CFP: Explorations of Space (MLA, Toronto, Jan. 8-11, 2026)
-
Modern Language Association Conference
Toronto
January 8–11, 2026CFP: Explorations of Space (organized by the LLC Forum for 18th- and early 19th-Century German)
The Forum for 18th- and early 19th-century German seeks papers contributing new insights to notions of space in the German-speaking world around 1800. The “spatial turn” has generated new insights into constructions of space and their implications for a host of issues ranging from gendered spaces of the bourgeois tragedy, von Humboldt’s explorations of the “New World”, to the uncanny subterranean spaces of Romanticism, as only a few examples. Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia” and Bhabha’s theory of “third space” offer but two critical examples of how re-examining space opens up sites of contestation and allows for diverse perspectives and voices to emerge. This panel seeks to showcase these varied permutations of space as well as their possibilities for resistance and/or co-existence as they were manifested in German language, literature, and culture.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- staging spaces in German drama
- travel and exploration
- environmental and ecological concerns with space
- space and time as forms of intuition in Kant and the Early Romantics
- (dis)abled bodies in spaces
- the politics of gendered and Queer spaces
- minoritized and hegemonic spaces
- liminality and space
- Bakhtin’s “chronotope” and the relation of time and space in the novel
- transformative spaces such as Foucault’s “heterotopia” or Bhabha’s “third space”
- aesthetic and poetic figurations of space
- entanglements of space and place, such as Marc Augé’s “non-place”
- spaces and borders in 18th-century German lands
- literary cartography and the mapping of spaces in the novel
Please submit 300-word abstracts and a short bio to Julie Koser (jkoser@umd.edu) and Ellwood Wiggins (wiggins1@uw.edu) by March 14, 2025. If your proposal is accepted, you must be an MLA member by April 7, 2025.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.