Literature, Geography, Translation: The New Comparative HorizonsComparative literature is currently undergoing critical changes.Transnational and global paradigms of study are emerging to supplant thediscipline's earlier Eurocentric framework; circulation, translation,postcolonialism and “world literature” have become the focus of overlappingdebates which expand the horizon of literary studies. The complexity of these theoretical and methodological developments shouldnot be underestimated, however. While “the globe” may be an enticing frameof reference, no one, as Gayatri Spivak reminds us, actually lives there.Or, as Franco Moretti argues, the concept of “world literature” may havehave been with us for two centuries, but we still don't know what it is. The warp and weft of literature as it is written, read, distributed andtranslated remains the historically dense and often discordant experiencesof language, places, intellectual networks, and economic and politicalinequities. It is, perhaps, only by continually engaging this tangle ofspecificities that the call for “global” literary studies will prevail.The Departments of Literature and English at Uppsala University, incollaboration with the University of Oslo, will host a conference inUppsala, Sweden, on 11-13 June 2009 on this theme. Papers should address,mutatis mutandis, each of the terms “literature”, “geography” and“translation” within a transnational frame. Possible panels may include:* Notions of world literature from Goethe to Moretti, Casanova andDamrosch* Postcolonial translation* Geographies of literary translation* Histories of literary translation* Transnational literary networks* Literature and the circulation of print * The local, the national and the global in literary historiography* Translating genres* Place, space and geography in literature* Translingual aestheticsConfirmed keynote speakers at the conference will be Susan Bassnett(Warwick), Wai Chee Dimock (Yale), Isabel Hofmeyr (Witwatersrand) and PeterHulme (Essex).Proposals for papers (no longer than 200 words) should be submitted before 1October 2008 to one of the three e-mail addresses noted below. Notificationof acceptance of proposals will be sent out no later than 31 January 2009.A conference website is under construction. More information on this will becirculated presently. Queries concerning practical matters should bedirected to litgeo09@adm.slu.se Proposals and academic enquiries should be directed to one of the followingaddresses:cecilia.alvstad@ilos.uio.nostefan.helgesson@littvet.uu.sedavid.watson@engelska.uu.se