The short story has proven to be fertile ground for writers seeking to interrogate what the act of recording lives and the search for meaning entails, often through imagined renderings of the machineries of archive. In works such as Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” Danilo Kis’s “The Encyclopedia of the Dead,” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The Loss Library,” for example, writers engage with “the forces that govern preservation and erasure” in line with this year’s MMLA convention theme. 

This panel seeks papers that consider how these and other concerns find expression through the short story form.

C

Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowships
Named for the founder of our journal, Richard “Dale” Mullen (1915-1998), the Mullen
fellowships are awarded by Science Fiction Studies to support archival research in
topics related to science fiction, broadly construed.

We have two categories of awards:

Category 1
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
Amount: Up to $3000: 1 award each year

In the collective global imaginary, humans seemingly write the world in isolation. We dictate the climate, biodiversity, and natural resources but we also control the ways in which the world is perceived through literature. This roundtable considers how literature is a co-constitutive process written through connectivity across time and space, landscapes, species, environments, and voices by humans and more-than-humans.