Call for Papers: Literature and Infrastructure

TfL Days, Uppsala University, 10–11 December 2026
Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap (Journal of Literary Studies), Issue 4, 2026

Over the past decade, the concept of infrastructure has gained renewed theoretical momentum across the humanities and social sciences. Building on seminal contributions such as Susan Leigh Star’s “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” (1999) and Brian Larkin’s “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure” (2013), both theoretical reflections on and analytical applications of the concept have expanded across a wide range of fields. Important interventions have emerged from media theory, including media-philosophical works such as John Durham Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds (2015), which defines media themselves in terms of “ontological infrastructures,” as well as historically and materially oriented studies such as Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (2015), edited by Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski. At the same time, these works demonstrate how contemporary understandings of infrastructure remain deeply connected to earlier traditions of media-historical inquiry, from Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan to Friedrich A. Kittler and N. Katherine Hayles.

This infrastructural turn has also left its mark on disciplines and extra-disciplinary practices concerned with aesthetic production. In Sweden, this was notably reflected in the 2017 special issue of OEI (#77–78), while more recently it has found expression in the Danish anthology Infrastructure Aesthetics (2025), edited by Solveig Daugaard and colleagues. Here, art is approached in a broad sense as “a social sphere of practices framed by historical institutions, cultural expectations, and social relations.” Such an approach cannot be reduced to a general contextualization of artistic production: “The point is not to place art within a larger context, but to specify the set of relations, mediations, and distributions that help reproduce our expectation that something like art exists.”

Literary studies, too, have increasingly engaged with these questions. As early as 2015, Modern Fiction Studies (Vol. 61, No. 4) published a special issue exploring “new ways of thinking about the technological mediation of everyday life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” gathered under the rubric of “infrastructuralism.”

Yet much work remains to be done. This is particularly true when viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective that considers how technical, historical, aesthetic, epistemological, and, not least, political questions intersect within this analytical framework. Infrastructure may refer not only to the hidden material conditions that become visible when systems fail, but also to an aesthetic principle structuring literary works or a political instrument operating on a global scale.

The road, for instance, is not merely the elementary cultural infrastructure on which Saul became Paul or where Oedipus’s fate was sealed; to invoke Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation, it is also a chronotope of immense significance in the history of the novel. Extending this insight further, the vast body of literature concerned with sea voyages—from Camões’s The Lusiads, through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to Derek Walcott’s Omeros—can be read not simply as narratives of adventure but as narrative elements within a colonial world order. In contemporary literature, a very different infrastructure, that of digitized financial capital, may similarly appear both as a political problem and as a narrative aesthetic, as in Agri Ismaïl’s Hyper (2024).

For these reasons, both this year’s TfL Days and Issue 4 (2026) of Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap are devoted to the theme of infrastructure. We ask what the concept of infrastructure—as an analytical lens and conceptual relay—can contribute to literary studies beyond what is already afforded by related and more frequently employed concepts such as discourse, ecology, or system. We invite contributions that engage with infrastructure as simultaneously a material category and an institutional structure, a historical condition and a literary form, as well as the intersections among these dimensions.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The infrastructures of writing and reading
• The aesthetics of infrastructure / the infrastructure of aesthetics
• Infrastructure, catastrophe, and breakdown
• Genre and infrastructure
• Infrastructure and interfaces
• Gender and infrastructure
• The politicization of infrastructure
• Visible and invisible infrastructure
• Elements and climate as infrastructure

The Call for Papers applies to both:

• Scholarly articles
  Articles addressing the theme of the issue are invited.
  
  Length: Maximum 40,000 characters (including spaces).
  
  Submission: Manuscripts should be submitted through the journal’s website, where detailed author guidelines are available: https://publicera.kb.se/tfl/about/submissions
  
  
• Conference presentations
  Proposals for 20–30 minute presentations are invited for the TfL Days at Uppsala University, 10–11 December 2026. Presentations may subsequently be revised and developed into essays for publication in the special issue.
  
  Abstracts (4–500 characters) should be sent to: jesper.olsson@littvet.uu.se
  and/or thomas.gotselius@littvet.su.se

Deadline: 15 October 2026