Wednesday, September 25, 2013 (All day) to Thursday, September 26, 2013 (All day)
St Anne's College
A conference organised by the Oxford University research programme New Grounds for Comparative Criticism, held in collaboration with the British Comparative Literature Association and funded by The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, the John Fell OUP Research Fund, and St Anne’s College.
The way we do comparative criticism affects the histories we tell of it; and the histories we tell affect our practice. Our conference will explore this interaction. There will be sessions on literature in the world; comparative philology; classical reception; influence and translation; appropriation and resistance; and tropes of comparison. Prof Ritchie Robertson (Oxford) will speak on Weltliteratur before Goethe; Prof Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam) on the history of comparative literature in Britain; Prof Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (Budapest and Indiana) on inter-art studies. Representatives of the BCLA will describe the state of the discipline today. We will focus on texts from Asia and Africa as well as Europe; and we will give attention to the interplay between the comparative criticism of written texts and that of film, music and visual art. Is ‘comparative criticism’ a distinct formulation that might usefully complement ‘comparative literature’?