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.