Text Matters No. 14 CFP: "Dwelling and Belonging: Reimaginings and Redescriptions"

2022-08-30

Call for Papers

 

Dwelling and Belonging:

Reimaginings and Redescriptions

 

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

(Issue 14, 2024)

University of Lodz, Poland

 

Co-Editors of the issue:

Prof. Ramsey Eric Ramsey, PhD

Dr hab. Małgorzata Hołda

 


I dwell in Possibility

A fairer House than Prose

More numerous of Windows

Superior—for Doors

 

Of Chambers as the Cedars

Impregnable of eye

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky

 

Of Visitors—the fairest

For Occupation—This

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise  

(“I dwell in Possibility,” Emily Dickinson)

 

The aim of this volume is to encourage wide-ranging discussions of the interconnections between dwelling, embodied (be)longing, and memory. We invite researchers in the fields of literary studies, philosophical hermeneutics, phenomenology, philosophy of art, and aesthetics to explore the complex and versatile questions pertaining to those notions.

We are seeking manuscripts that explore the subtle and less obvious meanings of the traditional conceptualizations of dwelling and belonging in their relationship to human embodiment and the capacity for reminiscing. Therefore, we endeavor to reconsider the hermeneutic tensions that arise in the multifaceted and non-univocal understandings that are called forth by the notions of dwelling and belonging.

Dwelling is concerned with human existence as a body in space, as well as the way the human Dasein interacts with spatiotemporal worldliness and with the Other. The philosophy of human embodiment with such prominent thinkers as Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and others sensitizes us to the intricacies of our embodied being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein) and the ways we dwell in the world. Dwelling, however, involves far more than our mere physical presence in the world. The imaginative responses to dwelling disclose and communicate realities expressed in literary, philosophical, and artistic discourses that exceed the cursory and tapered cognizance of what it means to dwell. The recent books by Brigitte Le Juez & Bill Richardson (eds.), Spaces of Longing and Belonging (2019), or Jeff Malpas’s Rethinking Dwelling (2021) give a new impetus to reconsider the issues of human dwelling and belonging. In a similar vein, the classic works of belles lettres by Emily Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Stéphane Mallarmé, to name but a few, and the contemporary work of Jeanette Winterson, Peter Ackroyd, David Whyte, Ada Limón, or the artistic achievements of say Le Corbusier, or Edward Hopper, and many others, inspire us to rethink the conceptual, lingual, and visual opulence of dwelling and belonging.

Our various modes of dwelling are inextricably interwoven with a sense of belonging that extends beyond our basic understanding of ourselves as collective beings. Belongingness includes our (be)longing to/for one another, ideas that belong together, and other less evident and more nuanced senses of our being-together in worldly understanding. We are continually captivated by the paradoxical nature of belongingness, expressed by the embodied meaningfulness of home, home-coming, as well as simultaneously the fleshly and spiritual feelings of homelessness. Heidegger uses the terms of homelessness (Heimlosigkeit) to indicate the oblivion of Being and home-coming (Heimholung) to convey the rediscovery of our primordial relationship to dwelling/Being (Letter to Humanism 1967, 218–19). What questions arise when we reflect on the phenomenology of home and its indissoluble connection to the ontological hermeneutics of human linguality formally indicated by Heidegger’s famous “Language is the ‘house of Being’”?

Our sense of belonging relates to our capability of recollecting and memorializing. While ruminating and summoning up the past and contemplating the future, we inhabit a worldliness that is bygone or ahead of us. In so far as this is so, dwelling embraces the actual and the symbolic, the real, and the imagined; thus, raising the question: what is the relationship between dwelling and imagination (Aristotle’s phantasia)?

We are interested in the marginal, vexing, stimulating, and non-dualistic ways of apprehending dwelling and belonging that would give us an incentive to advance the discussion of our multifarious modes of being-in-the-world. We welcome papers that will engage, though will not be limited to the following:

 

  • The hermeneutics of (be)longingness, belonging together, reciprocity, and non-reciprocity;
  • The poetics of openness and closeness, exteriority and interiority, inclusivity and exclusivity;
  • Dwelling and the notions of (in)dependence and (inter)dependence;
  • The humility of earthly dwelling: sedimentation, nomadism, diaspora;
  • The realities and fantasies of liminality: challenges, temptations, limitations, and complexities;
  • The opaque poeticality of thresholds: windows/doors/gates;
  • Narratives of corporeal and mental entrapment, seclusion, cloistering;
  • The idiosyncrasies of privacy, intrusion, and sequestration;
  • The interaction of landscape (seascape, cityscape) and human habitation;
  • The aesthetics of mise en abyme;
  • Philosophies of space;
  • Spatial representations of memory and post-memory;
  • Longing, (be)longing and the quagmires of human (un)fulfilment;
  • Spaces of refuge, retreat, and asylum: self-inflicted and communal isolation;
  • Presence, absence, proximity, remoteness, and the multi-dimensionality of being an exile;
  • Home and homelessness: the intimacies and entanglements of belonging;
  • Home-seeking and home-coming: the hermeneutic phenomenology of home;
  • The land of promise—imaginative dwellings and peregrinations;
  • Crumbling, building, and sheltering: the narratives of rehabbing hospitality in the destitute time.

 

Submissions:

An abstract (max. 250 words) should be submitted as an email attachment to the issue editors:

malgorzata.holda@uni.lodz.pl and rer@asu.edu

In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, title of the proposal, abstract, five keywords and a brief bio.

 

Editors:

Dr hab. Małgorzata Hołda

Department of British Literature and Culture

Institute of English Studies

University of Lodz, Poland

 

Prof. Ramsey Eric Ramsey, PhD

New College & Barrett

The Honors College

Arizona State University

Phoenix, the USA

 

 

Important deadlines:

Deadline for submission of article proposals (max. 250 words): January 31, 2023

Deadline for editors’ acceptance/rejection of proposals: February 28, 2023

Deadline for submission of full articles (max. 6000 words): October 1, 2023

Deadline for peer review and final acceptance/rejection of articles: December 1, 2023

Deadline for submission of final versions of articles: February 1, 2024