This year’s annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association gathered at Georgetown University. Participants met in small seminars over the course of the weekend, a format that made overhearing a challenge, but certainly not an impossibility. Amid the intimacy, knowledge building, and theorizing, literary folks had plenty of discourse to generate in the liminal spaces of the conference. Read on to see how subjects were interpellated in this Shoptalk.
1. “I’m always the copyeditor in the relationship.”
2. Person 1: “The themes and structures—and the spatiality!”
Person 2: “Don’t get me started on the spatiality.”
3. “I got soaked in the rain, so I bought a Georgetown Dad T-shirt.”
4. Person 1: “The route to that building is precarious.”
Person 2: “Just like the humanities.”
5. “Theory heads love a piano bar.”
6. “What if my drag name was Camp Aria Lit?”
7. Person 1: “She had 13 cats.”
Person 2: “That’s always already too many cats.”
8. Person 1: “There are too many sonic resonances in this space.”
Person 2: “Do you mean it echoes?”
9. “I was bummed because the medieval paper didn’t have any dragons.”
10. “That panel reminded me of why I don’t like Angela’s Ashes.”
11. “Adorno and Arendt walk into a bar …”
