CFP: SCLA '14 "Nuance" (5/12/2014; 10/10-12/2014)

SCLA 40th Annual Meeting
Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida

October 10-12, 2014

Deadline: May 12, 2014

"Nuance"

For Roland Barthes, nuance named "an ethical project." "I want to live according to nuance," he declared. But what is nuance, and what possibilities might it open up for thinking about the arts and humanities today? What role might it play in interpretation, in teaching and scholarship, in reading and writing? Wayne Koestenbaum, the keynote speaker for this conference, suggests that nuance appears as "a trace, like dust on plush, [that] resuscitates a lost instant when someone…raptly concentrated on a stray interpretive detail." What does it mean to care about nuance, to overlook it, to suppress it? In addition to an ethics of nuance, might we speak of a politics, an aesthetics, a history of nuance?

At the 2014 SCLA conference we will explore what it means to read for (and with) nuance. Welcome avenues of inquiry could include, but are not limited to:

• the ethics of interpretation
• translation and its vicissitudes
• memory, trauma, and the trace
• the pleasures of the text
• mimicry and insubordination
• queer identifications and misidentifications
• (out)laws of genre
• margins and marginality
• aesthetic categories
• affect
• silence, illegibility, the intractable, the neutral
• styles of reading (close, distant, surface)
• nuance and the consumer society
• criticism and creativity

Please submit 250-word paper proposals or 500-word panel proposals by May 12, 2014 through the conference’s website: www.eckerd.edu/scla.

Graduate students submitting a paper proposal may also apply for an SCLA Travel Scholarship (guidelines provided on paper proposal form). The conference also plans to include two undergraduate sessions and welcomes undergraduate proposals.

For more information on the Society of Comparative Literature and the Arts and The Comparatist, please visit http://www.complit-scla.org./