Can Literary Criticism Break Free of the Silos Trap—and Carry Literature Along? (NeMLA's 58th Annual Convention)
FEATURED LISTINGSalve Regina University
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA's 58th Annual Convention
CALL FOR PAPERS — NeMLA 2027 Seminar
Salve Regina University, Newport, RI | March 6–9, 2027
Can Literary Criticism Break Free of the Silos Trap — and Carry Literature Along?
In the early 1950s, Lacan admonished psychoanalysts for operating within Newtonian epistemology fifty years after Einstein and Heisenberg had dismantled it. It may be worth asking ourselves whether we, literary critics, 125 years later, have adjusted our analytical machine — or, at least, whether it is necessary that we do.
The answer is not self-evident. Literature itself is not trapped: it often operates in a position of antelación, perceiving and formally enacting epistemological shifts before the culture and the critical apparatus is equipped to name them. Kafka denounced the effects of the uberburocratization of society before the bureaucratic machine was perfected. Carroll dissolved space-time logic before Einstein formalized it. The question is whether literary criticism has kept pace — or whether the disciplinary silos we aim to transcend have become the very walls that contain us.
What if it's not the Earth that pulls the apple, but the apple that traces the curvature of spacetime? What if time were neither linear nor circular but helicoidal? Perhaps, meaning does not travel by ground but by air.
This seminar invites participants to assess the current state of literary criticism and to imagine what the field might look like if we challenged its epistemological foundations. We welcome papers that examine the field's blind spots, interrogate the logic that produces them, and are willing to venture what a paradigm shift might produce — for criticism, and for the literature it serves.
The session will be held in hybrid format — in person or remotely. Accepted papers will be pre-circulated among all members of the seminar prior to the session. The group will include between 5 and 10 participants. Papers should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words. Please submit an abstract of 250–300 words and a brief bio.
Abstract submission window: June 15 – September 30, 2026
Seminar chair: Alejandro López, Boston University lopez58@bu.edu
Submit at: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22482
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22482
Alejandro López