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CFP: Immanent Expressions: Literature and the Encounter with Immanence - Edited Volume - Deadline for Abstracts March 1, 2014
full name / name of organization:
What does it mean to read literature through the lens of immanence? While the theory of immanence—informed primarily by Spinoza—has influenced many recent investigations into politics, ontology, theology, and philosophy (see especially Warren Montag and Ted Stolze’s The New Spinoza and Dimitris Vardoulakis’s Spinoza Now), the question of the relationship between immanence and literature has received far less attention. The continuing interest in Deleuze’s readings of literature, Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production, as well as studies documenting Spinoza’s influence on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, George Eliot, and Beckett, among others, points to productive potentials inherent in the often overlooked dynamic between literature and immanence. Central to the philosophy of immanence is a theory of interpretation which is directly linked to the concept of immanent causality, or, a theory of causality in which the cause does not stand outside its effects, but inheres in them. In relation to literature, immanent causality presupposes the act of interpretation because in this perspective the work of art does not exist prior to its effects. These effects, as Montag explains, “may remain dormant or deferred for decades or even centuries, (re)activated only in an encounter.” This proposed edited volume will collect studies that explore the encounters between literature and the philosophy of immanence.
Potential questions and topics include:
Please send proposals of 400-500 words as attachment (.doc, docx. .pdf, .rtf, or .odt) to Brynnar Swenson at firstname.lastname@example.org by March 1, 2014. Please direct all questions to the same address.