Liminal Dialogues: AI, Voice, and Impossible Conversations in Literary Creation (NEMLA)
Newport, RI Convention Site: Salve Regina University
Organization: NEMLA
Event: NEMLA
This creative session invites scholars, writers, and hybrid practitioner-theorists to explore liminal dialogue as a form of literary creation in which unlikely, displaced, or structurally incompatible voices are brought into conversation. Drawing on the centrality of dialogue in literary and dramatic traditions, this panel reimagines conversational form as a site of constraint-based experimentation, where meaning emerges through the collision of discourses that would not ordinarily coexist. Rather than focusing on artificial intelligence as a technological subject, this session treats AI-assisted generation as a formal device for producing estranged adjacency between voices, genres, and epistemologies. What happens when characters drawn from radically different narrative worlds, historical moments, or discursive systems are placed in structured conversation? How does meaning shift when dialogue is detached from stable context, shared reality, or conventional narrative logic? We welcome creative-critical submissions that use AI-assisted or procedural methods to generate liminal dialogues between incompatible speakers or speech forms. Contributions might include conversations between fictional, historical, or conceptual figures who would not normally meet; dialogues staged between competing textual systems or genres; or experimental works in which voice, tone, and argumentative logic destabilize one another through forced proximity. Submissions may also explore the failure of communication itself as a productive literary space. The session is especially interested in work that frames dialogue as a site of interpretive tension rather than narrative coherence, and in which meaning emerges through friction, misalignment, and discursive instability. AI or generative systems may be used as compositional tools, but the emphasis should remain on literary form, voice construction, and interpretive effect rather than technology itself. We encourage submissions across poetry, prose, hybrid writing, and performative or experimental formats suitable for conference presentation.
Scott Ennis