Colloquies

Welcome to Colloquies, a dynamic index to current themes that run through Arcade’s field of literature, the humanities, and the world.  For each Colloquy, a curator selects from a variety of intellectual work in different modes—journal articles, book chapters, multimedia recordings, and blog posts—to assemble a conversation.

Open Colloquies

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Comparing Literatures: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Urdu

Curator 
Alexander Key
Comparative Literature has spent the last few decades expanding its focus beyond Europe and the Anglophone Americas. But has it succeeded? Departments around the world include scholars working on Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, and to a lesser extent Turkish, Urdu, and other non-European languages. But the desire for coverage remains a chimera, always tempting with the prospect of inclusion: "if only we had somebody who did…" What would success, even if we subscribed to such teleology, look like? more

On Being a Medievalist and More

Curator 
Marisa Galvez
This Colloquy is one of two that originated in the "After 1967" conference in which we celebrated the work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. more

Personification and Allegory: Selves and Signs

Curator 
Vladimir Brljak
What has allegory to do with personification, and personification with allegory? Are we justified in speaking, as we often do, of “allegorical personifications” and “personification allegory,” or does such usage, however widespread, obscure fundamental differences between the two? more
Updated

Thing Theory in Literary Studies

Curators 
Sarah Wasserman, Patrick Moran
That things capture our imagination is hardly news. As Andrew Cole wrote in a 2016 issue of October, "materialism is as old as the hills." Cole claims that new approaches to studying things allow us to find similarities where we have too often found difference, and that this method dates back at least to Hegel and Marx. more

Tropicalismo Fifty Years Later

Curator 
Christopher Dunn
Tropicália is the name of a cultural moment in late 1960s Brazil that was manifest in nearly all realms of artistic production, especially in popular music, but also the visual arts, theater, film and literature. more

Prosody: Alternative Histories

Curators 
Eric Weiskott, Natalie Gerber
What are the historical stakes of prosody, and why should we ask? ‘Prosody’ refers both to the patterning of language in poetry and to the formal study of that patterning. more

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