What if literature’s defining power has never been interpretation but intervention? Across comparative literature, Latin American studies, affect theory, media theory, and aesthetics, a growing body of scholarship conceives literature not as a vehicle of meaning but as a practice that reorganizes perception, sensation, attention, and forms of life. According to this view, literature’s singularity resides less in what it represents than in what it does. This is so even as digital media, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic culture have radically transformed the conditions of reading and of reality itself. 

Recent work by Erin Graff Zivin (Anarchaeologies), Gareth Williams (Infrapolitical Passages), Ashley Brock (Dwelling in Fiction), and Adam Joseph Shellhorse (Anti-Literature) exemplify this shift. Though differing in archive and method, these thinkers challenge the primacy of meaning by reconceptualizing literature as an affective, perceptual, multimedial, and formal practice connected to Latin American life and politics. Shellhorse, in particular, explores how literature in Latin America deploys affect, multimedia, and creative syntax to reshape and reframe experience in a minoritarian, political key.

If recent theory has reconceived literature as an intervention into perception and affect, contemporary debates have increasingly questioned the future of reading itself. Rose Horowitch’s essay, “The End of Reading Is Here” (2026), has brought these anxieties into focus. And yet, rather than asking whether reading is disappearing, this seminar asks a different question: What can literature still do?  If reading practices are changing, how should literary criticism respond? What concepts are needed to account for literature’s affective, perceptual, and formal dimensions? How might literature continue to cultivate new modes of feeling, perceiving, attention, imagination, and world-making amid new media environments?

Drawing on affect theory, media theory, continental philosophy, Latin American criticism, and comparative literature, we invite papers that explore literature’s capacity to transform perception, sensation, and forms of life across languages, traditions, periods, and media. We welcome comparative, interdisciplinary papers that examine literature’s affective, perceptual, formal, political, and medial interventions across languages, historical periods, and geographic traditions, particularly in relation to changing practices of reading in the post-literate age. Possible topics include literary form and perception; affect; poetics and politics; literature and media; anti-literature; minoritarian literature; and new theories of reading.

In short, rather than mourning the so-called demise of reading, this seminar asks how literature continues to be charged with a singular task: transforming not only what we think, but how we perceive, feel, inhabit, and read the world.