“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. [...]”

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

If reading and comparing, interpretation and translation are regular keywords in our discipline, re-reading is a concept that goes often unexplored, even though it endows them all with new and enhanced meaning. That ‘re’ necessarily asks us to position that reading and its repetition (or repetitions) within time and space: in the short term, re-reading is essential to any intensive, critical engagement with text; but re-reading in the longer term entails revisiting more than just text – it means an active comparison between now and then, necessarily locating ourselves within that action and renegotiating both cultural and personal awareness. Re-reading can take different forms as it happens over time, sometimes a seasonal or cyclical action to find something familiar – yet never quite the same – sometimes taking the shape of cumulative, palimpsestic reading. And what if we extend that act of reading outside of ourselves, and choose to read and understand with others, inscribing our own interpretive effort within a history of reading? We become part of an interpretive community where reading and re-reading – across time and space, borders and languages, cultures and media – contribute to a tapestry of meaning.

We invite contributions for posters and 15-minute papers that build on the concept of re-reading to reflect on themes including, though not limited to, the following:

• material expressions of re-reading
• comparing re-readings of the same text
• fictional representations of re-reading
• re-reading as emotion
• translation and re-translation
• adaptation and transformations of texts across media
• re-appropriation of texts, canons, histories
• intergenerational and diachronic acts of re-reading
• rewriting as re-reading
• re-reading and decoloniality
• dystopia as re-reading

Please send proposals of around 200 words to <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.;, including your name, affiliation, and a brief biography by 3 March 2025. All participants will be notified by 14 March 2025. Attendance is free and the conference will be hybrid. Our keynote speaker this year will be Professor David Damrosch (Institute for World Literature, Harvard University).