Rethinking the Fantastic: Impossibility, Ontology, and Alternative Realities (NeMLA)
Newport, RI
Organization: 58th NeMLA Convention
Event: NeMLA
Call for Papers
NeMLA 2027 Annual Convention
Rethinking the Fantastic: Impossibility, Ontology, and Alternative Realities
What makes a text fantastic? While traditional definitions often emphasize the supernatural or the uncanny, many literary works generate the fantastic through impossibility itself. Impossible worlds, contradictory realities, unstable identities, infinite spaces, and paradoxical temporalities challenge readers' assumptions about reality and invite new ways of understanding existence.
This panel explores the fantastic through the lens of impossibility, examining how literature constructs alternative realities that disrupt conventional notions of ontology, epistemology, identity, language, memory, and time. While the work of Jorge Luis Borges serves as a significant point of departure for these discussions, the panel also welcomes comparative and interdisciplinary approaches that extend beyond Borges to other literary traditions, periods, and media.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Impossibility as a defining feature of the fantastic
- Ontological and epistemological uncertainty
- Borges and the redefinition of the fantastic
- Comparative studies of Borges and other writers of the fantastic
- Alternative realities, dreams, simulations, and virtual worlds
- Labyrinths, infinite libraries, mirrors, doubles, and paradoxes
- Time, memory, identity, and narrative impossibility
- Metafiction and self-reflexive narrative
- The fantastic across cultures, languages, and historical periods
- Philosophical approaches to the fantastic
- Contemporary fantasy, speculative fiction, and science fiction in relation to impossibility
We welcome proposals from scholars at all career stages and encourage contributions from literary studies, comparative literature, philosophy, cultural studies, media studies, and related disciplines.
Submission Information
Please submit a 250–300-word abstract through the NeMLA submission portal.
Submission deadline: September 30, 2026
CFP page: https://cfplist.com/nemla/ Home/S/22693
Session modality: Remote only
This panel seeks to foster conversations on how impossibility reshapes our understanding of the fantastic across literary traditions and theoretical perspectives. We look forward to receiving proposals that reconsider the fantastic beyond conventional boundaries.
Ay?e Nur Beler