CALL FOR PAPERS: Esferas Literarias nº 8 (2025)

Varia, Notes and Review Sections

The CFP is now open for original texts to be published in the sections Varia, Notes and Reviews of Esferas Literarias, nº 8 (2025).

Articles and reviews may be in English or Spanish.

All proposals must follow the guidelines of the journal and must be submitted through the journal’s website (make a submission).

Deadline for submissions: 15^th July 2025.

 

Monograph: Paul Auster, Universal Writer

Guest editor: Mª Laura Arce Álvarez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

 

PAUL AUSTER, UNIVERSAL WRITER

In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, Paul Auster answers to a question about solitude and the act of writing, “I felt as though I were looking down to the bottom of myself, and what I found there was more than just myself–I found the world” (The Red Notebook 144). Auster’s work, representative of the Postmodern American Fiction of the 1980s, offered to his readers that world he found in the solitude and intimacy of his writing. In Auster’s universe converged the American literary Renaissance of Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville, the French symbolism of Baudelaire’s flannêur or Cervantes’ Don Quijote in the labyrinths of New York City. Undeniably, Auster’s literature embraced different voices and worlds that opened a never-ending universal dialogue that makes of his books a collective work, a global literary community that allows his readers to trespass the limits of fiction and the boundaries of literary genres. However, Auster’s work goes one step further in its universality to share this global dialogue not only with other authors and literary works, but also with other artistic disciplines Auster constantly made present in his literature and life. The first part of his writing life was focused on poetry and translation, making these two roles fundamental for his future fiction. The peak of his career came with the publication of The New York Trilogy in 1987, a landmark in American postmodern metafiction which made of Auster one of the representatives of the American literature of the 1980s. Lover of cinema, it was in 1995 when he made one of his dreams come true by writing the screenplay for the movie Smoke directed by Wayne Wang. This movie opens the celluloid world for him, becoming a film maker and directing his own movies. Auster’s universal dialogue does not have frontiers either and it interacts with different textual disciplines that make him one of the most versatile artists of our time. The universality of his work becomes a community for his readers who find in his texts a homely atmosphere. This special issue of Esferas Literarias is a tribute to Auster’s artistic legacy by giving voice to the universality and dialogic nature of his work.

 

Articles can include the following topics:

 

Paul Auster and Poetry: Auster started his writing life as a poet publishing 4 poetry collections, Unearth (1974), Wall Writing (1976), Fragments from the Cold (1977) and Facing the Music (1980), a fundamental experience for his future life as a novelist. Auster neither wrote nor published any book of poems after 1980. However, critics claim that his poetic oeuvre was essential for his formation as a writer and he was even encouraged to go back to his poetry almost until the end of his life. As Auster himself wrote in his nonfiction work The Art of Hunger, “All my work is of a piece, and the move into prose was the last step in a slow and natural evolution.” We welcome articles that discuss the role of Paul Auster as a poet and the poetic and theoretical contribution of his poetry to American postmodernism. Also, we encourage contributors to study the intertextual dialogue that Auster’s poetry established with other American and European poets.

 

Paul Auster and Translation: The beginning of Auster’s writing life is also marked by his work as a translator. First a way of living, translation became an important task for Auster’s formation as a novelist. Translation opened an intertextual dialogue in Auster’s work that made it participant of theoretical works that will condition his particular Austerian postmodernity. In The Red Notebook he explained that through translation “you learn how to feel more comfortable with yourself in the act of writing […] You submit yourself to someone else’s work–someone who is necessarily more accomplished than you are–and you begin to read more profoundly and intelligently than you ever have before” (102). This special issue welcomes articles that study the importance of Auster’s role as a translator and how it influenced his work.

 

Paul Auster’s Postmodernity and Intertextuality: Paul Auster fiction openly quotes and mentions other writers’ works as a way to tribute authors and texts that Auster considered fundamental for his literary career. Thus, on the one hand, his novels show an explicit intertextuality that constitutes the famous Austerian mise-en-abyme technique and on the other, his novels hide an implicit intertextuality in the foundations of his literary space. Here is where all the influences that conditioned his role as poet and translator emerge to give shape to a particular Austerian postmodernity. We welcome articles that analyze both the explicit and implicit intertextuality in Auster’s work from different authors and literary traditions. Also, we accept articles that deal with the influence Auster had for other writers, especially those from non-English speaking countries, and the literary and cultural dialogue established with some of his friends such as Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee or Don DeLillo.

 

Paul Auster and film: Films have always been central in Auster’s life and writing career. It is not until 1995 that he had the opportunity to write his first screenplay, Smoke, and direct his first movie Blue in the Face (1995). This was just the beginning of a film maker career that added two more movies to the list, Lulu on the Bridge (1998) and The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007). However, cinema has been also present in Auster’s fiction. Movies are part of the plots of novels such as The New York Trilogy, The Music of Chance, Mr. Vertigo or The Book of Illusions. This special issue welcomes articles that discuss Auster’s cinema and the influence of film studies in his work.

 

Articles can be written in English or Spanish.

Articles must follow the guidelines of the journal and must be submitted through the journal’s website.

Deadline for submissions: 15th July 2025.