CFP: «Mitteilungen an die ferne Zukunft». Aesthetics and Hermeneutics of Long-Term Communication – Special Issue 2026 (Deadline: June 1, 2026)

Ed. by Elena Romagnoli (University of Pisa) – Matteo Zupancic (University of Pisa)

In 1984, amid the Cold War and its enduring anxieties about the survival of the human race, as well as two years prior the infamous Černobyl disaster, the German journal Zeitschrift für Semiotik published a special issue entitled Und in alle Ewigkeit: Kommunikation über 10000 Jahre. Wie sagen wir unseren Kindeskindern, wo der Atommüll liegt? [1] The atomic phenomenon was, in fact, at the very center of political debate worldwide, framed through different, yet partially overlapping, perspectives: on the one hand, the threat of nuclear holocaust looming over the confrontation between the two global superpowers; on the other, the more subtle but pervasive fear associated with nuclear power plants and their long-term sustainability.

Against this backdrop, the special issue of the Zeitschrift für Semiotik marked the culmination of what came to be known as Nuclear Semiotics (Atomsemiotik): a research field devoted to imagining strategies for communicating to humans in a far future – up to 10,000 years – the dangers posed by nuclear waste storage sites. The extraordinarily extended timeframe required for radioactive decay, and thus the long-lasting health and environmental hazards associated with nuclear waste, demanded a perspective on language and communication so far-reaching that even their most basic assumptions had to be reconsidered. What might the receivers of such messages look like 10,000 years from now? Would they be technologically advanced enough to already possess knowledge of the affected locations? If not, would they still be able to understand the media used to transmit these warnings, or would technological incompatibility lead to a complete breakdown of communication? And, in the event of civilizational collapse, would surviving human communities still be able to recognize and interpret the warnings left by their ancestors? The contributions to that special issue set out to address these dilemmas by bringing together approaches ranging from strictly semiotic analyses to technical reflections on the design of databases and storage sites, and even broader anthropological considerations concerning memory, temporality, and cultural transmission. 

Our driving idea is to bring together literary and philosophical approaches in the challenges posed by this promising and unexplored topic. As a result, Nuclear Semiotics preserves within itself a radical question that exceeds its highly specific original application. At its core lies the problem of the survival and readability of a text across an extreme temporal horizon, regardless of its specific content or function. While Nuclear Semiotics explicitly addressed the aesthetic dimension involved in the transmission of nuclear warnings – for instance by considering the architecture of storage sites designed to convey, almost atmospherically, a sense of danger and unease – it never extended these reflections to literature itself, for obvious pragmatic reasons. Yet the underlying questions remain strikingly relevant: How will literature look in 10,000 years? How will the literature of our past and present be preserved? Will it still be readable to future descendants of the human species? Which media are capable of withstanding the depth of time? What if the reader itself is lost through extinction? Will literature migrate into other forms, transcending its textual dimension?

Early reflections on the relationship between the threat of nuclear apocalypse and the survival of literature can already be found in the work of the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Similarly, in the essay No Apocalypse, Not Now, Jacques Derrida hypothesizes a nuclear war that would destroy literature but not poetry or the arts. Derrida thus suggests that literature is intrinsically tied to archival practices and lacks the external referential grounding that might grant it objective value beyond the oral traditions from which it historically emerged.

This special issue takes up the conceptual challenge posed by the Zeitschrift für Semiotik and invites contributions that engage with the future of literature and its agent – the human species – as well as with the core aesthetic implications of the literary phenomenon in the broadest sense. Reflecting on the resilience of the literary message, its aesthetic constitution, and the conditions of its mediation and reception opens up four key areas of inquiry:

• Philosophy of Literature. The survival of literature confronts a horizon of expectations inconceivable for the theorists of  the Constance School – indeed, even the very idea of a readership living 10,000 years from now. Setting aside the traditional questions concerning the essence of literature (Sartre 1947) or its functions (Lamarque 2008; Schroeder 2010), a more radical line of inquiry focuses on the nature of literature as a narrative practice capable of withstanding the passage of time and its unforeseeable consequences. This includes the possibility that literature might survive the concrete deactivation of humanity’s capacity to occupy the roles of author and reader (through extinction, illiteracy, or other causes), as well as the potential loss of its customary media (the book as object, visual poetry, audiobooks, etc.). How far can literature be transfigured before it ceases to be narrative at all?
  
  
• End of Literature? Which events or conditions might lead to the death of literature in the near future, or to its radical transformation? Topics include the so-called ‘death’ (Kernan 1990; Greif 2009) or ‘end’ of literature (Kermode 1967; Vermeulen 2015; Campana 2019), literature and artificial intelligence (authorship, large language models, literature produced by automata, e.g. Slocombe/Liveley 2024), literature and the internet (Chalmers 2022), and other emergent media (Johnson 2021).
  
  
• Literature of the End? Post-apocalyptic fiction and the ways in which literature reflects on its own role in post-apocalyptic scenarios (as recently featured in the special issue of the Journal Between in 2025). Possible intersections with Critical Posthuman Studies are welcome, both on a thematic level (literature that imagines a posthuman literary subject, e.g. Hayles 2008; Braidotti 2013; Nayar 2014; Micali, 2019; Karkulehto/Koistinen/Varis 2020; Kundu/Sarkar 2021) and on a formal one (the potential shape of a literature truly “after the human,” following the extinction of contemporary global civilization or even of the species itself, e.g. Grusin 2018).
  
  
• Archival and Material Studies. The transmission and preservation of culture through objects, whose value may involve not only conservative concerns (some materials endure far longer than traditional literary artifacts) but also semiotic ones. Alternative media and material languages may serve as vehicles of cultural transmission even in the event of radical transformations of known linguistic systems. Contributions may address questions of documentality in relation to the notion of trace (from a deconstructive perspective) and mediality (Ferraris 2013), literary preservation, future archival practices, projects for long term preservation (Borghoff/Rödig/Scheffczyk 2010; Traczyk/ Ogryczak/Pałka 2017); and the safeguarding of cultural memory under extreme temporal conditions.

Bibliography

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Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
Campana, Francesco. The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Chalmers, David. Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now”. Transl. By C. Porter and P. Lewis, Diacritics, 14 (1984), 2: 20–31.
Ferraris Maurizio. Documentality. Why it is Necessary to Leave Traces. Transl. by R. Davies, Fordham University Press, 2013.
Greif, Mark. ‘The Death of the Novel’ and its Afterlives: Toward a History of the ‘Big, Ambitious Novel’. Boundary 36 (2009), 2: 11–30.
Grusin, Richard (ed. by). After Extinction. University of Wisconsin Press 2018.
Hauser, Susanne. “Wiedergelesen: ‘... und in alle Ewigkeit. Kommunikation über 10000 Jahre’. Zur Neuherausgabe eines Heftes der Zeitschrift für Semiotik aus dem Jahr 1984”. Zeitschrift für Semiotik 43 (2021), 3/4: I–VIII.
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Karkulehto, Sanna – Koistinen, Aino-Kaisa – Varis, Essi (ed. by). Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2020
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Schroeder, Severin (ed. by). Philosophy of Literature. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Slocombe, Will – Liveley, Genevieve (ed. by). The Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature. Routledge, 2024.
Traczyk, Tomasz – ‎ Ogryczak, Włodzimierz – Pałka, Piotr (ed. by). Digital Preservation: Putting It to Work. Springer, 2017.
Vermeulen, Pieter. Contemporary Literature and the End of the  Novel. Creature, Affect, Form. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
After the Catastrophe. Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Narratives = Between 15 (2025), 30.
Und in alle Ewigkeit: Kommunikation über 10000 Jahre. Wie sagen wir unseren Kindeskindern, wo der Atommüll liegt? = Zeitschrift für Semiotik 6 (1984), 3.

Timetable

Contact E-mail:

elena.romagnoli@unipi.it
matteo.zupancic@unipi.it