In a 1918 speech at Munich University, sociologist Max Weber observed a widespread cultural loss of belief in magic and the supernatural: “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’… the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life." Weber’s idea of disenchantment is borrowed from the Enlightenment-era playwright Fredrich Schiller's exploration of Entzauberung, the "de-divinizing" of art, literature, culture, and existence. As Richard Jenkins clarifies, Weber's disenchantment is “right at the heart of modernity,” a product of the world becoming “knowable, predictable, and manipulable by humans ... understandable and tameable.” By peering through a literary lens, we might come to a greater understanding of when this “disenchantment of the world” began, if it is a distinctly post-Enlightenment phenomenon, and how it continues to unfold in contemporary contexts.

Some questions we will ask ourselves are: how does literature respond to Weber’s exhausted cry for a return to enchantment? Is the process of writing and producing imaginary worlds, whether realist or fantastical, an answer to this need to “re-enchant” human life? If, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to enchant means to “exert magical influence upon; to bewitch, lay under a spell,” then how does literature, and the act of reading itself, problematize or align with this definition? What does “(dis)enchanted literature” look like, and how do certain texts, authors, literary traditions, or critical paradigms traverse the transhistorical sphere between enchantment and disenchantment? 

This seminar invites proposals that engage with these and related questions, with a grounded focus on texts, authors, critics, themes, genres and/or forms from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, though papers that make comparisons beyond these temporal boundaries are welcome. Possible lines of inquiry include, but are certainly not limited to: representations of witches and witchcraft in literature; the history of tarot and divination (the Rider-Waite cards; T.S. Eliot); the phenomena of New Age spirituality, on #WitchTok and beyond; occultism and belonging; new popular genres of literature and their conventions (magical realism, romantasy); origins in global folklore, mythology, or fairy tale; cunning-folk, herbalism, alternative medicine, and alchemy; the disabled body and enchanted reclamation; Wicca, neo-paganism, or new religious approaches (Aleister Crowley; Gerald B. Gardner); queering the world of magic and/or witchcraft; cliches, stereotypes, and cultural perceptions ("we are the daughters of the witches you could not burn"); trauma, marginalization, postcolonial and feminist resistance.

This panel will take place in person in 2026 at ACLA in Montreal. Please submit proposals directly through ACLA's portal by October 2nd.