatic webs of texts, images, and sound, and networks of texts from various eras address global issues. In a similar vein, literary text files, creative images, and other cultural materials are converted into computerized datasets. They are stored, retrieved, and sorted into digitized networks, and they are written to output devices in distinctive and continually evolving forms of digital communication. Texts from various eras and locations address transcultural and global themes.
At a more profound level, the technology of transmedial and intermedial futurities combines art and literature and investigates the ways in which the material conditions of technology are exposed through the combination of artistic and theoretical contemplation. How can technology be employed to foster new forms of ethical behavior, thought, and creativity in the arts and literature? Cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence have seen transformations over the past two decades, and they now emphasize the environmentally embedded and embodied nature of intelligent action. The retreat of the human agent into a broader ecological environment has been articulated by posthumanism through the use of computer and information technology. Currently, human agency is confronted with “the sublimation of matter into the digital.”
In this era of the “digital sublime,” the field of comparative literature is preoccupied with language models and artificial intelligence. Finally, the recent resurgence of computer-generated texts, translations, and other artificial intelligence-related accomplishments has once again prompted the inquiry regarding the author’s and other actors’ roles in the literary realm. In addition to being a literary topic or a problem that warrants comparative study, artificial intelligence can also be employed as a tool for comparative literary scholarship.
In a 2015 article published in Comparative Literature, Matthew Wilkens proposes that this reluctance can be overcome by evaluating computer tools for the purposes of comparative literature, including text mining, network analysis, sociology of literature, clustering, and mapping. In fact, the digitization of large textual archives and the development of techniques such as computer-assisted distant reading have opened new perspectives for the study of literature. Nevertheless, the terrain of Comparative Literary Studies remains one of the hot potatoes for digital research.
These issues affect us all in the present, but they also invite us to revisit, from a comparative, interdisciplinary, interarts and intermedial perspective the reciprocal relationships between literature and technology in earlier times, to include, for example, the invention of writing, the printing press, technologies such as film and photography and how they affect or relate to writing.
In attempts to balance the digital and the so-called “traditional comparative literature studies,” this call for proposals welcomes submission of a wide range of topics of interests to comparatists worldwide.
We invite proposals for group sessions and individual papers:
- Group session proposals can be closed (all speakers are already specified in the proposal) or open (they welcome proposal of papers). Deadline for proposal of group session: 30 September 2024.
- Individual proposals can be made to the open Group sessions or to the Congress sessions. Individual proposal submission will open on 16 October and close on 15 December 2024.
There will also be sessions dedicated to early career scholars, under the aegis of the ICLA ECARE committee. These will also open on 16 October 2024. More details about these will be published on the Congress website.
The Congress will include:
A. Congress Sessions (also called Individual Sessions, on topics proposed by the organizers and open to individual paper submissions)
B. Group Sessions: “closed” (all speakers are already specified in the proposal) or “open” (they welcome proposal of papers): Titles of accepted group sessions will be published between 1 and 15 October 2024).
C. ECARE/Next Gen Abstract Proposals
D. Special Sessions (by invitation)
A. Congress Sessions (Individual Sessions) Themes:
A.1 Crossing the Borders
A.2 Narration in Context
A.3 Convergence of Literature and Technology
A.4 Translation as Hospitality
A.5 Korean Literature and Culture in Comparative Context/Literatures and Literary Cultures of Buddhism
A.6 Comparative Literature and Glocal Publishing
A.7 Literary Prizes: Geopolitics and Aesthetics
Sub-Themes in Detail:
A.1 Crossing the Borders
“East Meets West: Border-Crossings of Language, Literature, and Culture”
“North-South Divide: The Interface of Literature and Economy”
“Comparative Literature and Transnationalism: Ethnicity in Multiculturalism, Transnationalism, and Glocalism”
“Comparative Literature and World Literature: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism”
“Transnational Literature in Global South and Global North”
“Minor Literatures in Global Context”
“Rewriting Cultural History after Colonialism”
A.2 Narration in Context
“Histories of the Novel/romance/soseol/xiaoshuo/shosetsu/etc… Beyond Europe”
“Dialects, Non-National Languages, and Literary Expression”
“Commentary as Creativity”
“Literary Inquisitions and the Life of Reputations”
“Aesthetics, Politics, and Ethics of Translation”
“Expanded Literatures”
“Literatures and Ancestry”
“Ecocriticism and the Challenges of Our Age”
A.3 Convergence of Literature and Technology
“Comparative Literature and Technology: Convergence of Comparative Literature, Transmediality, and Digital Humanities”
“Artificial Intelligence, Posthumanism/Transhumanism, and Literary Discourse”
“The Anthropocene, Technology and the Making of Literary Worlds”
“Image, Sound, and Text in Digital Media: Intermedia, Transmedia, and World Literature”
“From Clay Tablets to Digital Tablets: Technologies of Textual Production”
“From Recording Technologies to Technologies of Production”
“Ethics of Literature and Criticism in the Age of Chat GPT” (or at Times of Technological Changes)
“The Human Body and its Extensions, from the Neolithic to the Anthropocene”
“Communication Theory Since Social Media”
“Intermedia, Transmedia, and Digital World Literature”
“Pre-and Post-digital Comparative Practices of Trolling and Belief Production”
“Artificial Intelligence and Digital Humanities”
“The Digital Literature/Humanities Spaces: Infrastructures and Research”
“Technologies in the literary imagination: history, genres, theories (from pre-industrial to post-industrial societies)”
“Communication technologies and the circulation of literatures”
“Writing literature and Kittler’s Aufschreibensystem: from handwriting to algorithms”
“Comparing multilingual corpora: towards comparative distant reading”
“Technology as a factor of uneven development in the literary world-system”
“Comparative literature in the age of citation indexes”
“Distant reading techniques and computational literary studies”
“Archives & digitalization: possibilities and limitations”
“The transformation of the book and reading in the post-digital age; born-digital literature”
“GIS, data visualization, and comparative literature”
“Machine translation, AI, language models and comparative literature”
A.4 Translation as Hospitality
“Translation and World Literature”
“Translation, Gender, and Performance”
“Translation, Ecology, and Narrating Rights”
“Translating Human, Nonhuman, and Inhuman Demands”
“Translating the Other: In Other Words in Other Worlds”
“Translation and Migration”
“Translation Justice in the Digital Era”
“Translation Futures”
“Translation and Translanguaging”
“Translating Self”
“New and Old forms of (Self-)censorship”
“Poetics of Cultural Translation”
A.5 Korean literature and Culture/Buddhist literature:
“Korean Literature and Culture in a Comparative Context”
“Buddhist literature and literary culture”
“Korean Literature, World Literature, and Technology”
“War Represented in Korean, East Asian, and world literature”
“Technical transformation of Korean literature and world literature”
“Globalization of Korean Literature and Buddhist Ecological Imagination”
“Ethics of life sciences and East Asian Buddhist literature”
“Multilingualism in Korean comparative literature”
A.6 Comparative Literature and Glocal Publishing
“Inter-Asian Comparisons beyond Anglo-America: Nationalism contra International Canons”
“Journal Editors’ Panel around the World: Current Issues and Trends in Journal Publishing in East and West”
“Global Publishing and World Literature for Young Scholars: Trans Media and Transnational World Literature”
“Digital Media Technologies and Teaching Comparative Literature”
A.7 Literary Prizes: Geopolitics and Aesthetics
“Literary Prizes and International Competition”
“Literary Prizes and National Canons: The Stakes of Recognition”-“Counter-Prizes and Anti-Prizes”
B. Group Sessions.
Titles of the accepted group sessions will be published between 1 and 15 October 2024.
C. ECARE/Next Gen
Detail of these sessions, dedicated to early career researchers, will be published by 15 October 2024 and abstract proposals will open from 16 October 2024.
D. Special Sessions: (by Invitation)
D.1 Nobel Prize Winners in Literature
D.2 Distant reading techniques and computational literary studies
D.3 Presidents of National Associations Session
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Abstract Submission
Guide for Proposals
Proposals for Group Sessions must include: a title, an abstract of the session’s proposed theme and scope, the name(s) of the group session chair(s), the names of any other speakers already included, and if they are open or closed to further paper proposals.
If the Group session is open, the session’s chair(s) will accept or reject proposals made to that session. Acceptance or rejection must be communicated to the Congress organizers by 10 January 2025. Proposals rejected by the group session organizers will be considered for inclusion in the Congress Sessions.
Individual proposals may be submitted for Congress sessions as well as for open Group sessions, and they must include: a title, an abstract, and the title of the Congress or Group session applied for (e.g. A1 “East Meets West: Border-Crossings of Language, Literature, and Culture”)
Abstracts should be submitted in English or in French or in Korean with 5 keywords;
250 words maximum; Font- Times New Roman; Size 11; Line spacing: single.
Working Languages
XXIV Congress working languages are: English, French, Korean.
Proposals must be written in English or French or Korean.
* Membership of the ICLA is a requirement to present at the Congress
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Submission Types
A. Congress Sessions (Individual Sessions that are proposed by the organizers and are open to individual paper submissions.)
B. Group Sessions: “closed” (all speakers are already specified in the proposal) or “open” (they welcome proposal of papers): Titles of accepted group sessions will be published between 1 and 15 October 2024).
C. ECARE/Next Gen Sessions
D. Special Sessions (by invitation)
Important Dates:
*Group sessions submission:
- Group proposal submission due: 30 September 2024.
- Acceptance of Group sessions notified by: 15 October 2024.
- A list of accepted Group sessions will be posted on the website of the Congress by 16 October 2024.
- The chair of the accepted Group sessions will be responsible for the choice of participants and, if the session is open, for the acceptance of individual proposals (to be communicate to the Congress organizers by 10 January 2025).
*Individual proposal submission:
- Individual proposal submission: 16 October 2024 – 15 December 2024.
- Acceptance of Individual Proposals notified by: 30 January 2025
For information on the Congress, paper and group session submission links, registration links and more, please visit the Congress website: https://icla2025-seoul.kr. A full version of the website, with active submission links, will be launched by the 15th of August in French, English, and Korean.