We are excited to announce the third installment of our Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture series, mini-conferences devoted to studying the most pressing and emerging concepts actively shaping digital literary culture.
In 2026-2027, Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture will host two virtual mini-conferences consisting of four thematically-linked keywords actively shaping digital literary culture in the very online, very present moment. Our first installment this year will be on the keywords "trope" and "maxxing." We are working at the bleeding edge of culture, and these mini-conferences are designed to be intimate, safe, and collaborative spaces to think with others about what we see emerging, as it is emerging.
To that end, the conference will be held on a single day consisting of two panels organized around the keywords. For each keyword, we are soliciting submissions for three to four 10-minute papers to facilitate timely conversations about the pressing issues in digital literary culture today. Our aim is to invite conversation across the papers and across the keywords through a day spent reading and thinking together.
For our Keywords Sessions, our selections ask potential participants to touch on these dynamics via the following keywords shaping digital literary culture today. Please see the call-for-papers below.
Trope:
Discussions of tropes as recognizable narrative devices–indicating certain plot points, character dynamics, or narrative beats–are no longer the purview of narratologists and literary critics alone. “Trope” has become common parlance among readers, writers, publishers of contemporary fiction and other participants in digital literary culture. Users on BookTok and other reader-driven platforms, for example, speak in the language of tropes when recommending books, previewing the narrative experience a reader might expect. Publishers, booksellers, and authors alike have adopted the language of tropes to reach target readerships—often those readers who now actively seek out particular tropes and combinations of tropes.
Many familiar tropes now circulating through mainstream publishing (enemies to lovers, fake dating, forced proximity, only one bed!) have longer histories and their contemporary naming and circulation owe much to the folksonomies in fanfiction spaces, where formulaic narrative experiences create much of the pleasure of writing and reading. In these spaces, tags and tropes help readers navigate enormous textual archives according to desired narrative experiences (or to enable the exclusion of undesired experiences). Repetition and variation become sources of pleasure rather than evidence of aesthetic failure. As the language and classification practices of online reading communities have migrated into commercial publishing, “trope” has increasingly become a category through which fiction is written, marketed, discovered, evaluated, and read.
We invite papers that engage with “trope” as a category of interest in contemporary literature. We are less interested in readings of a familiar trope in a singular novel, film, or television series than in work that theorizes trope: its changing meanings, uses, histories, and cultural functions. How did a term with established histories in rhetoric, literary criticism, and narratology become a vernacular category used by readers and audiences to name, sort, search for, anticipate, and evaluate stories? What conceptual work does trope perform when it operates simultaneously as a narrative category, reader-generated classification, marketing term, metadata, search keyword, and algorithmically legible signal? What happens when readers and audiences increasingly encounter stories through anticipated narrative patterns? How does the language of tropes reshape relationships among authors, readers, viewers, publishers, platforms, producers, and texts? How do tropes travel across media, particularly as popular fiction is adapted for film and television? And what can the contemporary prominence of the word trope tell us about changing ideas of originality, genre, formula, pleasure, discoverability, and cultural value?
Topics might include:“Tropification” of publicity language
Formulaic fiction and pleasure
Fanfiction, folksonomies, and the migration of vernacular classifications into mainstream publishing
Narratology and tropes
The changing meanings and intellectual histories of trope
Tropes as metadata, search terms, or mechanisms of discoverability
Trope as a category produced collectively by readers, fans, authors, publishers, and platforms
Tropes, algorithms, and platformed literary culture
Writing “to trope” and the influence of market categories on literary production
Maxxing:
Looksmaxxing. Sleepmaxxing. Booksmaxxing. Communitymaxxing. Increasingly, almost anything can be maxxed. The proliferation of -maxxing across social media offers a new vocabulary for thinking about a culture increasingly organized around optimization, measurement, self-improvement, and the pursuit of an imagined maximum. Emerging from the language of gaming and min-maxing, maxxing was subsequently taken up in incel and manosphere communities, where looksmaxxing named efforts to maximize physical attractiveness and, with it, perceived social and sexual value. The suffix has since travelled far beyond these communities. -maxxing can now be attached to seemingly any dimension of everyday life, from sleep and fitness to productivity, relationships, leisure, and community. Sometimes these practices are pursued earnestly; sometimes maxxing is used ironically, parodying the very impulse toward relentless optimization that the word describes.
As a keyword, maxxing also invites us to consider the relationship between language and platforms. Its productivity as a suffix allows virtually any activity to be transformed into a project of optimization, while social media provides the metrics, comparisons, tutorials, communities, and imagined audiences through which that optimization can be performed and evaluated. Maxxing therefore sits at the intersection of several defining tendencies of contemporary digital culture: the quantified self, algorithmic visibility, neoliberal self-fashioning, wellness culture, platform vernaculars, memetic language, gendered online subcultures, and the conversion of everyday practices into identifiable—and potentially monetizable—lifestyles.
We invite papers that approach ‘maxxing’ (or maxxxing, or any number of Xs) as an object of inquiry in its own right. We are less interested in studies of a particular maxxing trend than in work that uses the term to theorize contemporary digital and popular culture more broadly. What does maxxing name that terms such as self-improvement, optimization, productivity, or wellness do not? What happens when the logic of maximizing a game statistic becomes a way of conceptualizing bodies, identities, relationships, careers, and everyday life? What histories of gender, masculinity, capitalism, technology, and quantification travel with the term even as it becomes detached from the subcultures in which it developed?
Topics might include:
Maxxing as a keyword of contemporary digital literary culture
The linguistic, cultural, and technological histories of -maxxing
Maxxing as a platform vernacular or memetic form
Gaming, min-maxing, and the translation of game logics into everyday life
The movement of maxxing from incel and manosphere communities into mainstream internet culture
Maxxing, masculinity, femininity, and gendered self-fashioning
The productivity of -maxxing as a suffix and the rapid formation of new internet vocabularies
Alternatives, refusals, or limits to the imperative to optimize
Submission Guidelines:
We welcome 250-300 word proposals for 10 minute presentations through our Google form by October 2nd. We invite proposals from individuals at all career levels, including emerging scholars, graduate students, independent researchers, and practitioners. Please include your full name and pronouns, email, a 100 word biography, and a working title.
Authors of successful proposals will be notified by October 9th. The mini-conference will take place online on November 19th. Timing will be set to EST local time, and optimized to accommodate the potentially global timezones of the presenters.
If we receive more abstract submissions than the mini-conference format has room for, the following criteria will apply:
Presenters that can attend both panels (if time zones allow)
Explicit thematic relevance
Overall strength of submission
We anticipate accepting three to four papers per keyword and accommodating attendees if your paper is not selected but you would still like to participate, or you don’t want to submit a paper but would like to attend.
Please send any queries to Kiera Obbard and Hannah Jorgensen at contact@dlcplus.org.
