Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Aug 2025, 01:35:13am KST

 
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Session Overview
Session
Special Session II: Roundtable on Living With Machines: Comparative Literature, AI, and the Ethics of Digital Imagination
Time:
Wednesday, 30/July/2025:
1:30pm - 3:00pm

Session Chair: Matthew Reynolds, University of Oxford
Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom


2025 ICLA SPECIAL SESSION 2 - YouTube

Special Session II: Roundtable on Living With Machines: Comparative Literature, AI, and the Ethics of Digital Imagination

#5: Wednesday, 7.30, 13:30 am - 15:00 pm 
Location: KINTEX 1, Grand Ballroom 

Session Chair: Matthew Reynolds (University of Oxford, UK)

Speakers: Each speaker will give a 5 minute lightning talk about the paper or project.

Alberto Parisi (Kobe University, Japan)
The Power Not to Think: LLMs as Poetic Impotential Machines

Matthew Reynolds (University of Oxford, UK)
Constraints as a Route to Creativity in AI Translation: the AIDCPT project

Deepshikha Behera (EFL University, India)
“My Language has no School”: Decolonising AI Translation

Nicholas Y. H. Wong (The University of Hong Kong)
Vocational but Vernacular: Forestry Policies and Sinophone Malaysian Literature

Christof Schöch (Trier University)
Multilingual Stylometry: The Influence of Language, Translation, and Corpus Composition on Authorship Attribution Accuracy

Simone Rebora (University of Verona, Italy)
Digital Social Reading and Comparative Literature: Three Case Studies

Translation and the Eco-Techno Turn: Individuation Across Organic and Inorganic Realms
Youngmin Kim (Dongguk University, Korea)

Joseph Hankinson (University of Oxford, UK)
Complementarities: Artificial Intelligence and Language Ontologies

Wen-Chin Ouyang (SOAS, University of London, UK)
Arabic and Chinese Wine Poems: Culture and Ethos

Cosima Bruno (SOAS, University of London, UK)
The Multiverse: AI Poetry Translation in the Network System

Shengke Deng (Tsinghua University, China)
Crisis of Subjectivity in Technological Networks: Bruno Latour and Impersonal Generation in Digital Age

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (Sichuan University, China)
Digital Humanities and Publishing Scholarship in the Humanities


Session Abstract

Comparative Literature, AI, and the Ethics of Digital Imagination

The dreamor nightmareof artificial intelligence has long haunted speculative literature, but today it is no longer confined to fiction. As AI technologies increasingly shape our social, cultural, and epistemological landscapes, they raise urgent questions about what it means to be human and how we might live with the machines we have created. This session explores how comparative literature, digital humanities, and AI ethics intersect to address these questions. Drawing inspiration from UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the session frames literary and digital inquiry as vital tools for imagining and negotiating the ethical, existential, and political dimensions of AI. Through case studies ranging from poetic language models to decolonial translation pedagogy, the session foregrounds literature’s role in shaping cultural responses to technological futures.

The speakers in this special session span a wide range of geographies, languages, and methodologies. From poetic experimentation with LLMs to decolonial translation practices, the speakers explore the cultural and ontological implications of AI in multilingual contexts, while reflecting on subjectivity and comparative literature in digital networks as well as addressing the transformation of scholarly publishing. Together, they offer a critical, multilingual, and transregional dialogue on how literature and digital tools can collaboratively respond to the ethical imperatives of our AI-infused world.


External Resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMgf-eyx6lo&t=5988s
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Presentations
ID: 1805 / Special Session II: 1
Special Sessions
Keywords: 70th Anniversary, ICLA, National Associations of Comparative Literature, Roundtable, Lightning Talk

Special Session II: Roundtable Celebrating 70th Anniversary of the ICLA

Lucia Boldrini1, Anne Duprat2, Ipshita Chanda3, Sandra Bermann4, Anne Tomiche5, Hiraishi Noriko6, Haun Saussy7, Márcio Seligmann-Silva8, E.V. Ramarkrishnan9, Marc Maufort10, Chengzhou He11, Emanuelle Santos12, Matthew Reynolds13, Stefan Helgesson14

1Goldsmiths, UK; 2Picardie-Jules Verne University, France; 3EFLU, India; 4Princeton U; 5U of Sorbonne, France; 6Tsukuba U, Japan; 7U of Chicago, USA; 8UNICAMP, Brazil; 9Central U of Gujarat, India; 10Editor of Recherche littéraire, USA; 11Nanjing University, China; 12U of Birmingham, UK; 13Oxford U; 14Stockholm U

Special Session II: Roundtable Celebrating 70th Anniversary of the ICLA:

Connecting National Associations of Comparative Literature across Regions and Temporality

Chairs:

Lucia Boldrini, Goldsmiths, UK, President of the ICLA

Anne Duprat, Picardie-Jules Verne University, France, Secretary of the ICLA

Ipshita Chanda, EFLU, India, Secretary of the ICLA

Speakers:

Sandra L. Bermann, Princeton U, USA: President of the ICLA (2019-2022)

Anne Tomiche, U of Sorbonne, France, Vice-President of the ICLA

Hiraishi Noriko, Tssukuba U, Japan, Vice-President of the ICLA

Haun Saussy, U of Chicago, USA, Vice-President of the ICLA

Macio Seligmann-Silva, UNICAMP, Brazil, Vice-President of the ICLA

E. V. Ramarkrishnan, Central U of Gujarat, India

Marc Maufort, Editor of Recherche littéraire, USA

He Chengzhou, Nanjing University, China,

Emanuelle Santos, Chair of the ECARE/NEXT GEN, U of Birmingham, UK

Matthew Reynolds, Chair of Research Committees, Oxford U, UK

Stefan Helgesson, Chair of the Nominating Committee, Stockholm U, Sweden

Q&A:

Bibliography
TBA