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.

Panelists might consider the legacies of Borges’s and others’ archival fictions, short story writers’ engagements with past and contemporary documentary impulses, or the diverse approaches short story writers take to ensuring valued elements of lived and historical experience endure.   

Questions for consideration may include but are not limited to the following:

Do symbolic modes of representation counter or feed into the desire for endurance that underlies the documentary impulse, and what role does the short story form play in facilitating such acts of representation? 

To what extent are reparative futures dependent on archaeological approaches being taken to representation?  Is historical accumulation necessary or desirable?  How does the short story form facilitate historical reconstruction and/or renewal?

Is the short story form particularly responsive to the vicissitudes of change that challenge the archive and its cultural legacies?

Is the short story a site that can facilitate the imaginative remaking of the archive or movement beyond the archive, reinscribing power and/or repairing that which has been damaged or lost? 

To what extent do individual stories and story collections themselves manifest as iterations of archives or their afterlives, allowing their implications to be probed?

Do specific representational strategies associated with the short story form (e.g., condensation, etc.) pave the way for conceiving of alternate forms of remembrance and/or persistence?

Please submit abstracts of 300 words and a brief bio to Dr. Heather Joyce at hjoyce@nwpolytech.ca by April 25, 2026.

The MMLA Annual Convention will take place 12-14 November 2026 at the voco Chicago Downtown in Chicago, IL