The Consortium brings together faculty and graduate students from the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as affiliates from other disciplines, to advance collaborative research in literary studies. While grounded in the study of national literary traditions, it seeks to encourage interdisciplinary and theoretical reflections on literature and culture in global and comparative contexts.

5/5/08 SPRING ROUNDTABLE

Monday, May 5th
5:00-7:00 p.m.
Theater/Dance Seminar Room (2517), Second floor of new Theater/Dance building, across the bike path from the Performing Arts Theater

Presenters:

Jennifer Caldwell, Theater and Dance, "Wigs, Props, and 'Authentic' Voice: Navigating the Historiography of World War II Soldier Shows."

Elizabeth Lagresa, Comparative Literature, "Imaginary Women: Helen and the Rebirth of the Errant Wife/Mother Archetype in the Twentieth Century."

Allison Schifani, Comparative Literature, "Mobile Technology: The Institute for Applied Autonomy and Resistance in the City."

Lily Wong, Comparative Literature, "Interpenetrating Temporalities: The Death of a Prostitute in a Time of Globalism."

3/31/08- NOW ACCEPTING 250-WORD ABSTRACTS FOR THE CLTC ANNUAL GRADUATE CONFERENCE-Thursday, May 29th, McCune Conference Room

DETAILS:

Time is a social construction that serves as a condition of possibility for notions of history, memory, narrative, movement, speed, labor, and other categories of study. The Sixth Annual UCSB Consortium of Literature, Theory, and Culture (CLTC) Graduate Conference, "Chronographies: Contemplating Time in Science and the Humanities," will focus on the way time contributes to and energizes narratives, performances, processes, events, and life in its breadth and depth, while also interrogating cultural forms and social epistemologies that are intimately bound to discursive, symbolic, and scientific formulations of time and its correlate space. While the CLTC is grounded in the study of national and transnational literary production, our conference seeks interdisciplinary and theoretical reflections on time in global and comparative contexts.

The CLTC is pleased to announce that the keynote speaker for the conference will be Enda Duffy, Professor in the UCSB Department of English. Professor Duffy's current research focuses on how new concepts of space and technologies of speed have functioned geopolitically in this century. We invite 250-word abstracts that speak to any of the following or other related topics: Phenomenology of time, Social construction and/or cultural notion of time, Time and industrial labor, Time as a literary/artistic device, Philosophy of time Non-western notions of time, Historiography of time, Simultaneity and the shared moment, Anachronisms, Periodicity within fields of study, Time's relation to space, Transformation, Time and memory, Time and technology, Time and politics, labor, family, Psychology of memory and deja-vu, Scientific understandings of time. Please submit 250-word abstracts electronically to cltcucsb@gmail.com by 5:00 p.m., Friday, April 18th

3/31/08- Now accepting abstracts for Spring roundtables. DEADLINE TO SUBMIT PAPERS IS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9TH BY 5:00 P.M.

1/15/07- Now accepting papers for Winter roundtables, date and location T.B.D. DEADLINE TO SUBMIT PAPERS IS TUESDAY, JANUARY 22ND BY 5:00 P.M.

12/4/07-Second Roundtable discussion of Fall Quarter

Tuesday, December 4th
5:00-7:00 p.m.
Theater/Dance Seminar Room (2517), Second floor of new Theater/Dance building, across the bike path from the Performing Arts Theater

Presenters at this Round Table Discussion will be:

Colin Carman, English Department
Paper: "In the Eye of Sane Philosophy": Percy Shelley, Homophobia, England in 1810.”

Susan Cook, English Department
Paper: “The Other of Incorporation: Sadomasochism and the Colonial Scene."

Sören Hammerschmidt, English Department
Paper: "A Life in Transit: Travel, Maternity, and the Progress of Civilisation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence."

11/6/07- Our first roundtable discussion of the year!

5:00-7:00 p.m., Theater and Dance Seminar Room

Papers delivered:

Christina Cheng (Comparative Literature) "Barbadian Culture Through the Memory of Food in Austin Clarke's 'Bakes' and 'Smoked Ham Hocks with Lima Beans'"

Jessica O'Keefe (Theater and Dance) "Transgender Theatre: Rethinking Essentialism"

4/6/07 - Our 2007 graduate student conference!

05/22/06

Please join on on May 31st for the 4th annual CLTC Graduate Student Conference!

04/26/06
Please join us for two CLTC events with Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor of Harvard University Press.

Thursday, May 4, 2-4PM, South Hall 2617
"Slow Reading," A Talk by Lindsay Waters

Friday, May 5, 3-5 PM, South Hall 2635
CLTC Afterhours: "The Futures of Academic Publishing and Literary Studies"

To facilitate discussion, we are making available two articles by Lindsay Waters on our discussion board. Instructions are as follows:

1. Simply login, or create a profile if you have not yet registered, and a discussion thread called "CLTC Afterhours Documents" should appear.
2. Click on that thread and you will find a sub-topic called "Lindsay Waters Articles."
3. Click on that sub-topic and it will lead you to the links for downloading the articles.

03/01/06
Announcing the 4th Annual CLTC Graduate Student Conference! We are currently accepting abstracts for paper presentations. Please click here for more details.

02/08/06
Thanks to all who came to the vanguard CLTC Afterhours event! It was a rousing success, and please visit the discussion board to post follow-up questions, recommendations, or suggestions.

01/26/06
Join us for the first roundtable of the quarter! On Monday, February 27th (4-6PM), we will be hearing papers from Nathan Henne (Comp Lit), Laura Miller (English), Lisa Swanstrom (Comp Lit), and Ben Shockey (English). Click here or look at our calendar for more details.

01/25/06

CLTC Afterhours: "Revisiting the Subaltern as an Analytic Category"

The subaltern who cannot speak has plagued, beguiled, challenged, and
compelled scholars ever since Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak's evocation of this figure for disenfranchisement in her landmark essay, "Can the
Subaltern Speak?" (1987) Seventeen years past that moment, her intervention remains one of the most influential and contentious hypotheses in literary, cultural, and historical studies--and its suggestions have been widely disseminated both in the humanities and the social sciences. Seventeen years, and we are still asking what this category--formulated in its singularity, in its rhetorical surges--has to do with social justice, human rights, or enfranchisement in its broadest sense. Seventeen years, and we are still wondering about the durability of the category, its flexibility, its purchase, its legacies. And seventeen years later, Spivak returns to her early work to rethink it in terms of the popular, in "Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular"(2004). Join us in rethinking the subaltern as we find it in the initial polemic and its later avatar.

The two essays we will consider are:

"Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1987)
"Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular" (2004)

11/28/05
Many thanks to those of you who attended the second CLTC Roundtable of the year. Thanks again to Suk-Young Kim, Jeremy Douglass, Jessica O'Keefe, and Sarah McLemore for presenting their provocative work!

Call for proposals: "CLTC After-hours"
As befits its missions to bring together faculty and graduate students across disciplines, stimulate the intellectual atmosphere, and advance collaborative research in literary studies at UCSB, this year the Consortium for Literature, Theory and Culture (http://www.cltc.ucsb.edu) has instituted a new program called "CLTC After-hours." At each meeting, one or more than one faculty member will lead a discussion of a text that has had or will have sustained effects on literary studies. For example, someone could lead a discussion of Clifford Geertz's famous essay, "Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture," or his equally important "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Or, Walter Benjamin's idiosyncratic "Unpacking My Library." Ideally, the chosen text, not necessarily canonical, ought to appeal to most faculty and graduate students in literary studies. Prior to each meeting, we will make copies of the text available to people who plan to participate in the discussion.

Faculty interested in leading a discussion can contact Yunte Huang, Chair of the Steering Committee for the CLTC, 893-2119, or yhuang@english.ucsb.edu. The proposal may simply contain a title of the text and a brief explanation of its importance or potential appeal. If it's a book, please select chapters.