11th Congress of the European Society of Comparative Literature (ESCL) / 11e Congrès de la Société européenne de littérature comparée, SELC (Leeds, UK)
Call for Papers:
11th Congress of the European Society of Comparative Literature (ESCL)
University of Leeds, 24-28 August 2026
Ethics and Affect: Rethinking the Text and the World
Invited speakers
Susan Bassnett (opening event on Monday 24 August) Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, University of Glasgow / Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick; President of the British Comparative Literature Association
Jean-Louis Haquette Professeur des Universités en Littérature comparée, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
Duncan Large Professor of European Literature and Translation, University of East Anglia / Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation
Elleke Boehmer (closing plenary on Thursday 27 August) Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford / Director, Oxford Centre for Life Writing
‘Questions about justice, about well-being and social distribution, about moral realism and relativism, about the nature of rationality, about the concept of the person, about the emotions and desires, about the role of luck in human life – all these and others are debated from many sides with considerable excitement and even urgency.’ Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature
What different roles does literature play in our lives today? What are the stakes involved in the ways that literature is produced, circulated, translated, adapted, and taught? Over the last few decades, there has been a renewed interest in both ethical criticism and what has become known as affect theory. But literature has always been concerned with questions such as morality, politics, law and justice on the one hand, and sensations, emotions, intimacy and relationality on the other. Developments in literary/cultural theory have given us new ways to think about these questions and to reflect on changes in both epistemology and technology.
For Wayne Booth, ‘ethical criticism attempts to describe the encounters of a storyteller’s ethos with that of the reader or listener’. This emphasis on the ethics of both writing/narrating and reading/listening invokes wider questions of representation, reception, and criticism. It also implies the notion of a community of writers and readers engaged in using literature to make sense of their being in the world and their relationship with one another, recalling Tobin Siebers’ statement that ‘at the heart of ethics is a desire for community’. This interest in community involves in turn questions of identity, subjectivity, alterity, otherness and difference that underpin a wide body of theory and criticism, encompassing (but not limited to) decolonialism, feminism, postcolonialism, queer studies, translation studies, and world literature.
The focus on identity and community is also where we see a potential convergence of ethics and affect: literature influences both the private and the public spheres. Raymond Williams’ identification of ‘structures of feeling’ provides a means to consider ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt’. This emphasis on embodied experience can also be seen in the works we now associate with affect theory, exemplified by Lauren Berlant’s definition of the ‘the intimate public sphere’ as ‘a space of mediation where the personal is refracted through the general’. Affect theory allows to consider pre-cognitive and non-linguistic states of being, to consider how these states affect us, and to analyse how we interpret them. As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them’. We can approach these affects from different ethical standpoints, or consider how affects inhere to different ethical questions, exemplified by Sara Ahmed: ‘Justice is not simply a feeling. And feelings are not always just. But justice involves feelings, which move across the surfaces of the world, creating ripples in the intimate contours of our lives.’
Please send your abstracts in English or French (500 words) to the following address: escl2026@leeds.ac.uk
Please include with your submission your name, email address, position/status and institution (if applicable), as well as a short biographical note (c. 250 words). If you are proposing a panel or roundtable, please provide an overall abstract as well as abstracts for individual contributions.
The deadline for proposals (panels, roundtables and individual papers) is 30 November 2025.
Full information in English and French: https://escl-selc.eu/biennial-congress/leeds-2026/