Congress Themes & Call for Proposals

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, interacts 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: 31st October, 2024.
– Individual proposals can be made to the open Group sessions or to the Congress sessions. Individual proposal submisison will open on 7th November and close on 7th January, 2025.
There will also be sessions for early career scholars, under the aegis of the ICLA ECARE committee. These will also open on 7th November, 2024. More details about these will be published on the Congress website.
There will also be Special Sessions, by invitation.

Congress Sessions

A. 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 by 7th November, 2024.
B. Individual Sessions (Individual Sessions on topics proposed by the organizers and open to individual paper submissions)
C. ECARE/Next Gen Abstract Proposals
D. Special Session (Invited only)

A. Group Sessions

B. Individual Sessions

Research Committee Session Proposals

Research Committee Session Proposals

C. ECARE/Next Gen Abstract Proposals

D. Special Sessions (Invited Only)

D1. Nobel Prize Winners in Literature

D2. Distant reading techniques and computational literary studies

D3. Presidents of National Associations Session