University Library News
Georgia State University

Constellations: of Comparative Literature and the new Humanities

spivakThe Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University is hosting an interdisciplinary conference this weekend from October 16-18 called Constellations: of Comparative Literature and the new Humanities.

The conference features a round table discussion between Geoffrey Bennington, Peggy Kamuf, Thomas Keenan and Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak. The Georgia State University Library has items from all of these scholars in our collection. They can be found by following each named link above.

The conference website explains more about the roundtable, as well as providing a program and information about the location.

From the About section on the conference site:

What does it mean to practice comparative literature? When we speak of a discipline that is intrinsically interdisciplinary, how do we understand its limits, articulate its purpose, and constitute its objects? These very questions apply to the humanities in general—itself a heterogeneous constellation of disciplines, each representing not only its own knowledge but its own way of asking questions. From what position can this multiplicity of knowledges comprising the humanities ask the increasingly urgent question of its own self-definition?

Constellations aims to negotiate this critical task of self-definition by bringing the questions of comparative literature and the humanities together. We hope to produce well-informed perspectives on comparative literature within the broader context of the humanities. But we also hope to ask the question of the humanities from within the fold of comparative literature—not only because it is one of several loci in the humanities where interdisciplinary work is done, but because its emphasis on language has produced strategies for negotiating between opposed, even irreducible forms of thought and knowledge.