Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies: Announcements

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

2025-08-29T17:28:26+03:00

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

CfP: CfP: Theoretical Inquiries, Critical Dialogues I–II

2025-07-02T16:54:06+03:00

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies invites submissions for its 10th issue (April 2026) and 12th issue (April 2027). These issues are open to original articles without thematic restriction, covering classical and contemporary literary theories, literary traditions, genres and discourses, text-based interpretations and analyses, as well as comparative and interdisciplinary studies. This call prioritizes approaches that consider literature as a mode of thought marked by conceptual depth and metaphorical dynamism, rather than as something confined to a single period or national context.

Our journal aims to foster contributions that bring the historical and poetic distinctiveness of Turkish literature into a transformative dialogue with global literary thought; that create rather than merely apply theoretical frameworks; that interweave disciplinary perspectives with interdisciplinary questioning; and that promote interpretive approaches attentive to the historical and structural depth of literary meaning. Accordingly, submitted articles should not be limited to describing a work, a period, or a theoretical concept but should establish a critical engagement, raise new questions, and seek to expand the boundaries of literary understanding.

Believing in the necessity of intertextual critical dialogues for the ongoing development and renewal of literary thought, Nesir will give priority during the evaluation process to contributions that engage with, reference, or critically respond to studies previously published in the journal, either theoretically or interpretively.

For these issues, we welcome research articles and book reviews written in Turkish or English. Submissions should follow Nesir’s writing and citation guidelines and must be submitted through the journal’s online submission system (nesirdergisi.com) by 15 January 2026 for Issue 10 and 15 January 2027 for Issue 12.

CfP: Call for Book Reviews

2025-05-15T16:12:34+03:00

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies welcomes critical reviews of recently published academic works in the fields of literary theory, literary history, comparative literature, and Turkish literary studies. In addition to special issues that focus on the historical and theoretical problems of literature, each issue includes analytical book reviews that critically engage with a work’s main arguments, originality, and its place within the relevant scholarly literature.

Below is a list of suggested titles for review. However, this list is by no means exhaustive; reviews of other high-quality works on related subjects are also warmly welcomed:

Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, Occasions for Poetry: Politics, Literature, and Imagination Among the Early Modern Ottomans, 2025.
William Stroebel, Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape, 2025.
Mehmet Fatih Uslu, Çok Uzak Çok Yakın: Osmanlı’dan Türkiye’ye Modern Ermenice Edebiyat, 2025.
Ceyhun Arslan, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, 2024.
Müstakim Arıcı ve Sami Arslan, eds., Sebeb-i Telif: Osmanlı Literatüründe Açık ve Örtük Yazma Nedenleri, 2024.
Nergis Ertürk, Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union, 2024.
Nir Shafir, The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire, 2024.
Atiye Gülfer Gündoğdu ve Servet Gündoğdu, Gömülü Metinler Neden Döner: Edebi Mülksüzleşme Bağlamında Harabat Mukaddimesi, Tahrib-i Harabat ve Ta’kib, 2023.
Lars Marcus Petrisson, Writing as Re-enchantment: The Arabic and Turkish Novel’s Neo-Sufi Response to Secular Modernity, 2023.
Nil Tekgül, Emotions in the Ottoman Empire: Politics, Society, and Family in the Early Modern Era, 2023.
Şima İmşir, Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-Century Turkey: Bodies of Exception, 2023.
Zeynep Uysal ve Didem Havlioğlu (eds), Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature, 2023.
Fredric Jameson, Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory, 2024.
Nidesh Lawtoo. Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation, 2022.
Servet Gündoğdu. Mimesis, İfade ve Gösterge: Şiirin Özgünlüğü Bağlamında Poetika Sorunu, 2021.

Submission and Review Process

Length: Between 600 and 2000 words. In exceptional cases, the upper limit may be extended to 3000 words with editorial approval.

Style Guide: Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition – Notes and Bibliography system.

Deadlines:
March 1 for the April issue
September 1 for the October issue

Editorial Contact: Reviews will be evaluated by our book review editor, Elif Sezer-Aydınlı. Please send your review proposals and completed texts to:
editor@nesirdergisi.com and elif.sezer@sabanciuniv.edu

We strongly encourage contributors to contact the editor regarding the book they intend to review before submitting their work.

We look forward to your contributions.

CfP: CfP: Mimesis in Philosophy and Literature

2025-03-27T22:58:55+03:00

Issue Editors: Emre Koyuncu (Ankara University) and Servet Gündoğdu (Universität zu Köln)

One of the most enduring concepts in the philosophy of art and literature, mimesis has historically developed around the idea of “imitation,” serving as a key reference point in discussions of how art represents nature, human life, and action. Etymologically, mimesis refers not merely to imitation but also to a dramatic and embodied re-enactment. In Ancient Greece, it emerged as a performative mode of ritual, poetry, theatre, and music. In later classical philosophy, according to traditional interpretations, Plato regarded mimesis as a derivative and misleading copy of ideal forms, while Aristotle reconceptualized it as a creative act linked to learning and catharsis—one that reveals the universal order behind appearances.

Over time, mimesis evolved in tandem with changing aesthetic regimes of representation: from the medieval notion of the worldly reflection of divine truth, to Renaissance ideals of naturalism, and finally to the formal harmony of Neoclassicism. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, Romantic aesthetics displaced mimesis in favor of artistic originality and inner expression. In the twentieth century, structuralist and poststructuralist critiques further destabilized the concept, challenging the reliability of representation itself. Within semiotic frameworks, mimesis came to be seen as complicit in the illusion of referentiality and was subjected to deconstruction. Yet rather than vanishing, mimesis reemerged beyond the aesthetic domain, offering new conceptual possibilities in psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, philosophy of language, and hermeneutics.

In this broader context, mimesis has found renewed theoretical vitality. From Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and the formation of the ego, to Girard’s analysis of mimetic desire and the origins of cultural violence; from Tarde’s theory of social imitation, to Gadamer’s view of art as the enactment of truth through play; from Ricoeur’s threefold model of narrative time, to Auerbach’s philological exploration of literary realism—mimesis is now understood not merely as imitation, but as a foundational mode of thought and representation. Today, it allows us to rethink relations among repetition, difference, subjectivity, desire, alterity, and truth across disciplines and traditions.

Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies invites contributions for its ninth issue, to be published in October 2025, focusing on the concept of mimesis in its various dimensions across philosophy and literature. The journal welcomes research articles, and book reviews written in Turkish or English.

Submissions must follow the journal’s submission and citation guidelines and should be sent by August 1, 2025.

Reality and Representation: Literary and aesthetic transformations from Ancient Greece to postmodernism
Mimesis in Ancient Philosophy: Reinterpreting Plato and Aristotle in contemporary theoretical contexts
Difference, Repetition, and the Copy: Rethinking mimesis through models, exemplars, and representation
Linguistic Mimesis: The mimetic force of language, imitation in discourse and speech
At the Limits of Representation: Aesthetic ruptures, the crisis of representation, and the dissolution of mimesis
Between Mimeses: Adaptation and rewriting across genres, media, and narratives
Imitating the Sacred: Mimesis, icons, ritual, and theological representations of the divine
Cultural Imitation and Social Modeling: Traces of mimesis in anthropology and sociology
The Mimetic Self: Psychoanalytic subject formation and mirror theory in Freud and Lacan
Ethical and Political Representation: Mimesis in art, politics, and the public sphere
Digital Mimesis: Virtual reality, algorithmic creativity, and representation in technological environments

For submissions and further details, please visit our website: https://nesirdergisi.com/