The Politics of Literary Form
Graduate Student Conference at Johns Hopkins University
Date: November 13–15, 2026
Location: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Keynote Speaker: Oliver Simons, Columbia University

Literary texts emerge at crossroads between myriad historical, philosophical, and political movements and engage with them through variations of form and genre. This conference seeks to explore the reciprocal relationship between literary form and politics: to interrogate the impact of literary form on political and social action and interrogate the impact of politics on literary form.
In focusing on the formal dimensions of literature, several questions arise. Conventionally, certain genres, such as the manifesto, appear to be the most political, while poetry is associated with aesthetic autonomy and detachment from politics. To what degree does the formal structure of a work inform its political valence? To what degree do politics inflect the formal structure of a work? Are certain literary forms fundamentally more political than others, or are the politics of form contextually contingent?
In recent years, the return to formalism in literary studies—exemplified by Caroline Levine’s much-discussed work—has challenged the dominance of historico-theoretical approaches in the field. While her contention that form informs politics remains timely, critical voices have argued that this framework risks collapsing aesthetics into sociology and ignores a long genealogy of political formalism. Long before this turn, thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and György Lukács explicitly theorized literary form not as an abstract and apolitical template but as a concrete manifestation of sociopolitical tensions, building on the work of even earlier thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Karl Marx, each having emphasized the deep connection between artistic form and its content. How, then, can we reread the internal dynamics of a literary text without falling back into the apolitical critique of certain formalist approaches while avoiding the collapse of aesthetics into sociology? And in what ways can those materialist traditions revitalize our understanding of contemporary political crises?
In an attempt to respond to the importance and timeliness of this new formalism in an interdisciplinary and expansive academic field, we invite contributions across disciplines examining the reciprocal relationship between literary form and politics from early modernity to the present.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- The genealogy of literary forms
- Literature as a barometer of, and response to, evolutions and revolutions
- Ambiguity and self-contradiction in political literature
- Historical fiction
- State involvement in literary production (e.g. language standardization, censorship)
- Literature in the public sphere
- National identity and nationalism in literature
- Political Theater
- The relationship between fiction and nonfiction
- Transmedial literature and politics
- Alternate forms of literary mediation (radio, song, concrete poetry, manifesto)
- The political agency of historiography
- Literary form(s) of memory
- revolutionary literature
- political aesthetics
- postcolonial interventions in political formalism

Abstracts of up to 350 words and short bios can be sent to politicsofliteraryform@gmail.com by August 15, 2026.