Barış Çoban (Doğuş University)

The relationship between body, emotion, and creativity has long occupied a central place in philosophical, literary, and artistic inquiry. From classical reflections on perception and sensibility to contemporary debates in affect theory, phenomenology, and post-structural thought, embodiment has increasingly been understood not as secondary to cognition, but as a fundamental condition of meaning-making, subjectivity, and creative practice.

This special issue is grounded in phenomenological approaches to perception, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which conceptualizes perception as an active, bodily engagement with the world. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the phenomenal field emphasizes the inseparability of self, body, and environment, challenging Cartesian dualisms that have shaped much of Western thought. From this perspective, emotions and creativity emerge through lived, embodied experience rather than abstract mental processes.

The issue further draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which proposes a non-hierarchical, relational, and processual understanding of reality. Applied to cultural and textual analysis, the rhizomatic model invites scholars to rethink creativity, affect, and subjectivity as fluid and emergent, shaped through networks of bodily, social, and material relations. Within this framework, literature, language, media, and artistic practices function not only as representations of embodied experience but also as sites where affect and perception are actively produced and negotiated.

Recent interdisciplinary research has highlighted the significance of affect, interoception, and somatic practices in shaping emotional regulation, resilience, and creative capacities. Artistic and cultural practices, from modernist experiments with perception to contemporary literary, media, and performative forms, offer rich material for examining how embodied emotions are articulated, mediated, and transformed. At the same time, the “affective turn” in contemporary theory (Clough & Halley, 2007) has foregrounded preconscious bodily intensities as central to cognition, social relations, and cultural production, opening new avenues for literary, linguistic, and media studies.

As digital and biotechnological systems increasingly mediate everyday life, questions concerning how embodiment, affect, and creativity are reshaped through technological environments also become crucial. This special issue therefore welcomes contributions that critically engage with embodied experience across historical periods, genres, languages, and media within European literary and cultural contexts.

INTERFACE –Journal of European Languages and Literatures  is inviting scholars from diverse disciplines to submit original, unpublished papers written in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, or Italian for Interface Issue 29-30, to be published in August 2026.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Embodiment, Affect, and Creativity

• The affective turn and embodied cognition in literary and cultural studies
• Emotions, perception, and creativity in European literatures and cultures

Literature, Art, and Media

• Literary, artistic, or media practices that theorize or enact embodied perception
• Embodiment and affect in narrative, poetry, performance, and visual culture
• New media, affect, and embodied experience in digital and networked cultures

Somatic and Affective Practices

• Mindfulness, interoception, and body-based approaches in cultural analysis
• Somatic practices, emotional resilience, and creative expression

Technology and Embodiment

• Digital technologies and their impact on affect, body, and creativity
• Embodied subjectivity in technologically mediated environments

Methods and Approaches

• Cross-disciplinary and comparative methods for studying embodied experience
• Phenomenological, post-structural, and affect-theoretical approaches