CFP: Minor literature (2021/1)

Issue editors: Marta Baron-Milian, Anna Kałuża 

The concept of minor literatures has aroused a great deal of emotion for some time now. The reason for this is that the idea links literature with minority, revolutionary action, materiality, and politics. When referring to minority, we don’t necessarily need to have in mind the literature representing unofficial regions or languages, marginalised and unrecognised by state legislation, though we also do not want to lose sight of them. Deleuze and Guattari, the most widely discussed codifiers of this concept, write about the deterritorialisation of dominant meanings which is carried out by the experimentally oriented minor literatures. “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language […] it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (Deleuze and Guattari 2016, 84). And even though they focus on recognised writers (Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce), the merit of their typology consists in making it possible to examine the complex relations between the centre and peripheries. The aesthetic and political tensions between the minor and the dominant, the particular and the universal, the individual and the communal, are essential in the construction of the concept of minor literatures.  

In the upcoming issue of The Silesian Journal of Polish Studies, we want to look at various conceptualisations of minor literatures and ask chiefly about their artistic significance and political potential. We ask: How can the marginal, despite lacking political representation, question the power of the majority? Which contemporary authors could be regarded as representatives of minor literatures? What are the examples of minor languages operating in essential cooperation with dominant languages? What visions of revolutionary politics and identity politics do minor literatures propose? 

The deadline for the submission of proposals with abstracts is 10.06.2020. 

Send your text to the email address of the editorial board of the journal:  
slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl