CFP: Vernon Press (Tentative)

READING NOTHING ACROSS LITERATURES: A HANDBOOK

“No friend is He who to his friend and comrade who comes imploring food, will offer nothing.” (Rig Veda CXVII)

“Did you rise to the crisis? Not a word, you and your birds, your gods – nothing.” (Oedipus the King)

“Nothing will come of Nothing. Speak again.” (King Lear 1.1)

In these three aforementioned quotations, one ought to find a strange, but not intangible association amongst their nothings: The friend who offers something, instead of nothing is someone Godly, someone Godlike in human disguise. Materiality defines Godliness during a food crisis, unlike withholding means which makes him nothing like a God, and certainly less a friend of man at the same time. This Godlike friendliness, withheld, if not deferred during Oedipus’s moment of crisis, implores an utterance, not just a word, an epiphanic embroidery of language like nothing else. Offering becomes language; the materiality of language, transitioning between meaningful possession, while withholding meaning by supplying an alternative to preserve the foliage of Oedipus’s language, is inadequate, simulating nothing salvific. Rising into something from nothingness could be construed as phallic, and this phallic act of linguistic epiphany dispels the nothingness of language emptied of power – one reliable friend in crisis. Shakespeare’s Lear latches on to this paradox, combining both Nothings, demanding speech that is neither epiphanic not flaccid, not Nothings, but the true Nothing which leads to true speechlessness, beyond gratification. Perhaps, each repetitive act of ‘Nothing’ would propel the friend of God to articulate his Nothing better than last time, until its material nothing of meaning is transcended for the true, immaterial nothingness of meaning, dialectized in the literary critic’s art of discourse, witnessed in Geoffrey Hartman’s The Fulness and Nothingness of Literature.

This edited volume, designed to function like a handbook for our future generation of ‘Nothing’ readers, or readers of the Im/material nothing, will address how the connotative, and denotative use of the word often modifies the structures of meaning-making, even from its periphery. This volume will read literary texts by centralizing the nothingnesses in texts and explain its impact on conventional textual readings. In attempting this, the critics are expected to steer clear of existential nothingness, for the philosophical directive must be read across, for its frugality in the ‘Nothing’ universe. Instead, the practical materiality, and immateriality of nothing, in things, their presence and absence (things, and the consequences of their absence) structures the core of this volume. Themes encompassing, but not limited to these foundational ideas are invited for this volume’s essays. Ideas pertaining to

A)   Literature and Nothingness across the 19th and 20th century

B)   Nothingnesses in Science; The Transient Nothing in/across literature

C)   Aesthetics and the material ‘Nothing’

D)   Spatializing ‘Nothing’ in Contemporary light

E)    The Colonial (literary) othering of ‘Nothing’

F)    Industrial and Ecological ‘Nothings’ in Literary texts

G)   Deconstructing the literary nothing

Abstracts, not exceeding 400 words, without keywords, and with emphasis on literary texts from the standpoint of these above-mentioned indicators, must reach the Editor by 31st January, 2025. Once the contributor has been intimated, and the abstract selected with/without modifications, further instructions shall follow. Mail your abstracts, with a short bio to [email protected].