Special Issues CFPs

Special Issues

CLS welcomes proposals for special issues. Proposals should include a title and a general description (500-1000 words) addressing the purpose, relevance and contribution of the project to scholarship in comparative literary studies. If you have finalized your list of contributors, please include a title and a 200-250-word abstract for each individual contribution and a 75-150-word professional biography of each contributor. If you have not finalized your list of contributors, please submit a draft of the open call for papers that you plan to circulate. Special issue editors will finalize lists of accepted abstracts in consultation with the journal’s editor. A final list of confirmed contributors will be reviewed by the CLS editorial collective.

The total length for a proposed special issue should be approximately 70,000 words, which is typically no more than seven or eight articles at an average length of 8,000-10,000 words each. CLS welcomes proposal for special issues that may include varying forms of academic writing. If you would like to include interviews, conversations, or forum essays, feel free to mention this in your proposal.

Process: Proposals should be sent to cl-studies@psu.edu. The CLS editor and the editorial collective will discuss the proposal and decide to accept or to reject the proposal. Our goal is to review and respond to a special issue proposal within three weeks.

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Call For Papers

Counter-Anthropocene Fictions
Guest-editor, Claire Colebrook (Pennsylvania State University) 

After 15 years of debate geologists rejected the naming of a new Anthropocene epoch. The undecidability and indecision surrounding the debate intensifies the problem of the relation between humans and the felicitous conditions of the Holocene. How might disaster, catastrophe and ecology be imagined not just in the wake of the Anthropocene, but through an exploration of all the ends that haunted the earth before the thought of anthropogenic change?  Is there a mal d’archive in living systems as such, a necessary corruptibility and perishing that exceeds the geological markers of the Anthropocene? Just as each individual knows that they will die ‘some day,’ but behaves quite differently if they receive a terminal diagnosis, so ‘humanity’ has been transformed by the event of climate change and the Anthropocene. Without the clear marker of the Anthropocene as an epoch, the earth might be considered as bearing its own hostilities to life. If our own actions have accelerated the end of the world then the task of ameliorating or deferring that end presents itself as possibly human, or at least a form of the human that works with the benevolence of the Earth. Climate change denialists have often pointed to the earth’s inherent volatility and have done so to depoliticize supposedly natural disasters. The counter-Anthropocene charts a path between a depoliticized sense of earth’s dynamism and agency and a politics of catastrophe beyond human agency. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 provoked philosophical and literary responses that questioned the relationship between human history and the supposed harmony of the world. The 1755 earthquake, like the Little Ice Age of the 14th century and the year without a summer of the 19th century were disasters that were intertwined with empire and its technologies, but also posed the problem of a ‘nature’ at odds with the putative progress of civilization.  

There is already a significant corpus of climate change literature, and post-apocalyptic literature that ties the end of the world to human hubris – as if the earth without ‘us’ might have been a better place. The announcement of the Anthropocene in the first decade of the twenty-first century marked planetary transformations of the past in terms of human events – from industrialized agriculture to nuclear fallout – while climate scientists warn of tipping points in the future if ‘we’ do nothing. This new human-centred temporality has transformed both the time and space of catastrophe, but in doing so has displaced other important imaginations of finitude and disaster. How might time, space and endings be conceived beyond the imagination of the earth as a living system that would have remained harmonious had it not been for anthropogenic transformations? The Anthropocene has, in many ways, enabled an almost-comforting narrative of responsibility, even if there is a rich literary, cinematic and philosophical corpus of works exploring the volatility and sometimes malevolence of the earth.   

Earthquakes, for example, may be related to climate change, but their fast violence and spatial intensity produces quite different senses of the end. Tetsuo Takashima’s Tsunami, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘The Comet’ and Liu Cixin’s The Wandering Earth imagine ends that might be thought of beyond the anthropogenic — with the earth itself bearing its own forces. If climate change generates the imperative for ‘us’ to act before it is too late, how do other senses of the end produce aesthetic, political, cultural, formal and imaginary problems that have been explored in literature and visual culture beyond the canon of climate change literature?  

Not only do the terms ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘Anthropogenic’ enable a conception of a cause for contemporary catastrophes, they also imply a general non-human benevolence prior to the golden spike or great acceleration of the Anthropocene. The non-human has been well explored in terms of animal and plant life, but there is another layer of time and ‘agency’ in the non-organic forces of the earth. The earth as we know it is the outcome of what Charlotte Smith referred to as a ‘vast concussion.’ How might we live, write, think and respond in the milieu of a volatile and occasionally hostile planet? While it is urgent and necessary to acknowledge the role of humans in planetary disasters, it is also perhaps no less necessary to reckon with forces that appear as hostile, inhuman and destructive of the fantasy that if ‘we’ behave well the future might be ours. How do localized and apparently non-anthropogenic catastrophes require different narrative and formal responses? What are the geopolitical consequences of acknowledging the earth rather than the climate as a force to be reckoned with? Can there be a politics of the earth as Medea rather than Gaia? The counter-Anthropocene poses the question of ends of the world beyond, before or alongside the anthropogenic.   

The counter-Anthropocene hypothesis posed in this call for paper is not a denial of anthropogenic change but rather an invitation to explore an ethics and politics of catastrophe that reckons with a time and volatility of the earth without us, beyond us and hostile to us. 

Essays may be 7,000-12,000 words in length. Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words to nue5@psu.edu and cmc30@psu.edu by February 28, 2025. Please include a 200-300-word biography, and use “Counter-Anthropocene Fictions” in the subject line of your email. Authors will be informed of provisional acceptance by the end of March 2025, and full articles will be due by August 31, 2025.  

Keywords:
Earthquakes, volcanos, toxicity, year without a summer, Little Ice Age, Medea hypothesis, Bologna prophecy, tsunamis, and coal mining disasters. 

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Representations of the New Right in Contemporary European and American Fiction
Guest editor, Lena Seauve (Freie Universität Berlin)

New Right movements have moved in recent years from society’s outer fringes into the political mainstream. Disciplines like political science and sociology have given extensive attention to the phenomenon of the New Right, but its representation in fiction has yet to receive scholarly attention. This Comparative Literature Studies special issue aims to address this gap by examining contemporary narratives about and by the New Right across European and American contexts.

Essays may address contemporary literature and film that represent the New Right critically as well as those narratives that clearly propagate its political and aesthetic agenda. Special attention will also be paid to the large gray area between the two – those narratives whose stance is deliberately ambivalent. Working with methodologies borrowed from comparative literature and cultural studies, this special issue will critically examine the aesthetics and politics of contemporary New Right narratives. Questions to be addressed may include: How are New Right ideas mediated by contemporary fiction and film? How do the boundaries of what can be said and done shift in these works? How do contemporary New Right narratives represent the National Socialist, fascist, and colonial past of the (trans)national contexts in which they are set? What are the important continuities and breaks with aesthetic practices of the past? Essays will also examine how the writings of twentieth-century Right thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, and Armin Mohler, or more recently, Alain de Benoist shape the aesthetics and politics of contemporary New Right fiction.

As contributions on France, Italy, Great Britain, North America, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile are already planned, the editor is particularly interested in proposals that address aesthetic productions from other regions within the defined geographical framework, for instance Central or Eastern Europe or Central America.

Contributions may be up to 7,000-10,000 words in length. Please send a proposal of no more than 500 words to lena.seauve@fu-berlin.de by March 30, 2024. Please include a 200-300-word biography, and use “New Right Narratives” in the subject line of your email. Authors will be informed of provisional acceptance by the end of April 2024, the deadline for submitting finished articles will be the end of August 2024.

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Archival Turns, Twists, and New Directions
Guest editor, Cristina Vatulescu (New York University)