Aesthetic Forms of Community in German Literature and Thought (NeMLA 2027) (58th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention)
Salve Regina University, Newport, RI
Organization: Northeast Modern Languages Association (NeMLA)
Event: 58th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association Convention
Aesthetic Forms of Community in German Literature and Thought (Seminar)
Northeast Modern Languages Association (NeMLA) annual convention
Newport, Rhode Island
March 6 - 9, 2027
Submission Deadline: 30 September 2026, through the NeMLA portal:
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22453
In On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller asks how aesthetic experience might prepare human beings for freedom and social life after the disappointments of political transformation. Ever since, German literature and thought have repeatedly returned to the question of whether art can shape forms of shared life that politics cannot secure on its own. This question becomes especially urgent when community is approached from a position of loss, division, or historical distance, as in Hölderlin’s reflections on Greek-religious collectivity in Hyperion or Bread and Wine. It also shapes Hegel’s account of ethical life, tragedy, and the modern conditions of social unity. A related constellation emerges in the early twentieth century, when debates on theater and spectatorship turned to the question of how the theatrical event might shape collective perception and address an audience as a temporary community, for instance in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s and Max Reinhardt’s festival projects.
The central question of the seminar is how aesthetic forms imagine, model, stage, or produce community where political forms of belonging fail, while also exposing the exclusions and instabilities of communal life. It understands aesthetic form in a concrete sense, ranging from literary genre and dramatic structure to ritual, spectatorship, public address, festival culture, and embodied performance. How do such forms allow community to be imagined, staged, or tested in German-speaking contexts? How do texts and performances produce collective perception? When does a community remain a projection, and when does it become an event? The seminar is especially attentive to the boundaries such communities draw, asking who is allowed to speak, appear, participate, or remain visible within a shared aesthetic experience.
Possible directions include:
• aesthetic education and the formation of social or political life
• poetic, religious, or philosophical communities imagined after historical loss
• tragedy, ethical life, and the problem of modern social unity
• theatrical publics, festival culture, opera, or spectatorship as forms of temporary gathering
• gendered, racialized, religious, or national boundaries of belonging
• migration, exile, or displacement and the remaking of communal form
• contemporary performance practices that create temporary assemblies through embodiment, participation, excess, or discomfort
The seminar is intended to allow for sustained discussion of pre-circulated papers and may also open the possibility of developing contributions toward a future publication cluster.
Participants will be invited to circulate their papers in February 2027, allowing the session to focus on extended discussion. We particularly welcome contributions that engage across historical periods, disciplinary approaches, or theoretical traditions.
The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.
We welcome submissions from graduate students, early-career researchers, and established scholars.
Please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief bio through the NeMLA portal by September 30, 2026:
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22453
Questions about the seminar may be directed to Gabriela Zgrzebnicka at zgrzebnicka@web.de .
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22453
Gabriela Zgrzebnicka