Dear all,
Below is a Call for Proposals that may be of interest to some of you.
We’re looking for contributions to an edited volume on space and the nonhuman in narrative. Our focus will be on how the materiality of space shapes certain kinds of narratives (and readers’ imagination thereof), creating a platform for thinking beyond the human scale. The collection aims to bring narrative theory and cognitive approaches to literature into a conversation with the nonhuman turn.
If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch!
All the best,
David, Marco, and Marlene
Call for Proposals
Experiencing Nonhuman Spaces: Between Description and Narration
Abstracts due: 24 February 2017
“We felt enlarge itself round us the huge blackness of what is outside us, of what we are not,” declares Bernard in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931/2000, 213). “What we are not”-the nonhuman-has emerged as one of the most thought-provoking concepts in contemporary literary scholarship. As Mark McGurl puts it, “the obdurate rock, the dead-cold stone [has taken] center stage as an image of the non-human thing, the thing that simply does not care, and has been not-caring for longer than anyone can remember” (2011, 384). Thinking about-and with-the raw physicality of matter has proven instrumental in destabilizing a metaphysically entrenched conception of the human. Just as Bernard’s language views the nonhuman through spatial metaphors (“enlarge,” “round,” “outside”), the experience and imagination of space are key to any attempt to move beyond what we are.
The proposed collection of essays seeks to come to grips with how literary narrative may confront readers with the materiality of the spaces we live in, leveraging spatial description and spatial metaphors as a springboard toward the nonhuman. Literary studies after the “spatial turn” has explored the intersection between spatiality and multiple embodiments of “otherness”-postcolonial, queer, animal. In narratology, space has been a rich area of recent research, including Katrin Dennerlein’s monograph Narratologie des Raumes (2009), Fludernik and Keen’s special issue of Style, “Interior Spaces and Narrative Perspective” (2014), and Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu’s collaboration Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016). But in these areas of scholarship the phenomenological dimension of narrative space and its interpretive and epistemological ramifications for theories of the (non)human have been left on the sidelines. Michel Butor claimed: “[The novel] is the phenomenological realm par excellence, the best place to explore how reality appears to us, or might appear.” Revisiting and extending insights from phenomenologically and cognitively oriented approaches to literature, we are interested in how literary narrative may translate the nonhuman into a concrete experience that, like Bernard, readers may feel “enlarge itself round” them.
The primary focus of the proposed essays should be an open dialogue within and without literary studies in order to evaluate the role of spatial description and spatial language in challenging ingrained distinctions between human cultures and subjectivity and material realities. Particularly of interest are connections between narratology and emerging fields that prioritize the nonhuman, such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology. Possible topics include:
- The challenges involved in conveying an experience of spaces and phenomena beyond (or below) the human scale.
- “Empty deictic center” texts, in Ann Banfield’s (1987) term, or narratives that focus on spaces in the absence of human observers.
- Empathy and affect for inanimate objects, as elicited by spatial descriptions.
- The productivity of spatial metaphors in genres such as climate change and postapocalyptic fiction.
- Affordances of specific media that foreground space and the nonhuman.
- Any other project exploring narrative challenges to anthropocentrism, and how they play out in spatial terms.
Please send 300-500 word proposals to Marco Caracciolo (marcocaracciolo84@gmail.com), Marlene Marcussen (marlene@sdu.dk), and David Rodriguez (david.m.rodriguez@stonybrook.edu) by 24 February 2017.
Preliminary deadlines:
- 24 February 2017: abstracts are due
- Early April 2017: notification of acceptance
- 1 January 2018: first drafts are due