Call for Papers - Agrammaticality as a Critical Resource: Deviation, Hegemony, Cultural Dominance and Power

Call for Papers

Agrammaticality as a Critical Resource: Deviation, Hegemony, Cultural Dominance and Power

Topic & starting point

"Agrammaticality" - the conscious or unconscious violation of grammatical norms - is more than a poetic procedure. As an aesthetic-aesthetic disorder, it makes the politics of language visible: Who defines "correctness"? Which voices are considered audible, translatable, quotable? And where do zones of dissent emerge in which literary and cultural practices irritate hegemonic orders?

From a literary and cultural studies perspective, agrammaticity intertwines form and power. It de-naturalizes standard languages, destabilizes institutionally secured "grammars" of what can be said and opens up spaces for minority, polyphony, opacity and counter-discourse. It thus stands in the field of tension between hegemony (Gramsci), symbolic power (Bourdieu), sensual politics (Rancière), representational order (Foucault), defamiliarization/deautomatization (Slovskij), minor literature (Deleuze/Guattari), performativity (Butler) and post/decolonial language politics (Spivak, Ngũgĩ, Glissant). The aim of the publication is to examine agrammatic practices as cultural and literary-theoretical hinge phenomena between deviation/disturbance, cultural dominance and power, to place them in a context that can be theorized and to evaluate them in the direction of approaches to a literary theory of agrammaticity.

Initial perspectives for corresponding topic proposals could be

• Grammars of power: How do standardization, school canons, publishing and media practices secure the hegemony of an "official" language? Which strategies of agrammatic disruption (parataxis, morphological breaks, code-switching, creolization, pidginization) make this order visible?
• Poetics of dissent: To what extent do agrammatic procedures (ellipses, syntactic shifts, prefix splits, neologisms, interference and error poetics) generate aesthetic cognition and politically effective foreignness effects?
• Heteroglossia & register politics: How do literary texts (novels, poetry, drama) undermine the dominance of the standard language, for example through orality, sociolects, dialect literature, hip-hop/spoken word, fan fiction or digital memetics?
• Performativity & norm policing: What role do pronouns, gender marking, neopronouns, neologisms and "errors" play in struggles over gender, body, belonging? Where is the boundary between silencing and interrogation?
• Post/decolonial language practice: agrammaticality as opacity and self-assertion - from unwillingness to translate to "impure" multilingualism to strategic non-translatability.
• Materiality & media: How do media technologies (typesetting, spelling reforms, platform moderation, LLMs/AI grammar checkers) change the economies of error, deviation and correction?
• Methodological questions: close reading vs. corpus methods (e.g. stylometry), digital annotation of agrammatic phenomena, relational theory building between aesthetics, sociolinguistics and cultural studies.

Possible focus areas

• Avant-garde, concrete poetry, language criticism (e.g. Stein, Jelinek, Celan, Schmidt, Lispector, Kamau Brathwaite)
• Minoritarian modes of writing and "minor literature" (e.g. Kafka, post-migrant literature, Global South)
• Postcolonial & diasporic poetics (Ngũgĩ, Glissant, Edouard Louis, Warsan Shire, Ocean Vuong and others)
• Pop-cultural grammatical breaks (rap/trap, memes, net culture, fanfic)
• Translation, untranslatability, creoles/creole literatures
• Standardization/policing of language (Duden/academies, school and publishing policies, editorial offices, platforms)
• Algorithmic grammar: AI writing tools, autocorrection, moderation rules

Post format:

• We are looking for contributions that think further about the phenomenon of agrammaticity with regard to existing approaches in literary and cultural theory and/or ask in close readings of concrete aesthetic artefacts how the politicality of the agrammatic form can be described more precisely.

Submission

Please send a suitable proposal by November 15, 2025 to Dr. habil. Julia Prager / Dr. Florian Scherübl. This should include:

• Abstract (max. 500 words)
• Short biography (max. 100 words), affiliation, contact

Timetable

• November 23, 2025 - Deadline for submissions
• December 10, 2025 - Notification of acceptance
• March 31, 2026 - Submission of entries

The call can be downloaded as PDF under CfP_Agrammatikalität_25.