JLIC: New Call for Abstracts for Special Issue “Poetics in An Age of Differences”

Guest editor:

Andrew Bricker (Ghent University)

CFP: “Poetics in An Age of Differences”, A Special Issue of the Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings 

Over the last century, literary studies has undergone a profound transformation. Once grounded in broadly universalist assumptions about literary value, aesthetic experience, and human meaning, the discipline has increasingly turned toward difference: toward historically marginalized voices, minoritized literatures, experimental forms, decolonial critique, feminist and queer reading practices, Indigenous epistemologies, and the politics of representation itself. While this turn has fundamentally reshaped literary scholarship for the better, it has also left in its wake unanswered questions about the authority, scope, and public role of literary criticism in the contemporary world alongside, perhaps, an enduring but cautious desire for some kind of reformed universalism that might unify literary practices, literary scholarship, and literature’s many diverse publics and readers.

This special issue of the Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings emerges from a series of events tied to Prof. Roland Greene’s Francqui International Professorship at Ghent University (alongside VUB, UCLouvain, and KU Leuven), including his inaugural lecture, “Literary Studies After Universalism: A History and a Manifesto”, and a series of seminars conducted at the four host universities on the histories, afterlives, crises, and possible futures of universalism within literary studies broadly conceived.
The special issue invites contributions that interrogate what remains of universalist thinking after the discipline’s ethical, political, and epistemological transformations since the mid-twentieth century. How should literary criticism understand its public role in an era defined by fragmentation, global inequality, and contested democratic values? What forms of authority, expertise, or public legitimacy remain available to literary studies? Can concepts such as universality, collectivity, or shared human experience be rehabilitated without reproducing the exclusions historically associated with them? Conversely, what is lost when universalism is rejected outright?

We particularly welcome essays that place literary studies into dialogue with historical developments and broader social and political concerns, including democracy, public culture, decolonization, digital media, environmental crisis, migration, translation, and changing institutional structures within higher education. The issue is also interested in how literary criticism reaches — or fails to reach — diverse publics beyond the university.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Histories of universalism in literary criticism and theory
• The post-WWII turn away from universalist paradigms
• Canon formation, anti-canon movements, and institutional authority
• Comparative, world, or planetary literature after universalism
• Literary criticism and democratic culture
• Decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, queer, and critical race critiques of universality
• The ethics and politics of reading
• Literature and the public humanities
• The future of literary expertise and criticism
• Literary studies and digital publics
• Translation, cosmopolitanism, and transnational readerships
• Literature, affect, and shared experience
• Intermediality and new publics for literature
• The relationship between literary studies and contemporary political crises
• Experimental forms of criticism and scholarly communication

The issue also welcomes contributions that engage one or more of the symposium’s four conceptual clusters:

1. The Turn Away circa 1950: historical investigations into the decline of universalist paradigms in literary studies and criticism.
2. The Politics of Literary Studies: competing claims to intellectual, ethical, and political authority within the discipline after the 1960s.
3. Who Writes and Who Reads?: questions of readership, professionalization, expertise, and the vocation of criticism.
4. New Publics for Literature: reimagining the social function and audiences of literary study in the twenty-first century.

We welcome contributions from scholars working across literary studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, media studies, intermedial studies, rhetoric, philosophy, translation studies, digital humanities, performance studies, and adjacent disciplines.
We particularly encourage submissions from early career scholars, including M.A. and Ph.D. candidates and postdoctoral researchers.