Call For Papers

Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, University of Glasgow / Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick

President of the British Comparative Literature Association

Professeur des Universités en Littérature comparée, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne

Professor of European Literature and Translation, University of East Anglia / Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation

Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford / Director, Oxford Centre for Life Writing

‘Questions about justice, about well-being and social distribution, about moral realism and relativism, about the nature of rationality, about the concept of the person, about the emotions and desires, about the role of luck in human life – all these and others are debated from many sides with considerable excitement and even urgency.’

Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature  

What different roles does literature play in our lives today? What are the stakes involved in the ways that literature is produced, circulated, translated, adapted, and taught? Over the last few decades, there has been a renewed interest in both ethical criticism and what has become known as affect theory. But literature has always been concerned with questions such as morality, politics, law and justice on the one hand, and sensations, emotions, intimacy and relationality on the other. Developments in literary/cultural theory have given us new ways to think about these questions and to reflect on changes in both epistemology and technology.

For Wayne Booth, ‘ethical criticism attempts to describe the encounters of a storyteller’s ethos with that of the reader or listener’. This emphasis on the ethics of both writing/narrating and reading/listening invokes wider questions of representation, reception, and criticism. It also implies the notion of a community of writers and readers engaged in using literature to make sense of their being in the world and their relationship with one another, recalling Tobin Siebers’ statement that ‘at the heart of ethics is a desire for community’. This interest in community involves in turn questions of identity, subjectivity, alterity, otherness and difference that underpin a wide body of theory and criticism, encompassing (but not limited to) decolonialism, feminism, postcolonialism, queer studies, translation studies, and world literature.

The focus on identity and community is also where we see a potential convergence of ethics and affect: literature influences both the private and the public spheres. Raymond Williams’ identification of ‘structures of feeling’ provides a means to consider ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt’. This emphasis on embodied experience can also be seen in the works we now associate with affect theory, exemplified by Lauren Berlant’s definition of the ‘the intimate public sphere’ as ‘a space of mediation where the personal is refracted through the general’.  Affect theory allows to consider pre-cognitive and non-linguistic states of being, to consider how these states affect us, and to analyse how we interpret them. As Deleuze and  Guattari write, ‘Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them’. We can approach these affects from different ethical standpoints, or consider how affects inhere to different ethical questions, exemplified by Sara Ahmed: ‘Justice is not simply a feeling. And feelings are not always just. But justice involves feelings, which move across the surfaces of the world, creating ripples in the intimate contours of our lives.’

Ethical and/or affective approaches to criticism and interpretation

Writing and reading as ethical and/or affective practices

Ethics of representation / witnessing, memory, and postmemory

Empathy, hospitality, and reparation

A good life / a good-enough life/ living one’s ‘best life’

The human/ humanism/the Anthropocene

Globalisation, decolonialism, and decoloniality

Censorship and didacticism

Travelling, tourism, ethnographies

The ethics and/or affect of the gaze

Affective ecologies / affective landscapes, walking, pilgrimages/ the Blue Humanities

Medical humanities and disability studies

Aesthetics, aestheticism, aisthesis and noesis

Archives, museums, canons/anti-canons, pantheons, catalogues, alternative taxonomies

Queer readings, alternative epistemologies, epistemic disobedience

Translation, adaptation, intertextuality, intermediality

Life writing, biography, autobiography, the autobiographical pact

Utopias, dystopias, fantasy, possible worlds

Genre, form, medium, style, rhetoric

Erotics and hermeneutics / messy interpretations

Performance, interaction, immersive theatre, gaming

Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Routledge, 2004)

Berlant, Lauren, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke UP, 2008)

Booth, Wayne, Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (University of California Press, 1988)

Cvetkovich, Ann, An Archive of Feelings? Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2003)

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (Verso, 1994)

Frank, Adam J., and Elizabeth A. Wilson,  A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

Mouffe, Chantal, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects (Verso, 2022).   

Nussbaum, Martha, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford UP, 1990)

Siebers, Tobin, The Ethics of Criticism (Cornell UP, 1988)

Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford UP, 1977)