[Aarthi Vadde]

Society of Novel Studies 2025: NOVEL LANGUAGES

Hosted by Duke University (Organizers: Aarthi Vadde and Sarah Quesada)

Location: Durham Convention Center in beautiful Downtown Durham!

Dates: May 29-June 1, 2025

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Abstracts due November 15, 2024 to the conference website: https://sites.duke.edu/sns2025/cfpsubmissions/

The 2025 conference theme—NOVEL LANGUAGES— connects our disciplinary expertise in various linguistic traditions of the novel to the broader topic of language itself.  Nothing is more foundational to human experience and collective identity than language.  Yet how people think about language, talk about language, and participate in our respective language communities is in flux due to the challenges and opportunities posed by nonhuman others. Novelists, artists, and philosophers, engaged in the fight against anthropogenic climate change, have questioned whether human-centered understandings of language have obscured our connections to other species and damaged our ability to see ourselves as part of earth’s systems.  They have drawn inspiration from scientific studies of plant and animal networks of communication to reconceive of human language for what ecologist David Abram calls a “more-than-human” world.  In turn, novelists have joined technologists in vigorously debating the role of large language models and Generative AI in the creative process raising questions about what, if any, role data-driven language technologies should play in the composition or translation of literary works.

Thinking differently about the more-than-human world requires reading beyond the English language and through the historical inequities among languages. Scholars now acknowledge the need to think cosmopolitically, that is to consider the intersections of multiple linguistic empires as well as multiple forms of indigenous culture. As we contemplate the relationship between languages and lifeworlds in the novel, it is crucial for scholars working across linguistic traditions to share and critique our differential understanding of common concepts like “the human,” “nature,” “technology,” “translation,” and “language” itself.

We encourage whole panel (3-4 scholars) proposals as well as individual 15 minute paper proposals that engage our theme.  We also welcome proposals committed to the study of the novel more broadly. Sample topics might include:

• Decentered Geographies of the Novel
• Indigenous cosmologies and the novel;
• Linguistic imperialism and/or Data colonialism
• Linguistic politics with respect to race, gender, sexuality, and disability;
• Novel and endangered languages;
• Novel in lesser-taught languages;
• Novel in a multispecies world
• Novel’s relationship to other popular media (e.g. the stage, radio, film, music, television; internet) and formats (print, digital, and audio)
• Politics of translation and distribution in the global marketplace
• Representational challenges of climate change
• Science fiction and science fact in the novel
• Technologies of novel-writing (from handwriting to word processing to social media platforms to large language models and generative AI)

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