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Call for Papers: Pre-modern comparative literary practice in the multilingual Islamic world(s), the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre, 23-24 July 2021
November 17, 2020
For most of Islamic intellectual history, the literary analysis of discourse has been carried out in the domain of balāghah, and its Arabic terms—e.g., sariqah (theft, but also intertextuality), muʿāraḍah (rivalry, but also parody), muṭābaqah (correspondence, but also antithesis), muwāzanah (collation, but also comparison) etc.—signify concepts and categories that are different from those of Western criticism. Likewise, the traditions of grammar, lexicography, poetic meter, Quranic exegesis, hadith criticism, jurisprudence, theology, philosophy, and mysticism developed their own Arabophone conceptual resources, which were applied throughout the Islamic world. We invite participants to investigate the ramifications of such terms, and the consequences of their application across the multilingual Arabic world, fruitful and otherwise. Participants are invited to extend Islamicate poetics beyond Islamic traditions, and contemplate how contemporary critical theory might be enriched by comparative methods of the Islamic world. To bridge the frontier dividing modern literary theory from Islamic Studies is another aim of this conference. We mean to challenge the Eurocentrism of modern Comparative Literature as we invite dialogue across the disciplines of comparative rhetoric, poetics, philosophy, and Islamic Studies.
Suggested topics:
- Translation and non-translation in the Islamic world
- Translinguistic adaptations of genre and form
- Multilingual scholars and scholarly practice
- Nationalism and polyglossia
- Minorities, shibboleths, and Arabolects
- Multilingual lexicology and exegesis
- Catachresis and Creative Misreadings
- Textual practices, media, and reception
Abstracts (max. 400 words) should be sent in a Word document, along with a short biography that contains academic affiliations and publications. Please use the IJMES transliteration system. The deadline for all submissions is November 17th, 2020.