volume 48, number 1 (2026), edited by Naomi Booth and Nicholas Royle
‘For now in every exuberant joy there is heard an undertone of horror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss. It is as though … a sentimental trait of nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into separate individuals.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
‘The inherent incompletion of a fragment renders it a sign of the movement beyond itself whereby it would be completed. It thus (to condense a more detailed analysis) instantiates the ideal of a Romantic or transcendental poetry as always in a state of becoming […].’ Timothy Clark, ‘Modern Transformations of German Romanticism’
‘When a stone breaks, a stone becomes stones. A fragment: what breaks off is on the way to becoming something else. Feminism: on the way to becoming something else. Shattering: scattering. […] The fragments: an assembly. In pieces. Becoming army.’ Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
‘Fragmentary writing,’ Maurice Blanchot tells us in The Writing of the Disaster, ‘might well be the greatest risk.’ In collaboration with the University of Sussex, the Oxford Literary Review will host a one-day symposium on fragmentary writing, on 20 June 2025. Papers will be short, a maximum of 1,300 words; shorter pieces and fragments are encouraged. The OLR will publish conference proceedings in a special issue of the journal in 2026.
Blanchot describes fragments as ‘pieces which do not form a composition, do not form part of any totality except to splice it up, not separated or isolated, but, on the contrary, always multiple without multiplication […] the passion of the fragmentary, effect of effects.’ Dan Mellamphy claims that ‘fragmentality’ or ‘thinking the fragment’ is to encounter the ‘eternal return of a rupture, […] fundamental fissure, a groundbreaking ground’. The fragment might constitute disobedience, resistance to a totalizing whole; it might be an ‘unfinished separation’, maintaining the ‘energy of disappearance’ (Blanchot). Or again, the fragment might activate the aspiration to (re)assemble.
Topics might include:
the aphorism
poetic fragments (from Sappho onwards)
the novel of fragments
fragments of philosophy (Heraclitus, Blanchot, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy)
short fiction and/as fragment
psychic fragments / fragments of an analysis
the fragmentary in politics
et cetera
etc
If you are interested in attending the conference and/or offering a submission, please get in contact with the issue editors at naomi.r.booth@durham.ac.uk and n.w.o.royle@sussex.ac.uk
