Upcoming Events

Hi everyone! Below is a list of some of our events which are open to all students:

Thesis Writing Workshop, Mon. September 15th 4:30-5:50pm Hum. 374

Pub Night at Zeitgeist (199 Valencia @ Duboce in the Mission District) Fri. September 19th 4pm - midnight?

Is Doctoral Study Right For You? Workshop Mon. September 22th 4:30-5:50 Hum. 587

Poetry Reading Night In November (time and location shortly)

Additionally, the CLSA is excited to announce that this year we will be collaborating with other organizations on campus. The following are events that the Graduate (English) Literature Association (the GLA) has proposed and that we are extending to all Comp. Lit. students:

Thurs 10/2 9pm Pub Night in the Mission at Liberty's
Wed 10/15 6pm Presidential Debate at Jones' Bar in the Marina (Divisidero & Lombard)
Sun 11/2 2pm Study Day at People's Cafe in the Haight
Tues 11/25 Museum Day during Thanksgiving Week. We will set a time and pick a location closer in.
Tues 12/2 9pm Pub Night at Fly Bar in Western Addition (Divisidero & Fulton)


We also hope to co-sponser the following event with The Michelangelo Club (from the Italian Department):

Foreign Film Night In early October (time and location to follow shortly)

INTRODUCING THE NEW CLSA

Hello Everyone,

I would like to present the new officers of the CLSA for 2008:

President: Bernie Mendoza

VP's of University Relations: Briah Luther and Anthony Scoggins

VP's of Publishing: David King and Laura Gillis

On behalf of the new CLSA I would like to congratulate all graduating students and offer a sincere thank you to last year's CLSA. Vered Weiss did an awesome job as president as did the rest of the team: Angelo, Adri and David. Thanks for all your hard work and the great memories and I wish you all the best of luck. I have no doubt this year's team will be as successful and as fun!

Have a great summer break and I hope to see everyone next fall at our Welcome Party (which I will keep you updated on)!

Bernie

Spring Career Panel

Announcing

Spring Career Panel

Come meet current students and alumni from the Comparative Literature program at SFSU

working in a variety of fields

from education to publishing

to find out

just what one does after graduation.

Thursday, April 3^rd, 2008, 7-9 pm

HUM 109

Refreshments provided

Brought to you by the Comparative Literature Student Association

Extended deadline for CLSA Symposium

Deadline for The CLSA Annual Symposium submissions has been extended to March 20th!!!

The CLSA Annual Symposium
At Rosa Parks E
March 22nd at 11am

The symposium will offer a stage for the presentation of various literary and academic genres within the comparative discipline: Translations, poems, short stories, riddles and limericks are welcome, as is conventional (or unconventional) literary criticism.

Please send abstracts to
vweiss@sfsu.edu

The CLSA Annual Symposium

The Comparative & World Literature Student Association invites you to participate in

The CLSA Annual Symposium

At Rosa Parks E

March 22^nd at 11am

The symposium will offer a stage for the presentation of various literary and academic genres within the comparative discipline:
Translations, poems, short stories, riddles and limericks are welcome, as is conventional (or unconventional) literary criticism.

The deadline for abstract submission is March 14^th

Please send abstracts to

clsa@sfsu.edu

or

vweiss@sfsu.edu

Conference Round Table

The Comparative Literature Student Association invites you to the CLSA 2008

Conference Round Table

which will be held at

HUM 109 March 18^th at 7:30pm.

The annual Conference Round Table is where professors and graduate students who had already presented at a conference share their experiences with other students. The speakers address a wide range of issues: from the technicalities of submitting a paper to a conference to performance tips and dress code. Each speaker brings his/her personal experience and point of view in order to present a variety of possible approaches. The event is right for the students who are taking their first steps in the world of academia as well as veterans. Come have all your questions answered and fears banished.

Refreshments provided

For further information please contact us at

clsa@sfsu.edu

Poetry Reading

The Comparative & World Literature Students’ Association

invites you to join us for an evening of poetry and wine at

The Second

Poetry Reading Evening

The evening will offer a stage for the presentation of various literary genres:
Poems, riddles and limericks are welcome.
We welcome both original and recycled work.

Location: at Vered Weiss’ 575a 27^th Ave. (Between Geary & Anza)

Time: February 29^th at 8pm

The party is potluck

For further information please contact us at

clasa@sfsu.edu

or

vweiss@sfsu.edu

CFP: Portals: Comparative Literature Journal Vol. 6 deadline extended!!!

Deadline for Portals submissions has been extended to March 3rd!!!

Portals: A Journal of Comparative Literature is a graduate student journal published annually by the Comparative Literature Student Association at San Francisco State University.

Portals invites original, critical essay submissions that explore comparative literary topics across cultural, regional, linguistic, and temporal boundaries, as well as poetry translations for the Spring 2008 issue.

Submission Guidelines

NOTE: Only papers by currently enrolled graduate students and doctoral candidates will be considered. Any faculty submissions will be automatically rejected with no further notice.

Comparative Essays:

• Papers must be written in English.


• In order to be considered for submission, essays must compare at least
  two literary works from different linguistic traditions.


• Citations should include both the original language and the English
  translation.


• Papers should be no longer than 25 pages in 12 point font, and should be
  properly formatted and documented in MLA style.

Poetry Translations:

Portals also invites short poetry translations. Submissions should include
a copy of the original and an additional 2-5 page explication of the
translation. Poetry translations will be published in tandem with the
original. Please submit the original with complete citation.

All submissions are to be sent via e-mail as an MS-Word attachment.
Submissions must include a 250-word abstract and a cover sheet including
name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, school affiliation, and
current academic standing; your name should not appear anywhere else in the
proposal, since this will be a blind selection process.

Contributions for the journal are reviewed with the understanding that they
have not been submitted to another journal. Articles will be published
online late in the Spring of 2008.

Due Date: March 3, 2008

We recommend that you visit our website before submitting:
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~clsa/portals/

Please direct all submissions and inquiries to:
clsa@sfsu.edu

Welcome Back!

Now that Spring has started, we've gotten to know each other better, and we've gotten a little more acclimatized, it's time to kick the CLSA into high gear. Upcoming events include:

Welcome Back Pub night!

Feb 5th (Vote Early and Often!!!)

7:30pm (or so.)

Philosopher's Club

824 Ulloa St. (West Portal MUNI Station)

Portals submission deadline!!!

I know some folks might be nervous or intimidated about sending their papers. We are always our own harshest critic and editor. Perhaps we're just fixing one or two more things before submitting... Just bite the bullet and send it in!!!

It's a blind selection which means the people evaluating your paper won't know it's yours. If you're selected, you have a publication for your CV and future employment, and if you're not selected, no harm, no foul. This is the BEST introduction to CFPs you can find, and it really does build confidence for future efforts.

Once we have our submissions we will need an editorial staff to help with the selection process and later editing for publication. This is a course-credit position, good for a CV, you learn valuable technical and editing skills, and not as time consuming as you might think. I highly encourage all CLSA grad students to participate.

Coming Soon...

Portals Editors request

Symposium

Speakers

Industry Related Panels

Of final papers, technology, cabbages and kings

Since it is the time of year when we Comp Lit students turn our minds towards final papers worth most of our semester grade, I thought I might share some alternative technological research tips.

By now we all have off-campus library pins, and if we don't, we should. It allows those of us who live off-campus to do our research into the MLA International Bibliography, Literature Online (LION), JSTOR, Project Muse, ProQuest Dissertations an Theses, etc in our pajamas at 3am. We've probably discovered Google Scholar, which allows us to search some journal articles and books, and Google Books which allows us to search and view some pages of books which we can add to our research "library". Maybe you've used Link+ to borrow books from other schools in CA and NV, or you've used ILLiad to request an article in a publication that isn't available in our library. Maybe you've looked at ABEbooks, a consortium of over 10,000 private book sellers with a Book Finder feature, or Alibris, a front-end for thousands of international independent book sellers, to track down a copy.

But have you tried the following tricks?

Amazon
Amazon, like Google Books, frequently allows you to search inside books and view whole pages. Unlike Google Books, they are a bit more lenient and will often allow you to view up to 10 consecutive pages, so you'll know if it's actually useful enough to be worth tracking down.

E-mail
In one lower div class, I was reading Lysistrata and the instructor hadn't thought to specify a translation, so half the class was reading one version and the rest of the class another. Predictably, questions came up about why certain choices were made, particularly, why did the British translator make the "hick", rural, warrior Spartans have a Scottish accent and the American make them Appalachian? (As a West Coaster, I'd have probably gone Texan. Sorry Melina!) I was working on writing a paper filled with all sorts of suppositions about why these choices were made, when I decided to just google the name and e-mail the translator, who was still teaching (at Texas A&M, which answered that question).

Similarly, I had a translated poem by a (back then still) Yugoslavian poet and was trying to find an additional English translation. After the split, she became a Serbian peace activist and English translator and had a readily accessible e-mail address. She responded there wasn't another translation that she knew of, but that she'd never seen the one I had, so could I send her a copy of the book.

Craigslist
So what do you do when you've tried everything? You've used all of the databases, checked all of the libraries, and after 6 hours of tracking it down find that the poem you need is only printed in one rare, weird book from 1682, and the only copy is in one private appointment-only library in the US, and only one college in the state of California has access to an electronic copy. What now? Post it to their local craigslist and ask someone to look it up for you. (I put it in writing gigs, based on the principle that literature students who spend a lot of time reseaching in the library probably cruise the writing gigs boards for petty cash jobs for editing and such. I had 3 responses in less than 12 hours.)

Now that you're done...
So, you've managed to research the heck out of your thesis, written a paper, submitted it to your prof, and finished the semester, now what are you going to do? Submit it to Portals!