Special Issue No. 48
Theme: Truth in Question: Literature, Narrative, and the Politics of Knowing
dialog, a fully peer-reviewed, bi-annual international journal of the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh, invites submissions for its forthcoming special issue (No. 48) on “Truth in Question: Literature, Narrative, and the Politics of Knowing.” The journal provides a forum for interdisciplinary research engaging literature, culture, and critical theory.
Across the contemporary world, questions of truth have acquired renewed urgency. The proliferation of misinformation, AI-generated texts, algorithmically mediated knowledge, contested histories, conspiracy cultures, and competing narratives has transformed the conditions under which truth is produced, circulated, and interpreted. Rather than signalling the disappearance of truth, these developments compel us to reconsider how literature participates in the making, questioning, and ethical negotiation of truth.
This special issue draws inspiration from philosophical and literary traditions that understand truth not as a fixed possession but as a contested process of interpretation. Paul Ricœur’s conception of narrative as a mode of configuring experience, Michel Foucault’s analyses of “regimes of truth,” Jacques Derrida’s reflections on testimony and archive, and Hannah Arendt’s distinction between factual truth and political opinion collectively remind us that truth is inseparable from questions of language, power, memory, and representation. Literature occupies a distinctive place within these debates. Fiction may reveal forms of historical, emotional, and ethical truth that exceed empirical verification, while memoirs, testimonies, documentary narratives, and archival fictions continually negotiate the fragile boundaries between fact and imagination.
The journal welcomes papers on, but is not limited to, the following areas:
- Truth, fiction, and narrative
- Testimony, witnessing, and life writing
- Memory studies and contested histories
- Historical fiction and historiographic metafiction
- Archives, documents, and the politics of memory
- Misinformation, post-truth cultures, and digital media
- AI-generated texts, authorship, and authenticity
- Narrative reliability and unreliable narration
- Literature, ethics, and the philosophy of truth
- Translation, interpretation, and epistemic mediation
- Cultural memory and collective forgetting
- Trauma, silence, and the limits of representation
- Documentary literature and documentary aesthetics
- Reading, interpretation, and the politics of knowledge
The issue also invites original poems, translations, photo essays and book reviews.
Important points to remember:
- Word limit for scholarly articles is 4,000–6,000 words (minimum 12 and maximum 20 pages).
- Papers must be in 12-point Times New Roman and formatted according to the MLA Handbook (9th edition).
- Authors should submit their papers to editordialog@pu.ac.in on or before 15 October 2026, along with an abstract (approximately 250 words) and a 50-word biographical note.
- Papers must be original and unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are not permitted.
- Authors must provide an undertaking that the submitted manuscript is original.
Other guidelines:
- Photo essays must include high-resolution images submitted as a compressed (.zip) file, along with the necessary copyright permissions.
- Word limit for Book Reviews is 1,200 words and for Interviews is 4,000–4,500 words.
Website: http://dialog.puchd.ac.in