Conference theme: Literature and space

Over the past decade, we have experienced new developments in our cultural and political perceptions of space. What was believed, at the turn of the millennium, to be an irreversible movement of spatial expansion towards a postnational, globalized world, has proven to be far more complex and “gritty”. Recent political landscapes have been characterized by a countermovement of contraction, into a remobilization of nationalism, ideals of the nation state, and the preoccupation with borders. The refugee crises of the 2010s and the climate crisis are both embedded into an ideological conflict centring around the idea of geographical and political space as something precarious. The recent corona-virus crisis has reconfigured our perceptions of space in yet another way, in what could be described as a double movement of contraction and expansion: the use of isolation, quarantines, and so-called social distancing, the closing of borders and radical reduction of movement and travel, correspond to a contraction of our living spaces. At the same time, an opposite movement has taken place in the digital domain, in an expansion of our virtual spaces within culture, education, and commerce.  
 
These developments call for responses from the community of literary scholars on the relationship between literature and space, and, by extension, for reassessing the critical approaches in literary studies that have followed the so-called spatial turn of the humanities and social sciences. Although approaches to literature and space are as methodologically as they are thematically diverse, they share a conception of literature being important to how cultures perceive space, and of space being important to literary forms. The urgent questions now are how these approaches can help us understand the political and cultural developments of the new decade, and how these developments in turn can be used to rethink our critical approaches.

Call for papers

Norlit21 invites scholars to examine the question of how space intervenes in literature and how literature produces and reconfigures perceptions of space. 

We wish to encourage papers covering a diverse array of fields and approaches, including, but not necessarily restricted to: 

• digital humanities
• book history
• children- and youth literature
• literary didactics
• sociology of literature
• literary theory, -history, and –criticism 

Submission formats for the NorLit 2021 conference

Submission deadline: 1 April 2022

All scholars, from any country, with interests converging with that of the conference theme Literature and space, are welcome to propose panels, sessions and papers. The official conference language is English, while sessions will be partially open to papers presented in Scandinavian languages; some sessions might also accept papers in German and French.

PhD-seminar  

• Timeframe: 15 minutes of presentation and 15 minutes for discussion and comments.
• Participants at the PhD-seminar will be asked to hand in their project description some weeks before the seminar. 

Paper

• Timeframe: 20 minutes of presentation and 10 minutes for discussion. Chairs will be appointed by the committee.

Panel session

• Several papers may be submitted together indicating an interest to form a panel session. The panel participants are themselves responsible for engaging and involve a discussant/chair that gets papers in beforehand.
• Timeframe: 90 minutes 

How to submit

You must use the template when you submit your contribution. Download the document. This will help you in remembering to give us all the information we need, and help us in putting together an digital abstract folder. 

• Submit your paper to norlit21@ntnu.no 

Submit an abstract no more than 400 words including references. Regarding panel session, the word limit is 400 words per participant. Upon acceptance the abstract will be published in the online conference program.

Notification of acceptance will be e-mailed to presenters latest by 1 May 2022.