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Writers and Texts on the Move: Chinese Literature as World Literature” MLA Annual Convention, January 9-12, 2020 (Deadline February 21, 2019)

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Writers and Texts on the Move: Chinese Literature as World Literature” MLA Annual Convention, January 9-12, 2020 (proposal deadline Feb. 21, 2019) 
 
Over the last twenty years, interest in Chinese and Sinophone literature around the world has grown dramatically. Writers such as Mo Yan and Liu Cixin have made literature written in Chinese increasingly visible and accessible to readers worldwide. Their success has prompted the reexamination or discovery of other writers such as Zhang Ailing and Qiu Miaojin, both of whom have been recently translated and reprinted in the New York Review of Books Classics series. This session will examine the question of how Chinese and Sinophone literature have been (and have not been) incorporated into the world literary canon. While some attempts such as those of Gao Xingjian and Liu Cixin have been spectacularly successful, others have had initial success and then faded into obscurity such as Lin Yutang, or have been rediscovered long after their death like Zhang Ailing. This session seeks to answer the question of what qualities make some literature particularly portable into the world literary canon. How do authors anticipate or cater to potential translation? Are some Chinese language works written to be translated or translated even as they are written, to borrow Rebecca Walkowitz’s term “born-translated”? How do writers face the pressure to represent and re-articulate their entire nation in their literary production? What is the relation between the writer, the text, and the world? Presentations that innovatively address these questions are especially welcome. This session is sponsored by the LLC Modern and Contemporary Chinese Forum. 
 
Please send an approximate 300-word title and abstract proposal, 250-word minimum BIO and CV by February 21, 2019 to Clara Iwasaki (ciwasaki@ualberta.ca) and Sijia Yao (syao4@unl.edu). 
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