Seminar Organizers: Brian Lennon, Pennsylvania State University; Nergis Erturk, Columbia University

This seminar invites reflections on literature and language reform. More specifically, we invite participants to consider how nineteenth and twentieth century nationalist and internationalist language projects at once destroyed and reconstituted --- literally re-formed --- imaginations of language as something (uniquely) human: a double movement manifest in the para-literary and masocritical activities of historical and contemporary avant-gardes, in post-structuralist translation theory, and in current models of and for world literature. Papers might address the consequences for "human language," and the relevance for literature, of any of the following or related topics in language politics and language ecology: alphabet reform; language purification; orthographic standardization; official language policies; international auxiliary and planned languages; "global" languages; monolingualism and plurilingualism; machine writing and machine translation.

Deadline for submission of individual paper proposals: November 30, 2005. Please submit proposals at the Web site for ACLA 2006:

http://www.princeton.edu/~acla06