The Research Project “The Novel as Global Form. Poetic Challenges and Cross-border Literary Circulation” organizes its final conference and seeks paper proposals of scholars who are pursuing research on the contemporary novel from a global perspective, from any literary and linguistic tradition. 

The conference topic aligns with the project's objective. We are interested in a new, more integrated, and decentralized perspective in the study of the emergent genre of the global novel, defined as a narrative form that aspires to represent and think about the contemporary world from a global perspective. This new approach will help us better understand how the global novel contributes, discusses and builds global discourses through specific exploratory poetics. Simultaneously, it will help map the uneven circulation of these works within the literary space. Working from a comparative perspective, the conference seeks to cross the poetic and sociological approaches to the genre, the separated adoption of which is now producing contradictory definitions and simplifications. Through this crossing, we aim to understand how contemporary novels address global matters, such as global violence, inequality, migration, or climate change, as well as how novels circulate at a large scale in the international literary market. We aim both to contribute to the global novel debate as well as to interrogate its conceptualization, scope, and behavior.

Amongst our invited speakers, we are pleased to confirm the participation of Debjani Ganguly (University of Virginia), Treasa De Loughry (University College Dublin) and Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University).

We invite papers on topics that might include, but are no limited to:

• Theoretical discussion about the global novel and its definitions

• Tensions between global/local/national aspects and circulation behavior

• Translation and international circulation

• Translation features as poetics in the novel

• Non-circulation

• Novelistic ultra-local reactions against the global 

• Publishing strategies and the contemporary novel

• Geological scales and temporalities and the contemporary novel

• Planetary approaches to the novel

• Global violence in the contemporary novel

• Gender and global approaches to the contemporary novel

• Critical cosmopolitanism in the contemporary novel

• Decolonial perspectives interrogating the global in the contemporary novel

If you would like to present a paper (ca. 20 minutes), please send an English abstract (150–300 words) with a title and a short biography to nrotgerc@uoc.edu. Please note that the working language will be English. There will be no conference fee. The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2023.

Organizers: the Research Project “The Novel as Global Form. Poetic Challenges and Cross-border Literary Circulation” (Spanish Research Agency, PID2020-118610GA-I00), with the collaboration of the ERC Consolidator Grant project Ocean Crime Narratives, and the Arts and Humanities Department at UOC.

The conference will be held in person at the Universitat Oberta de Cataliunya in Barcelona. Venue: Campus Poblenou, Carrer del Perú 52, 08018 Barcelona, Spain.