Calls

2i JOURNAL | IDENTITY AND INTERMEDIALITY STUDIES

 

CALL FOR PAPERS — Nº 15 (2027) : ADAPTATION AND POST-LITERATURE: RECYCLING, PRODUCTION AND CULTURAL CONDITIONS OF CONTEMPORANEITY

Deadline for submissions of contributions: 15th January 2027
Editors: Silviano Carrasco (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and David Lea (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela)

Presentation

In the context of the globalized world, whose post-capitalist societies (Fisher, 2016) are permeated by the phenomena of hybridization (Canclini, 2003) and transmedia (Salmose and Elleström, 2020), post-literary dynamics proliferate not only within the medium itself but also expand to the screen through the aforementioned processes and the recurring method of adaptation (post-literary). Unlike the types of transposition defined by Thomas Leitch (2004; 2007), the paradigm focuses more on the authorial survival of the literary canon in its media posterity and less on the transformation of the medium into new modalities that provide adaptive sources for the audiovisual.

George Bluestone's Novels into Film (1957) can be considered the first work to address the phenomenon of adaptation and would therefore constitute the cornerstone of what would later be called Adaptation Studies, although Virginia Woolf had already anticipated the field in her essay “The Cinema” (1950) [1926], where, despite being critical of the process, she evoked the advantages of moving images to convey thoughts and emotions. For much of the 20th century, the field struggled to emancipate itself from evaluative studies regarding the fidelity of adaptations of literary classics to films (always privileging the literary narrative over the filmic). However, in the full 21st century, the paradigm undergoes a profound transformation with the emergence of new theories that move away from the debate on transformation and focus on the adaptive process (Hutcheon, 2006). The need for a solid theoretical framework, emancipated from the essayistic analysis based on the impressionistic reading of adaptation fidelity, takes shape and gains importance (Cattrysse, 2014). In this sense, Simone Murray (2008; 2011) introduces the central idea of the post-literary adaptation industry understood through the tensions between culture and economy. Similarly, transmedia or transmedia narrative (Ryan, 2020) emerges in contemporary times to respond to the same media expansions of cultural products.

In this transformative scope, it can be stated that the (post)literary field currently faces a reality marked by adaptation to and from media, with a tradition of cultural recycling of over a decade in transmedia narratives (franchises, expanded universes, see Jenkins 2006; 2013) and in intertextual relations (Voigts and Nicklas, 2013). The central authors of literary hegemony and their texts are reinterpreted, expanded, or challenged through their remediation via these post-literary strategies, modes, and styles (Santos Unamuno, 2025)

Possible topics for reflection:

  • The post-literary condition: definition and debate;
  • New directions in transmedia studies within the current media ecosystem of hegemonic literary survival;
  • Links between literature and cinema in post-literary adaptation or expansion processes;
  • Transmedia expansions: from the (non)literariness of the audiovisual to other manifestations;
  • Fertilizations and theoretical hybridizations between film studies, literary studies, and transmedia;
  • New horizons: digitalities, social networks, and artificial intelligence.

 

CALL FOR PAPERS — Nº 14 (2026): ON EVIL AND TECHNIQUE: LITERARY AND ARTISTIC FIGURATIONS

Deadline for submissions of contributions: 15th June 2026
Editors: Diogo Martins (ILMCL-Universidade do Porto), Elisabete Marques (ILMCL-Universidade do Porto) and Pedro Meneses (CEHUM / IPVC)

Presentation

In contemporary terms, evil has become banal, losing any burden of guilt or remission for a theological failing. It has lost its exceptional and transcendent features. It has become the immanent way of pursuing efficiency (Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia, 1949; Günther Anders, The Obsolescence of Hatred, 1985). Since Kafka, at least, technique and competence have become recognizably the fundamental devices of an axiological flattening (Elias Canetti, The other process, 1969), as illustrated by the short story “In the Penal Colony,” in which an official on an exotic island intoxicatingly narrates how a machine works, remaining indifferent to the bloody effects of that very operation. In more recent Portuguese literature, it is possible to trace this association between technique and evil in the writing of authors such as Rui Nunes, Gonçalo M. Tavares, or H. G. Cancela, which present characters drawn from everyday or political reality, equally entangled in their power struggles with the purpose of surviving or just conquering more power (promoting evils of civilizational scope). However, any horizon of salvation in modernity cannot exclude the technical question: we will be saved by the unwavering hand, just as, mutatis mutandis, every man who trembled was considered guilty in revolutionary contexts (Peter Sloterdijk, Primitive Reflexes, 2016). This impasse defines the incongruity and fascination of modernity, as the Romantics immediately pointed out (Hölderlin, for example, in Hyperion, in an ancient philosophical-humanistic register; or, recalling another tradition, in the emergence of science fiction, like the one in which Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe are inscribed), often creating a decadent imaginary of technological origins, associated with the voraciousness of progress (Bernard Stiegler, Mécréance et Discrédit, 2004), and urban speed (Paul Virilio, La vitesse de libération, 1995), “in the pit of ecstasy that will become the cosmos” (Achille Mbembe, Brutalism, 2021). In this respect, there are significant examples of resistance to the dehumanizing effect of dromological power (Lorenz Potthast, “The decelerator helmet”, 2012) in contemporary art. In other cases, in which the bodies reject their own inefficiency (Stelarc, “The third hand”, 1980), diverging from and expanding the notion of technique as prosthesis, the artistic creations manifest that last unclassifiable remnant recognized by Parmenides in filth, in the excrement; or they lucidly engender machines of a kind of intimacy that was once considered irreducibly human (Wim Delvoye, “Cloaca”, 2000). Cinema and literature have been also presenting Ridley Scott’s replicants, James Cameron’s terminators, Wachowski sisters’ beings connected to the Matrix, David Cronenberg’s scanners, or even AI as an expression of a certain fascination both with the disembodied or algorithmically engineered body (Donna Haraway, A Cyborgue Manifesto, 1985; José Gil, Chaos and Rhythm, 2018; Juan Villoro, I'm Not a Robot, 2025), and the end of agency (Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1999; Lev Manovich, «‘Make it New’: GenAI, Modernism, and Database Art», 2023). Last but not least, with an apology for agency-without-a-subject, according to the updating of the idea of “body-without-organs” formulated by Mark Fisher, the lucid and agitated transdisciplinary and intermedial theorist of cyberpunk and gothic materialism (Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, 1999).

Possible topics for reflection:

  • Media manifestations that associate evil and technique: literature, painting, comics, photography, performance art, cinema, television, videogames;
  • (Inter)medial rewritings of evil figures;
  • Urban imaginary, technocracy and post-capitalist ideologies;
  • Art in its relations with bioengineering, genetics and other areas of experimental sciences;
  • Theorizations on creativity in the age of artificial intelligence;
  • Adaptations and updates of the myths of science and the apocalypse in science fiction and other genres.