Unfeeling

Unfeeling CFP

On this page you can find our calls for academic papers, book reviews, and creative writing submissions responding to 'Unfeeling', the theme for the 2022 issue of Moveable Type.

Unfeeling: Call for Academic Papers

‘Unfeeling’ in relation to literature may evoke thoughts about depictions of cold-hearted characters, or repressive worlds in dystopian literature. It may also evoke the supposedly “emotionless” character of disinterested responses to art and literature, and of data-driven distant reading techniques. Affect and reader-response theories tell us that our feelings matter when we read, but which feelings have historically been prioritised and at whose expense?

This call for papers encourages researchers to explore emotion and feeling through the lens of unfeeling: that is, unfeeling as a deliberate approach or stance as adopted by audiences, writers and critics. Papers might explore how unfeeling results in disinterested or indifferent attitudes and aesthetics - from the cool to the careless - or strategies and practices that avoid or disencourage empathetic readings, emotivity or embodiment. They may also consider how such approaches might produce modes of resistance, receptivity, or even humour, among other things. We particularly encourage contributors to discuss texts in light of Xine Yao’s Disaffected (2021), a pertinent monograph which illuminates how ‘universal feeling is a ruse when only some feelings are privileged as true’ (210).

Among the questions we are interested in are: how might unfeeling be adopted as a mode of resistance by writers from marginalized and/or potentially minoritized groups? How should critics write about reader response when feelings and affective responses cannot be universalised? When do literary critics choose to be unfeeling; and what are the consequences of that? How might biopower manifest itself in literary criticism? How might unfeeling allow us to access a non-anthropocentric understanding of the ‘inanimate’: objects, things, concepts, and worlds? Do poems—a genre once associated with an overflow of emotion—present other modes of being for non-humans that do not revolve around feeling, or might other forms and genres achieve this too? How might sentimentalism have been, and perhaps, continue to be recruited for colonial, national or literary projects? What are the political possibilities of unfeeling? 

More potential topics for exploration: 

• The adoption of unfeeling as a mode of resistance  
• (Un)feeling in narratives about race, disability, the climate crises, and the refugee crisis. 
• The medicalisation of feeling /unfeeling
• Assumptions about the sub-literary nature of texts that depict certain feelings and the readers/readings which respond to them
• Depictions of unfeeling characters (past and present)
• Political / literary apathy and its usefulness; or investigations of how different modes of literary criticism resist the culture of apathy or desensisitation
• What does mean it for writing to be done carefully or, conversely, carelessly - to intend to be tactless, offensive or hurtful
• Anti-relational readings in queer theory (Lee Edelman) and focusing on potential futures instead (Jose Esteban Munoz)
• What might be distinctive about queer unfeeling, or unfeeling as a means of self-defence, or as a subversion of heteronormative sentimentalism?
• The non-universality of feelings 
• How does unfeeling look in earlier texts e.g. in the Victorian Age or alongside the eighteenth-century sentimental novel?
• The use of humour in disability narratives
•  Objects and 'unfeeling' things in past and present literatures

Academic articles should be 3000-5000 words. All submissions should use MHRA style referencing, and include a bibliography and an author bio. We encourage close-reading of literary texts as much as thematic exploration. We welcome contributions exploring any genre and time period.

Please send completed submissions to editors.moveabletype@gmail.com. Feel free to get in touch to briefly discuss your article topic prior to submission. 

Deadline: 22^nd March.

Unfeeling: Call for Book and Film Reviews 

We are also seeking reviews of poetry, novels, plays, film adaptations, and critical monographs relating to the theme of unfeeling. Ideally, texts for review should have been published in the last two-three years.

Suggestions for review: 

Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (2020)

Patricia Lockwood’s Nobody is Talking About This (2021)

Xine Yao’s Disaffected (2021)

Tomáš Jirsa’s Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature (2021)

Peter Gizzi, Now It’s Dark (2021)

Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021) 

Alex Houen’s Affect and Literature (2020)

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020)

Kaye Mitchell’s Writing Shame (2019)

Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom (2021)

Natasha Brown’s Assembly (2021)

Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020)

Moses Sumney’s albums Aromanticism (2018) and græ (2020)

Fred Moten’s consent not to be a single being (2018), particularly its final volume, The Universal Machine

Please feel free to contact us at editors.moveabletype@gmail.com to discuss a potential review. We typically ask reviewers to request review copies from publishers if necessary. 

Reviews should be 1500-2000 words. All submissions should use MHRA style referencing and include an author bio, an abstract, and a bibliography. Please send completed submissions to editors.moveabletype@gmail.com.

Deadline: 22^nd March.

Unfeeling: Call for Creative Writing Submissions 

Moveable Type invites submissions of your creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction and drama relating to the theme of unfeeling for its Autumn 2022 issue. 

We welcome submissions about: 

• Climate change narratives 
• The ruse of universal feelings
• Shame
• Sympathy, or a lack thereof
• The medicalization of feeling 
• Biopower 
• Apathy and/or despair 
• Unfeeling characters 
• Spaces of unfeeling 
• Perceiving and interacting with the world in the absence of feeling 
• Alternative modes of being which do not revolve around feeling
• Transcendentalism
• Mechanical automation 

Creative submissions should be 2500 words at most. All submissions should use MHRA style referencing where necessary and include a bibliography (if necessary) and a short author bio. Please send completed submissions to editors.moveabletype@gmail.com. 

 Deadline: 22^nd March.