CFP: Chiasma Volume 10: Literature and Criticism

Theme and Scope:

With the passing of Marxist literary and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, we witness the end of an era. We can characterize this era as one of the heretical literary intellectuals, which, as Terry Eagleton pointed out, is a “reinvention of the classical intellectual” that brings “ideas to bear on society as a whole” (2024). Jameson reminds us that the role of criticism is to assess the limitations and detriments of contemporary discourses of power. In his work, he navigated approaches to history, culture, and literature that stressed the text’s semi-autonomous influence over institutionalized discourses (1981). The literary intellectual was necessarily anchored to political projects and movements. As what Jameson called a “business society” encroaches upon the Humanities, any undergraduate literary theory survey course worth its brand offers a rich inventory of options for political engagement: cultural, textual, or representational politics (1991, p. 325). It is true that literature has been crucial to the expansion of hegemony. At the same time, it has served as a key interdiction and an unsettling of its dominance. Though literature departments have clearly understood this dialectic, the task of the literary intellectual – whether writer or critic – has become ambiguous and uncertain.

In the university, normative notions of social progress and emancipatory struggles are deprived of their historicity and political effectuality. Rather than radicalism, it is political moralism that has become inescapable for students and scholars alike. As Wendy Brown has stated in Materializing Democracy (2002), this moralism invokes a type of politics that is simultaneously “antipolitical;” it functions as “a remnant of a discourse whose heritage and legitimacy it claims while in fact inverting that discourse’s sense and sensibility” (p. 372). Political engagement is no longer synonymous with explicit allegiances to revolutionary movements, liberation struggles, or national cultures. Instead of an emergent revolutionaryconsciousness, we face, as Stuart Hall says, a “continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle” to “disorganize and reorganize popular culture” (2002, p. 187). Something like what Antonio Gramsci called a ‘passive revolution’ has occurred wherein the pre-existing structure of bourgeois society has transmuted itself from epoch to epoch, era to era, sublating-qua-self-preservation its existence. We are witnessing a loss of the radical engagement of the partisan cultural critic. This loss is mourned alongside the university’s further detachment from engaging with the general populace.  

The task of the literary critic today is to follow a tradition that is historically situated and committed to concrete political practices. The message of our times may well be that we have not outgrown the need for such allegiances and projects. As Theodor Adorno stated in Negative Dialectics (1966), “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (p. 3). This also rings true for literature and criticism. It has led us to conclude that we are still in need of the “different and innovative paradigm for humanistic research” that Edward Said called for in Culture and Imperialism (1993, p. 312). What would such a humanistic approach – envisioned by Said – look like today? Can it ground politically engaged literary education and culture to foster, in Said’s words, “the improvement and non-coercive enhancement of life in a community struggling to exist among other communities” (p. 312)?  

Volume 10 of Chiasma seeks to ask the following questions: can the social practice of reading and writing literature anchor us to a politics that is more concrete and more firmly committed to democratic practices? Analogously, how might literary criticism live on after its own ‘missed’ opportunity? What is the role of the heretical literary intellectual, following the tradition of Marxist literary theory? How has literature contributed to national cultures? What is simultaneously ripe for intellectual and cultural criticism and at risk of being lost to the historical eddy of oblivion and annihilation? 

The moment is opportune for a deep exploration of literature and literary figures devoted to movements and struggles of liberation worldwide.  

Potential submissions may want to take up themes such as, but not limited to:  

• Arab radical literary intellectuals who have lent their words and lives to movements of liberation and construction (e.g., Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Naguib Mahfouz, Edward Said, etc.)

• Heretical writings and prison notebooks

• The Négritude Movement (e.g., Aimé Césaire, David Diop, Léopold Sédar Senghor, etc.)  

• The tradition of Marxist literary theory (e.g., György Lukács, Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Bakhtin, etc.)   

• The Harlem Renaissance (e.g., Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, etc.) 

• Kerygma and Literature (e.g., Northrop Frye) 

• The role of popular culture (e.g., Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, etc.) 

• Death of the author (e.g., Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, etc.) 

• Irony, metaphor, and deconstruction (e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, etc.) 

• Anticolonial approaches to literature and theory (e.g., Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, etc.)  
• Indigenous literary criticism (e.g., Jo-Ann Episkenew, Daniel Heath Justice, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, etc.)

• Queer theory and criticism (e.g., Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, etc.)
• Paranoid and repetitive reading (e.g., Eve Sedgwick) 

• Feminist theory and criticism (e.g., Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigary, Audre Lorde, etc.) 

• Critical engagements with political literary figures (e.g., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, etc.) 

• Post-Marxism, Populism, and Critique (e.g., Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) 

• Literature, Criticism, and Utopia (e.g., José Esteban Muñoz, Ernst Bloch, etc.) 
• Under-theorized account(s) of subaltern or marginal literary traditions not mentioned above

Submission Guidelines:

Chiasma accepts any and all manuscripts related to the topic at hand. That being said, submissions should be theoretically rigorous and diverse, in keeping with the trans-disciplinary nature of the journal. We ask for complete papers between 6,000–10,000 words that conform to a slightly modified version of the Chicago Manual of Style with footnotes and no bibliography (see our Style Guidelines). If there are original works of art that you think might fit within the theme, please get in contact via the email below. When submitting your manuscript, please include two documents:

1. the complete text of your manuscript with any identifying information removed (for help, see here), and
2. a title page that includes your full name, email address, institutional affiliation, short biography (no more than 100 words), and an abstract (no more than 300 words)

Please submit your manuscript via our submission page here. The deadline for submissions is March 1st, 2025.

Should you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at [email protected].