We live in chaotic times. The global news cycle is dominated by surprise and shock, and the future—even in the short term—feels at times totally unpredictable. But of course, chaos is nothing new; according to many traditions, it is in fact older than time itself. The word comes to English from Greek, and in Greek mythology Chaos is primordial. In Hesiod’s Theogony, “First of all there came Chaos, and after him came / Gaia of the broad breast” (lines 116-17, trans. Lattimore). Chaos preceded earth and sky, night and day, gods and humans, and everything else in existence. But chaos persists after creation as well, sometimes menacingly so. In Paradise Lost, John Milton describes Chaos as both a place, in a kind of nowhere between Heaven and Hell, and a personified figure, a king who reigns in “Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise / Of endless wars” (Book II, lines 896-97). The threat of Chaos is that our ordered social world could descend into anarchy, lawlessness, and war. In The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur argues that in many mythologies, the “origin of evil” is rooted in “the drama of creation” in which a benevolent god of order fights to bring order to unruly Chaos (trans. Buchanan 172). By extension, Chaos comes to represent the persistent threat of sin and evil, which is the drive to break away from an order imposed by God. And indeed, as we encounter scenes of chaos and “endless wars” in literature and in our news feeds, we might easily suspect Chaos still looms at the edge of time and space. Living in a world that seems to drift increasingly toward chaos, trying to build an orderly life can seem an impossible task, especially for those with a more precarious position in society. As the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man muses on his life of marginalization as a Black American, “the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived” (580). Thus, the cosmic battle becomes daily life.

And yet, Chaos is not always so bad. In many mythologies, it does not merely precede creation but births it. Also in Paradise Lost, Milton calls Chaos “the womb of Nature … neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, / But all these in their pregnant causes mixed” (Book II, lines 911-13). Thus, Chaos in the cosmic sense is a kind of substance from which all reality comes. But this is not only a question of cosmic creation but also of literary creation. In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley notes: “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.” Nothing comes from nothing, but innumerable creations can spring from chaos. N. Katherine Hayles, in her monograph on contemporary literature and science Chaos Bound, states it simply: “The more chaotic a system is, the more information it produces” (8) which makes Chaos “a positive force in its own right” (3). Chaos is the rich source of material from which many new literary worlds can be created, a possibility dazzlingly staged by Tom Stoppard in Arcadia (1993), recently revived in London. Moreover, living in a complex and chaotic world can offer novel and energizing experiences which bring new forms of knowledge. In An Accented Cinema, for example, Iranian-born scholar Hamid Naficy recounts watching Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film A Time to Love through translation across three different languages and cultures, with disorientation becoming a generative condition for new forms of perception. Thus, the true danger may lie not in primal chaos but in its antithesis, order—too much of which can lead to an authoritarianism that descends into its own regime of chaos. 

This conference invites scholars to submit papers on literature in English across all genres related to chaos, disorder, and anarchy and by association the drive toward order, their counterpart. Paper topics may include but are not limited to the following:

●      Return to order
●      Political and social anarchy
●      Traditional vs. experimental literary forms
●      Making sense from nonsense
●      Chaos and order
●      Dis/order
●      Chaos and existence
●      Literature reframing chaos
●      Chaos, void, and creativity
●      Narrative and poetic forms
●      Literary disruptors
●      Political revolution
●      Madness and civilization
●      Cross-cultural contact
●      Romanticism and the sublime
●      Modernist and avant-garde confusion
●      Nature, fractals, and landscape
●      Climate and the Anthropocene
●      Entropy
●      Religious imagination
●      Transmediation
●      Filmic representations of chaos
●      Posthuman and the ecological monstrosity
●      Biopolitics and the aberrant body
●      Migration, mobility, and the geopolitics of disorder
●      Media reflexivity
●      Testimony and trauma
●      The technological world viewed
●      The threat of order: authoritarianism and repression

Proposals for papers in English or Mandarin Chinese are accepted. Proposals for pre-formed (3-person) panels are also welcome. Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words (with a title and five keywords, for individual papers and pre-formed panels) and brief bios (which include name, title, affiliations, selected publications, contacts of each presenter) to 2027eala@gmail.com by 29 January 2027. For group submissions, please also include a group abstract. 

?  Notification of acceptance: 12 March 2027
?  Full paper submission deadline: 8 October 2027
※Submissions are limited to one proposal per person. For pre-formed panel submissions, please submit as a group; individual submissions will not be accepted. ※The full text of the paper is for the reference of the panel moderator only and will not be made publicly available. 

※Before participating in the conference and publishing your paper, you must have or obtain an EALA membership. 

※EALA encourages contributors to submit a revised version of their paper to Review of English and American Literature, which is a THCI Core tier-one journal, after the conference.

2027年英美文學學會年會徵稿啟事
破出混沌
主辦單位：天主教輔仁大學英國語文學系
天主教輔仁大學跨文化研究所
會議日期：2027 年 10 月 16日
會議地點：輔仁大學

我們身處在一個混沌不安的時代，全球新聞充滿震驚與劇變，難以預料。然而，如此混亂並不是現代的產物，而是深植於文化傳統之中，甚至存於世界開始運作之前。在西方，「渾沌」（Chaos）一詞源於希臘神話，意指太初的原始狀態。在《神譜》（Theogony）中，赫西俄德（Hesiod）寫道：「太初之際，渾沌始生，其後才有廣袤胸懷的大地蓋亞」（第116–117行，Lattimore 譯）。混沌先於天地、晝夜、神祇與人類，以及一切存在。然而，在創世之後，混沌仍持續存在，有時帶著威脅性。

在《失樂園》（Paradise Lost）中，彌爾頓（John Milton)將渾沌描述為介於天堂與地獄間的「無地之境」，同時，祂也是位統治著「永恆無序狀態」的擬人化君王。（卷二，第896–897行）。混沌的威脅是讓有序的社會世界一夕間崩解，陷入無政府狀態與無法無天的戰爭。在《惡的象徵》（The Symbolism of Evil）中，呂格爾主張，許多神話中「惡的起源」實則植根於「創世的戲劇」，其中仁慈的秩序之神試圖規訓狂放不羈的渾沌（第172頁，Buchanan 譯）。由此延伸，混沌象徵著罪與惡持續不斷的威脅，驅動著偏離神賦予的秩序正道。確實，不管從文學作品，還是動態消息中，我們見到混亂與「無止盡的戰爭」畫面時，很容易感受到混沌仍隱約浮現於時空邊界。

在日漸混亂的世界中，試圖建立有序的生活，對於處在「微脆生命」（precarious life）邊緣位置的人而言，是如此難以企及。如《隱形人》（Invisible Man）中的無名敘事者，沈思其非裔美國人邊緣處境時所言：「對安穩規律生活的想像，不可忽略秩序是為對抗混亂而生。」（第580頁）。於是，宇宙層級的對抗轉化為日常生活的現實。

然而，混亂並不總是負面的，在許多神話中，不僅先於創造，更孕育了創造。同樣在《失樂園》中，彌爾頓將混沌稱為「大自然的子宮，既非海洋、亦非陸地、空氣或火，而是一切孕生要素的混合」（卷二，第911–913行）。因此，在宇宙層面上，混沌是孕生萬物的原始物質。而這不僅是宇宙生成的問題，也關乎文學創作。在《科學怪人》（Frankenstein）1831年出版的序言中，瑪麗．雪萊（Mary Shelley) 曾言：「所謂發明並非始於虛無，而是發軔於渾沌。創作的素材必須先存在，創作者能為幽暗無形之物賦予形式。」無中不能生有，而無數創造都是從混亂之中湧現。

在探討當代文學與科學的理論專著《混屯邊界》（Chaos Bound）中，海爾斯（N. Katherine Hayles)指出：「系統越混亂，產出的資訊就越多」（第8頁）。這使得渾沌成為「「一種本身即具正面力量的存在」（第3頁）。混沌成為豐富的資源，使無數新的文學世界得以誕生，這一點亦在阿卡迪亞（Arcadia 1993，近年於倫敦重演）中被精彩呈現。此外，生活於一個複雜而混亂的世界，也可能帶來新的感知與知識形式。在《腔調電影》 （Accented Cinema）中，伊朗裔電影學者哈米德．納菲西（Hamid Naficy) 敘述他跨越三種語言與文化翻譯的過程中產生的觀影經驗，迷失與錯置反而成為生成感知世界的條件。因此，真正的危險或許不在於混亂，而是來自與之對立的秩序。過度的秩序導向威權體制，最終陷入另一種形式的混亂。

本次研討會誠摯邀請學者投稿，主題為英美文學中的混沌、失序、虛無狀態，以及與其對應的秩序趨力。投稿主題包括但不限於：

●      回歸秩序
●      政治與社會無政府狀態
●      傳統與實驗性文學形式
●      從無意義中建構意義
●      混沌與秩序
●      失序／秩序（Dis/order）
●      混沌與存在
●      文學如何重構混沌
●      混沌、虛無與創造力
●      敘事與詩學形式
●      文學中的顛覆力量
●      政治革命
●      瘋狂與文明
●      跨文化連結
●      浪漫主義與崇高
●      現代主義與前衛的混亂經驗
●      自然、分形與地景
●      氣候變遷與人類世
●      熵（Entropy）
●      宗教想像
●      跨媒介轉譯（Transmediation）
●      電影中的混沌再現
●      後人類與生態怪物性
●      生命政治與異常身體
●      遷移、流動與失序的地緣政治
●      媒介反身性（Media Reflexivity）
●      見證與創傷
●      科技中介的觀看世界（The Technological World Viewed）
●      秩序的威脅：威權主義與壓抑

本會議接受中、英文投稿，開放個人與小組（三人）提案發表論文。敬請有意 投稿者將三百字至五百字之論文摘要（含標題及至少五個關鍵字）與簡歷（含 姓名、職稱、任職機構、代表著作列舉）以電子郵件寄至：2027eala@gmail.com 。若為群組投件，請另附群組摘要。

? 論文摘要截稿日期：2027年1月29日
? 論文接受通知日期：2027年3月12日
? 論文全文上傳截止：2027年10月8日

※一人以投稿一篇為限。欲以小組投稿者請以組別為單位投稿，恕不接受個別投稿。※論文全文僅供會議主持人參考，不對外公開。

※參加會議發表論文之前，必須具備或取得英美文學學會會員資格。

※英美文學學會鼓勵投稿人會後將論文修訂版投稿至《英美文學評論》（該刊 為THCI第一級期刊）。