[Call for Paper] 《The 29th Annual Conference of the English and American Literature Association》ROC English and American Literature Association, National Taiwan Normal University

From Socrates’ daemon to the polar spirit that pursues Coleridge’s ancient mariner to the transferrable consciousness uploaded into “cortical stacks” on the recent cyberpunk series Altered Carbon, conceptions and representations of the immaterial abound in philosophy, literature, television, and almost every other discourse and medium. In theology, angels. In mathematics, p. “In” my body, all the ideas, sensations, and qualia that I experience. Exactly what these immaterial states and entities are and how they relate to and interact with material ones has been the subject of much debate and depiction in countless texts over millennia.

Nor does contemporary theory, which informs so much of our literary analysis, dismiss the immaterial as immaterial, despite its ample focus on bodies and materiality. There is the movement known as speculative realism, which speculates on, among other things, the interior reality of nonhuman entities, asking various permutations of Thomas Nagel’s famous question, “What is it like to be a bat?” There is the movement known as new materialism, which argues that there is no definitive break between material and spiritual phenomena. These relatively recent movements were preceded, and in some cases are informed, by the many analyses of ideologies, affects, and the virtual associated with the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and other important theorists of the twentieth century. Running even further back, psychoanalysis and the idealist tradition in philosophy can likewise be seen as developing sophisticated explanations for psychic phenomena that continue to shape our present perspectives.

If all of these approaches have a unifying theme, perhaps it is that of connection. How do the immaterial and material communicate? How are individual selves split from, or connected to, each other and larger collectives? Is the soul, as Foucault puts it, the prison of the body—and if so, how do we escape? Is the body, as Lisa Blackman puts it, immaterial—and if so, where does my body end? How is my consciousness and the consciousness of, say, a bat integrated into an ecology, a Gaia, or a world soul? How do ideologies and affects give rise to a collective mood that maintains or alters the political landscape? How does the materiality of literature, the leaves, the (digital) ink—but also its intangible forms and genres, senses and meanings—form and deform our psychology and interactions with others? The immaterial is an interface upon which infinite ideas can be cast, and we ask that you cast them in our direction. Possible paper topics on the immaterial in English and American literature include, but are not limited to, the following: