A conference including 140 speakers and 47 panels will meet on campus to discuss global perspectives of literature.

The American Comparative Literature Association will be held in the Keller Conference Center beginning at 8:45 tomorrow morning until noon Saturday.

This year's theme -- Literature in Global Perspective: Interactions and Refractions -- is designed to open the conference to a wider audience including younger scholars, said conference director Gerhard F. Strasser.

This is the first year Penn State has sponsored the conference and several of the issues emphasize Third World, African-American and women's literature.

The conference will be divided into six panel topics with two panel discussions in the morning and two in the afternoon each day.

Topics this year include:

-- The Writer in a Strange Land

-- Rethinking Reception and Reception Theory

-- Literature in the Oral Tradition

-- Representations of the Past and Future

The conference aims to provide a forum for new faculty, Strasser said. Several doctoral students will read their papers, he said.

"It is exciting that so many young people are involved this year," Strasser said. Part of the success of the conference will be dependent on the interaction of the writers with one another and the audience, he said.

Conference keynote speaker Ngugi wa Thiong'o will speak at 4:15 p.m. on Friday. Ngugi, a Kenyan novelist, playwright and essayist is a visiting professor at Yale University and will give a talk titled African Literature Today: Toward the Twenty-First Century.

Ngugi will also discuss globalization in literature, the plurality of languages and the connections between language and political change.

The conference is open to the public.