CALL FOR PAPERS Literary Boundary Work: Big Data and Comparative Non-Literature A seminar proposal for ACLA 2016, next March 17-20 at Harvard Abstracts by September 23 and further details at http://www.acla.org/node/5114 Questions to Scott Kushner, scottkushner@uri.edu Convened by Scott Kushner (Communication Studies, URI) and Jonathan Abel (Comp Lit, Penn State) Literary study draws its boundaries too narrowly. This is why as the discipline that continually seeks "literature plus ______” (another language, a new theory, a different medium), comparative literature shines brightest when it engages methodologies and objects from both within and beyond the traditional limits of literary studies. A new century brought novel forms of writing and criticism, though many practitioners of literary study still tread gingerly around status updates and comments, TEI and corpuses. Recent critical techniques for textual interpretation may reveal as illusory close reading's long monopoly on research and pedagogy. New textual cultures in everyday networked media continue to trouble the discipline's notions of the literary. Taken together, such shifts in methodology and object can reshape and rejuvenate literary studies. This seminar will ask what is new and what has stayed the same in comparative literature. Papers will map emergent and resilient methodologies, survey the current boundaries of the field, and inventory the professional practices that legitimize the discipline. As scholars apply new tools to new texts in new ways, what continues to hold comparative literature together and distinguish it from neighboring fields?