Call for Papers

2027 MLA Convention – January 7-10, 2027, Los Angeles, CA

Panel sponsored by the Lessing Society      

Emancipatory Narratives in Eighteenth-Century German Literature and Drama                                                                  

“The totality of the happiness of each member is the happiness of the state. […] Any other good fortune of the state for which even a few members suffer and must suffer is merely a cover-up for tyranny.” By the time G.E. Lessing formulated this statement in Ernst und Falk (1778), political debates across Europe had long become inseparable from questions of natural rights, human equality, and the conditions under which power could claim legitimacy. The theoretical rethinking of concepts such as ‘tyranny’ and ‘despotism’, to which Lessing’s quote points, provided further effective – if not uncontradictory – tools for diagnosing coercion in different forms (Koebner, Turchetti). In the German-speaking lands, however, philosophical discourses on emancipation unfolded within a fragmented political landscape marked by lingering feudal structures and pervasive censorship.

Within this context, literature and drama emerged as crucial sites for negotiating the premises and possibilities of emancipation. Plays staged tensions between despotic rule and individual freedom, whether by displacing these conflicts in time or space – such as in antiquity or the Orient – or by exposing oppression in contemporary bourgeois milieus.Novels and moral weeklies likewise engaged with questions of gender, education, and self-determination. Literary texts also registered Europe’s entanglement with colonial expansion, racial hierarchies, and slavery, at times reproducing and at others criticizing these formations. Well before the French Revolution, many works grappled with the tension between Enlightenment reform and the specter of armed emancipation, exploring the delicate boundary between ethical principle and violent resistance. Concepts of Vernunft, Toleranz and Humanität thereby offered powerful frameworks for envisioning emancipation, while also exposing the exclusions and contradictions inherent in Enlightenment understandings of it (Pečar/Tricoire).

This panel invites contributions examining how eighteenth-century German literature and drama translated ideas and debates on emancipation into imaginative form. We welcome papers that explore representations of social, political, or colonial emancipation; the narrative and discursive strategies through which oppression and resistance are staged; the use of historical reference and geographical displacement as aesthetic devices or responses to censorship; and the ways literary forms enabled, interrogated or constrained visions of freedom across axes of power, property, gender, and race.

Please send a 250-word abstract along with a short bio to Gaby Pailer (pailer.gaby@ubc.ca) and Elena Stramaglia (elena.stramaglia@fau.de) by March 20, 2026.

Contact Information

Elena Stramaglia, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Gaby Pailer, University of British Columbia

Contact Email

elena.stramaglia@fau.de

Call for Papers:

MLA Annual Convention
January 7 – 10, 2027
Los Angeles, California 

Controlling Fantasies in the Long Eighteenth Century

Panel sponsored by the Lessing Society

Enlightenment acknowledges the necessity and indeed virtue of imagination in various discursive domains, while it also tends to fear and to need to control the perceived excesses of imagination, e.g. as fantasy or as Schwärmerei.  In Nathan der Weise, for example, Lessing has Nathan say of his daughter, imagining his way into her experience of having her expressions of thanks be rejected by the Templar Knight, to whom she owes her life: 

“Da müssen Herz und Kopf sich lange zanken,
Ob Menschenhaß, ob Schwermut siegen soll.
Oft siegt auch keines; und die Phantasie, 
Die in den Streit sich mengt, macht Schwärmer,
Bei welchen bald der Kopf das Herz, und bald
Das Herz den Kopf muß spielen. – Schlimmer Tausch!” (I, 1, 133-8). 

Kant expresses (here, in the Anthropologie) a similar suspicion of imagination:  “Die dichte Einbildungskraft stiftet eine Art von Umgange mit uns selbst, obgleich bloß als Erscheinungen des inneren Sinnes, doch nach einer Analogie mit der äußeren.  Die Nacht belebt sie und erhöht sie über ihren wirklichen Gehalt: so wie der Mond zur Abendzeit eine große Figur am Himmel macht, der am hellen Tage nur wie ein unbedeutendes Wölkchen anzusehen ist. . . “

The status and significance of imagination and fantasy are, however, the object of lively debate not only in the Enlightenment, of course, but also throughout the Counter-Enlightenment, Klassik, and early Romanticism.  To take one small sample from Romantik, Friedrich Schlegel in Studium der griechischen Poesie, writes: “Aber auch dann, wenn die Phantasie schon lange durch Vielwisserei erdrückt und abgestumpt, durch Wollust erschlafft und zerrüttet worden ist, kann sie sich durch einen Schwung der Freiheit und durch echte Bildung von neuem emporschwingen und allmählich vervollkommnen.”

Across the long eighteenth century, then, the question persists as to what one is to do, in a secularizing age, with the irrational dimension of the human that appears in imagination and fantasy, given that rationality depends in some ways on these very functions (or faculties), and can never divorce itself entirely from their influence and importance, even as it remains opposed to them.  What strategies do different writers across this period invent and adopt?   What positions do they take?  We invite papers on literary, epistemic, ethical, aesthetic, ideological, ontological, rhetorical, political, gender-political, psychological, or other implications of fantasy and/or imagination in writing/thought from Enlightenment to Romanticism.   

Please send abstracts of 250-400 words to Jeffrey S. Librett (jlibrett@uoregon.edu) by March 20, 2026. 

Call for Papers:

German Studies Association Conference, Phoenix, AZ

September 24-27, 2026

Affects and Emotions in the Long Eighteenth Century

Panel sponsored by the Lessing Society

In light of the centrality of affects and emotions in today’s political and cultural landscape, this panel aims to trace their prominence and functions in the long eighteenth century. We invite papers that explore the complex emotive spectrum ranging from affects – basic, often automatic feeling states linked to arousal, valence, and physiological responses – to more context-specific, conscious, and sustained emotions that integrate bodily reactions with higher-level cognition and influence thought, decision-making, and social behavior. Although the conceptual vocabulary of the eighteenth century differs significantly from contemporary usage, can we nonetheless identify categories that correspond to our modern distinctions between transient affects, sustained passions, subjective feelings (Gefühl), and socially mediated, complex emotions?

This period of profound cultural, intellectual, social, and political transformation provided an ecosystem in which affects and emotions were unleashed, regulated, and steered. Examples include the “invention” of human rights through the epistemological integration of sensitivity and empathy into notions of the individual (Lynn Hunt) and the birth of aesthetic theories exploring the relationship between affects, emotions, morality and sensitivity (Baumgarten, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller). At the same time, intense affects and emotions – especially pleasant ones – were often tainted by their association with entertainment and femininity and came under close scrutiny as potential corruptors of good taste. In parallel, we also consider the minor, ambivalent, “ugly” feelings – irritation, envy, anxiety – that reveal how everyday forms of control and precarity inform what subjects can do (Sianne Ngai).

The panel will investigate the historical, social, and cultural processes by which affects and emotions drew a new kind of attention in the long eighteenth century. Papers might offer insights into how they were evoked, perceived, and strategically mobilized and/or analyze their interplay with emerging orders – such as the literary market, the bourgeois family, “modern” gender roles, racialization, colonial trade and fantasies, industrialization and “nature.” How were these orders shaped through affects and emotions, and how, in turn, were emotions and affective responses integrated within them?

Please send proposals by March 6, 2026 to Thomas Martinec (thomas.martinec@ur.de), Claudia Nitschke (claudia.nitschke@durham.ac.uk), and Heidi Schlipphacke (heidis@uic.edu)

The Eighteenth-Century Culture of Witz and Its Afterlife

Co-Sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America, the Lessing Society, and the North American Heine Society

German Studies Association Annual Conference

September 24-27, 2026

Phoenix, AZ

In the 18th century, the concept of Witz was so central to poetic and aesthetic discourse in the German language that Lessing could claim in 1751 that the Reich des Witzes encompassed the entire realm of the schönen Wissenschaften und freien Künste. The concept had the advantage of being both rigorously defined by figures such as Baumgarten and Gottsched while also being capacious enough to address embodied and experiential aspects of art and culture. Witz, in other words, was a term that allowed an age of reason to speak about things beyond reason's purview. But by the end of the century the hegemonic status of Witz had become much less clear. While the Jena Romantics still championed it in the pages of the Athenäum, even for them, similar, more loosely defined concepts such as Genie and Phantasie had begun to compete with and displace Witz. Regardless of the shifting terms of discourse, Witz left a lasting imprint on the aesthetics, poetics, and culture that emerged towards the end of the 18th century. This is the case even into the 19th century, particularly for figures such as Jean Paul and Heine. This panel will investigate the life and afterlife of the culture of Witz. We invite contributions investigating Witz's lasting influences, whether explicit or implicit, across all levels of literary and aesthetic culture, such as theories of laughter, performance arts, philosophical aesthetics, pedagogy, literary style, and salon culture. What affordances did Witz continue to provide beyond the age of Enlightenment? In what ways did it trouble aesthetics and cultural practice? What lasting traces did Witz leave on a culture that sought to define itself with other means?

Please send a 200-word abstract and short bio to Austen Hinkley (austen.hinkley@yale.edu) and Elliott Schreiber (elschreiber@vassar.edu) by March 1, 2026.