This year’s UCLA Comparative Literature Graduate Conference will explore the many ways in which form colludes and contends with, is created by and creates, power. From epic poetry to the English sonnet to the novel, literary forms have conspired with power to produce political identities and practices of domination. Indeed, one might argue that certain forms were produced by and in the service of power in the first instance. Likewise, writers and artists have mobilized (literary) form as a site for remix and resistance. Representation—literary, visual, or aural—necessarily involves structures of reading, seeing, and hearing that hyperlink to powerful modes of knowing and their rebellious detractors.

Keynote speaker: Michelle M. Wright, Professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University