Call for papers:
Philosophy and Literary Genres in the Twentieth Century
Journal: Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee - Critical Journal of History of Ideas
(https://en.giornalecritico.it/)

Issue editors:

Raffaele Ariano (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan)

Paolo Babbiotti (University of Turin)

Matteo Falomi (Sapienza University of Rome / University of Essex)

Submission deadline: September 30, 2026

The call for papers and the introduction to no. 2 (2021) of the Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee opened with a question from which we would like to set out again: «Could one write a history of the expressive forms of philosophy that would also be a social history of the philosopher’s role?» In that case, the eighteenth century—the Age of Enlightenment—offered itself as a natural laboratory of inquiry, both theoretically and historiographically. This time, however, we propose to focus on the twentieth century. The focus will remain on the notion of literary genre, renewing the wager that this concept, in studying the meaning and importance of writing for philosophy, can integrate—with heightened attention to social contexts, expressive conventions, pedagogical norms, and underlying historical trends—alternative (yet complementary) investigative paradigms such as those centered on the notion of style and on individual cases.

From this perspective, the twentieth century is a broad and fascinating field of variations and contrasts. It is the century in which Ludwig Wittgenstein experiments literarily with the forms of the treatise and the aphorism. It is the century in which Martin Heidegger investigates the relation between poetry and philosophical unconcealment. It is the century in which Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin rediscover the essay and the fragment, and in which Jacques Derrida places the question of philosophical textuality at the center through the idea of deconstruction. It is the century in which Stanley Cavell seeks a new form of philosophical rigor in confession and autobiography. It is the century in which philosophers such as Miguel de Unamuno, George Santayana, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Iris Murdoch write philosophy not only through treatises but also in the form of novels, poems, plays, screenplays, and “psychobiographies.” Journalistic reportages written by philosophers—from Albert Camus’s on Algeria to Michel Foucault’s on Iran, including Hannah Arendt’s from Jerusalem—and interviews with philosophers likewise have, in this period, a significant history, variously intertwined with the rise (and fall) of the philosopher’s social role as an engaged public intellectual, as well as with that of the philosopher as sage, spiritual guide, and scourge of morals. In the twentieth century, the development of the publishing market and the spread of recording technologies brought to the fore phenomena that are not altogether new but extensively renewed, such as the book that transcribes a course or a lecture—a singular mix of orality and writing—and the popular philosophy book, posing for both interpreter and author the problem of how to manage the passage from these to other domains and media—consider once again Foucault, who strategically used different registers depending on whether he was treating a topic in his “concept-books,” in his courses at the Collège de France, or in interviews. Of twentieth-century thinkers we read letters—such as Antonio Gramsci’s from prison—and we read autobiographies, such as those published— to mention only a heterogeneous handful of names—by Bertrand Russell, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Popper, W. V. O. Quine, Louis Althusser, Sarah Kofman, and Stanley Cavell. If, shifting from philosophers who write novels to novelists who engage in philosophical reflection, we turn our attention to the latter, we can fruitfully extend the study of the relation between philosophy and literary genres in the twentieth century to authors of the “novel-essay,” such as Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Milan Kundera.

Running parallel to this great variety, however, is the history—also twentieth-century—of the progressive academic professionalization of philosophy, a history of triumphs and miseries, of notable opportunities and achievements as well as of frustrations and asphyxiating constraints—the very ones on which, in different ways and with different outcomes, texts such as Stanley Cavell’s “An Audience for Philosophy,” Richard Rorty’s “The Philosopher as Expert,” and Bernard Williams’s “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” focused. To understand this “professionalization,” it is desirable to analyze philosophy’s relation to literary genres such as the journal article, the doctoral dissertation, the academic companion, the textbook, the encyclopedia entry, and—why not—the research project, with all that these imply, from an economic and sociological point of view, at the level of public and private policies that govern funding, journal and institutional rankings, peer-review mechanisms, synergies with academic publishing, etc. From this point of view, the history of twentieth-century philosophy extends into our present—into what, in this context, we may wish to investigate as a kind of long twentieth century, which also includes the first twenty-five years of the new millennium.

This call for papers encourages contributions on topics that include, but are not limited to, those mentioned above; that come from a variety of methods and disciplines, philosophical and non-philosophical, yet always with an eye to the historiographic aspects of the problem; and that attend to background trends and phenomena without neglecting the case studies offered by individual philosophers and the close reading of texts.

NOTE: No publication fees are charged for accepted manuscripts. Manuscripts must not be under review by other publications at the time of submission.

Prospective contributors should submit their articles—together with an abstract and complete affiliation details—to: philgenres20@gmail.com