CfP: Literature and the Body: The Relations Between Being and Writing

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies welcomes submissions for its October 2026 issue, which seeks to reconsider how literature translates bodily experience into writing and visibility, and how the body, in turn, discloses and shapes literary meaning.

Contemporary cultural forces, which we both shape and endure, demand a renewed examination of the body through literature and of literature through the body. The loss of physical touch during the pandemic has intensified the body’s alienation from its social and emotional milieus, while a digital culture governed by speed, distance, and surface erodes the possibility of tactile meaning and embodied encounter. Current debates on identity, gender, and representation have heightened corporeal visibility, yet they seldom foreground literature’s power to reinscribe the body or the body’s unique role in shaping literary sense and experience. Meanwhile, thinkers from Nietzsche and Foucault to Merleau-Ponty and Kearney reaffirm the body as a privileged locus of meaning, perception, and interpretation.

Literature’s varied portrayals of the body, and its own material dimension, both mirror and challenge the ontologies and cultural norms of their historical moments. In ancient tragedy, the body serves as a threshold to the divine; in medieval narratives it is sanctified and purified through suffering; in Renaissance texts it becomes an ideal of visibility and measurability. In the modern novel the body is frequently rendered as disciplined and gendered, whereas contemporary narratives present it as displaced, proliferating, and fluid, prominent within posthumanist and transhumanist discussions. We therefore invite essays that not only engage with current debates on corporeality but also trace the historical trajectories through which meanings, representations, and theories of the body have been fashioned across the diverse epochs of literary and cultural history.

Only a renewed attention to the body can meaningfully address literature’s most pressing crises, including the loosening bond between language and world, the erosion of sensory immediacy, and the growing disembodiment of reading. This issue therefore welcomes essays that conceive literature as an ontological threshold, poised between meaning and sensation, writing and life, word and world.

This issue accepts research articles and book reviews in Turkish or English. Contributions should be prepared in accordance with Nesir’s submission and citation guidelines and must be submitted through the journal’s online submission system (nesirdergisi.com) by August 1, 2026. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• The ontology of literature and the body: The tactile relation of writing to being
• The embodiment of meaning: Writing, gesture, breath, and literary form
• Literary imaginations of the body: Form, representation, and the imagination
• The corporeal boundaries of literary genres: Lyrical, dramatic, and epic bodies
• The body in dramatic literature: Corporeality, performance, and script
• The body and narrative space: Spatial meanings shaped by bodily experience
• The temporality of the body and the rhythm of literature: Pulse, cycle, interruption
• The corporeal bases of language: Voice, intonation, and the tactile sources of literature
• The testimony of the body: Wounds, memory, and recollection in literary texts
• The body’s influence on literary language: Silences, stutters, and screams
• Body and affect: The somatic resonances of literary works in readers
• The limits of the body, the possibilities of literature: Skin, death, and writing
• Tactile crises in literature: The loss, multiplication, or absence of the body
• Embodied subjectivity in writing: The tactile construction of the “I”
• Body and power: Control, resistance, and transformation in literary representations
• The touch of literature: The relation between touching, reading, and writing
• Embodiment and accessibility: Literary engagements with disability, assistive technologies, assistance animals, and alternative modalities of reading and writing