Calls for Contributions to Collective Publications

“Rivers and Journeys: Discovering New Selves and New Tropes”, edited volume.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 1 November 2023.

Volume edited by Dr. Doaa Omran

Volume theme presentation 

Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” This perhaps epitomizes the concept of my forthcoming edited book on “Rivers and Journeys: Discovering New Selves and New Tropes.” This project explores literary works that depict how we embark on such journeys to lose ourselves, to find ourselves, and sometimes, maybe, to be transformed into someone else somewhere else for a while. We travel across these liminal spaces to nourish our souls and, in some bleaker instances, to cross to the other world. A river forms a calmer, less-stormy frontier than a sea, a zone where one has the leisure to speculate and reflect on oneself even when stepping out of one’s comfort zone. If on a riverboat, the journey is relatively slow as river waters are shallow, and the ship needs to maintain a specific speed limit. Because the land is visible on both sides, one feels secure looking at the banks even when temporally not treading on them. This sense of assurance makes journeying across rivers a convenient trope for self-discovery. The physical and psychological liminalities experienced along rivers have inspired authors from multiple cultures.

I have received some abstracts, but am looking for a few more contributions. I am looking for essays that cover riverine journeys on almost every continent. I am particularly interested in abstracts that read riverine works on the Seine, the Volga, Rhein, Danube, etc. A paper on Olivia Laing’s To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface would also interest me. In addition to drawing upon canonical works journeying along rivers, I am also looking for less-known works exploring traveling along these waterways. I want to invite scholars to engage in comparative analyses of different river journeys across the globe––an essential literary trope that has been ignored. 

Timeline 

• The Abstract submission deadline is November 1^st, 2023. 
• Submit Book Proposal to Publisher by December 31^st, 2023.
• Chapters are expected by May/June 2024. 

Website

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/05/10/rivers-and-journeys-discovering-new-selves-and-new-tropes

Contact details

Domran@unm.edu

Lingvisticae Investigationes: Fuzziness, vagueness and underdetermination in reference.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 10 November 2023.

Issue edited by

Laure Gardelle & Frédéric Landrangin

Presentation 

The act of reference links a linguistic expression, called a referring expression, to one or more entities that belong to the extralinguistic world or to a mental representation of a possible world. Most referring expressions, in their context of use, allow for the precise identification of a referent. But in a number of cases – which will be the focus of the present issue – it is not clear which referent(s) are really involved in the act of reference. This concerns, among others, the phenomena sometimes described as a case of fuzzy, vague or underdetermined reference, such as plural referents, evolving referents, human impersonal pronouns.

With these examples, the very nature of fuzzy reference challenges the principle of an absolute search for the exact referent. Why can we say ‘the Gauls invented many Celtic cosmetic instruments and products’, when it was not the same Gauls who invented each of the instruments or cosmetic products? Why choose ‘it’, not ‘them’, even though the referent is clearly in several pieces, and why is it that some languages, such as French, do not license a personal pronoun in an exact translation? Why does the language offer so many possibilities to switch from singular to plural (‘Paul bought a Toyota because they are sturdy’, Kleiber 2001), from part to whole (‘Brussels’… ‘the European Commission’), from a given referent to a near-identical one (Recasens et al. 2010), from several referents to resumptive anaphora capable of regrouping and recategorizing? Above all, why do these cases of vagueness and imprecision pose no problem at all for the recipient (Sanford et al. 2008), who interprets the message without wondering whether he/she has identified the referent(s) precisely and accurately?

Timeline 

• Deadline for submission: 10 November 2023
• Notifications to authors: 20 December 2023
• Submission of final versions: 10 February 2024
• Publication: the second half of 2024

Website

https://www.lingvisticae-investigationes.org/

Contact details

laure.gardelle@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

frederic.landragin@ens.psl.eu

CFP

call_for_papers_LI_vague_reference

(Posted 12 March 2023)

European Journal of English Studies (EJES), Volume 29 (to be published in 2025): “Wasted Lives in Contemporary Fiction: Bodies That Do Not Matter”.
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2023.

Guest editors: Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz (University of Málaga, Spain) and Simonetta Falchi (University of Sassari, Italy)

In one of his seminal works, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (2004), Zygmunt Bauman defines the idea of “wasted lives” as a ripple of modernity creating the figure of “the outcast.” According to him, the production of “human waste” – or more precisely, wasted lives, the “superfluous” populations of migrants, refugees, and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernisation. The concept of wasted lives deconstructs the impact of this transformation. Coping with “human waste” provides a key to comprehending otherwise incomprehensible aspects of our shared life, from the strategies of global dominance to the most intimate human relationships. Contemporary and past societies believe themselves to be paragons of civilisation and progress. Yet a growing population of “undesirable people” has invaded public life and culture and represents a threat to class values. This situation is reflected in numerous literary and visual works created during the last few decades.

On the other hand, stigma has become a prominent indicator of contemporary and historical populations that have been subjected to discrimination for social and political reasons. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, stigma can be defined as “a mark of disgrace or infamy; a sign of severe censure or condemnation, regarded as impressed on a person or thing; a ‘brand.’” In light of this concept, Imogen Tyler reflects on how stigma changes the ways in which people think about themselves and others in Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality (2020): this concept represents an assault on human dignity through its technologies of division and dehumanisation. Compassion, hope, and solidarity are destroyed, since stigma, as a form of power, is embedded in social relations linked to colonialism and patriarchy, as well as to inequalities of class, race, gender, and sexuality written on the body of “the other.” Stigma always happens in historical contexts where violence, discipline, and punishment coalesce to produce devastating effects on people’s health and well-being. Social organisations frequently portray the disenfranchisement and distress of people living in poverty as the result of their poor behaviour, lack of discipline, and shamelessness.

There are many instances of contemporary literature and culture whose aim is to recover the voices of stigmatised people whose lives are considered wasted. Their bodies have stigma inscribed onto them because of their alleged lack of humanity. However, stigma can also be viewed as a mark of resistance in both historical and contemporary societies, and this is reflected in a number of these literary and cultural works that represent an attempt to reconstruct the lives of marginalised people.

We welcome proposals that deal with cultural and literary productions that are concerned with stigma, wasted lives, and bodies that do not matter in the context of past and contemporary societies. Essays can cover a range of approaches and methodologies, including linguistic, stylistic, and philological ones, as well as theoretical-critical and translational elements of contemporary literary texts and their audio-visual re-mediations. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The disposable bodies of the poor, refugees, and migrants as superfluous populations in cultural productions
• The lives of outcasts, criminals, “deviants,” and prostitutes as carriers of stigma in literature and visual culture
• Disabled and sick bodies and the lack of humanity attributed to them in past and contemporary societies
• The role of disease and contagion in the spread of social evils in literary and visual representations of marginalised individuals
• The idea of modernity as a false mirror of civilisation and progress in the face of “undesirable people” 
• The portrayal of poverty and fate as resulting from a lack of discipline and shamelessness and the violent stigmatization of populations in contemporary and past contexts

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max.100 words) should be sent to both editors by 30 November 2023: Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz, mirr@uma.es and Simonetta Falchi, sfalchi@uniss.it 

EJES operates in a two-stage review process.

1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by  30 November 2023.
2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a late spring 2024 deadline.
3. The full-length essays undergo a second round of review, and a final selection for publication is made. Selected essays are revised and then resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2024 for publication in 2025.

EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html and https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/neje20/current

CFPs for Vol. 29

EJES-CFP-on-Wasted-Lives-2025

EJES-CFP-on-Poetics-and-Politics-of-Gender-Mobility-and-Migration-2025

(Posted 8 April 2023, Updated 18 April 2023)

European Journal of English Studies (EJES), Volume 29 (to be published in 2025): “The Poetics and Politics of Gender, Mobility and Migration in the New Anglophone Literatures”.
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2023.

Guest Editors: Nadia Butt (University of Giessen), Radhika Mohanram (Cardiff University) and Michelle Stork (University of Frankfurt)

This special issue sets out to address the poetics and politics of gender in the New Anglophone literatures of mobility and migration. Considering the “mobilities turn” in the humanities (Sheller and Urry 2006, 207-226; Aguiar et al. 2019, 4) and its connection to migration, this issue aims to investigate how Anglophone literature by writers of diverse cultural backgrounds provides new perspectives on gender. The major objectives of the special issue are to examine both gender and the literary interrogations of Europe’s cultural encounters, as protagonists travel, move and migrate between cultures and continents, both literally and metaphorically. 

Focusing on writers working in English, the special issue interrogates how mobility and migration not only shape and transform the genre of the novel, prone to generic overlaps with travel literature, the epistolary novel, the memoir, the Bildungsroman, narratives of displacement or exile, journey or quest narratives and refugee narratives, but also facilitate our understanding of culture, nation, gender and identity in relation to various forms of movement. According to Aguiar et al., mobility “operates at multiple scales of meaning, any and all of which constitutes society’s mobile culture” (2019, 2). Likewise, migration is a “continual” and “multidirectional” (Ahmad 2019, xxvii) experience. Not only may gender propel movement in the first place, but “[e]ach journey takes the unmistakeable imprint of gender” (Siegel 2004, 9). 

In light of current research, we seek approaches to mobility and migration in the New Anglophone literatures from feminist, queer and transgender perspectives showing how gender shapes the experience of movement “across the lines” (Cronin 2000; Klooß 1998). We are very much interested in representations of gender with reference to mobility and migration as perceived by writers of the ‘Global South’, whose works are deeply engaged with global cultural entanglements. 

We are keen to address the following questions in this issue:

1. Why is it important to investigate the poetics and politics of gender, mobility and migration in the New Anglophone Literatures?
2. How can we grapple with the poetics and politics of gender in narratives of mobility and migration in the face of global modernity?
3. How do the New Anglophone Literatures bring out the dynamics of gender, mobility, and migration in relation to the Global South and the Global North? How useful is it to speak of “gendered racism” to allude to the racist oppression of migrant women “as structured by racist and ethnicist perceptions of gender roles” (Castles et al. 2014, 62; Essed 1991, 31)?
4. What is the role of transcultural and transnational relations in examining the nexus of gender, mobility and migration?
5. What is the role of diaspora, nomadism, exile and forced migration in shaping the poetics and politics of gender in a literary work? 

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max. 100 words) should be sent to both editors by 30 November 2023: Nadia Butt, Nadia.Butt@anglistik.uni-giessen.de, Radhika Mohanram, MohanramR1@cardiff.ac.uk, and Michelle Stork, m.stork@em.uni-frankfurt.de. 

EJES operates in a two-stage review process:

1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2023.
2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a late spring 2024 deadline.
3. The full-length essays undergo a second round of review, and a final selection for publication is made. Selected essays are revised and then resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2024 for publication in 2025.

EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling. For more information about EJES, see: http://www.essenglish.org/ejes.html and https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/neje20/current.

CFPs for Vol. 29

EJES-CFP-on-Wasted-Lives-2025

EJES-CFP-on-Poetics-and-Politics-of-Gender-Mobility-and-Migration-2025

(Posted 18 April 2023)

“The Politics of Home” – A Special Issue of Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power.
Deadline for abstracts: 30 November 2023.

Guest Editors: Kristin Aubel and Sarah Heinz (Wien)

The notion of home, while often associated with warmth, security, and personal sanctuary, is inherently intertwined with broader socio-political dynamics. It therefore encompasses more than a physical space, and it is never neutral, private, or simply ‘ours’. It is where inside and outside, private and public, as well as built forms, affective ties, and cultural imaginaries intersect in a politics of home. At their core, such politics of home encapsulate the intricate interplay between individuals, communities, and the broader structures and institutions of power that shape our lived experiences. This special issue seeks to explore the various ways in which ideas and ideals of homes are constructed, contested, and negotiated within the complex tapestry of society, highlighting the pivotal role played by political, cultural, artistic, and historical contexts. It therefore seeks to cover the multiple forms and functions that a politics of home can have, as well as the multiple forms in which literatures, the arts, media, activism, or concrete home-making practices negotiate and grapple with the diverse manifestations of such politics of home and their impact on individuals and communities.

Understanding home through the politics attached to it opens up a discussion about practices, selves, and relationships within, through, and beyond the home. Via objects put into specific places and their use, through activities like decorating, cooking, or playing, as well as through the social relations that these practices create or inhibit, the feelings they elicit, and the memories they amass, home is created, lived, and imagined, enabling the person performing these activities to experience, ‘feel,’ and remember home as a place, as social relations, and as a site for individuality and selfhood. This process can have positive and negative outcomes, it can be liberating and constricting, but it is never static, whole, or fixed. It is related to and produced by the interplay between public and private processes as well as chosen and imposed social relations. In effect, home is always already shaped by the power structures of a given community, because it is produced and re-produced within what Doreen Massey calls the flows of the power geometry between homes and other places (1991: 25).

Accordingly, transdisciplinary research of home has outlined that home is a multidimensional term that may refer to physical structures like a house, social units like a family, a place of origins, concrete practices, or affective ties. It is assessed as a place, a practice, an imaginary, a feeling, or a sense of self, sometimes all at the same time (Mallett 2004: 62-89). Home is also a scalable concept that may start with the mind or body as home, a house as home, and end with a nation or even the globe as home (Marston 2000; Marston 2004). These multiple scales and dimensions of home can explain the terminological and conceptual vagueness of the term, but they can also account for the relative effortlessness with which common-sense understandings of home as well as political rhetorics often conflate house and home, home and homeland, or home, family, and forms of (national) identity.

In consequence, the notion of home is a kaleidoscope of dimensions, scales, and meanings. Nevertheless, what many associations and definitions share is their seeming stability and boundedness and their sense of home as a positive place of belonging or becoming (Fox 2016: 2-4). In these understandings, home is the centre of the self and a place where meaning is made. It is thus seen as an essential setting for the grounding of one’s identity. In this perspective, home enables the grounded self to extend its selfhood into the outside world, as claimed by Heidegger and Bachelard in their respective phenomenologies of home (Heidegger 1993; Bachelard 1994). As Bachelard famously writes: “[…] by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves” (Bachelard 1994: xxxvii). The logical flipside of such organic notions of home is, however, that “all forms of mobility, which ‘disembed’ individuals from their local communities, have been seen to undermine social cohesion” and have been associated with danger, pollution, and destruction (Morley 2017: 59). In this logic, modernity and modern forms of building are seen as a threat to organic forms of dwelling. Modernity is thus judged as leaving the human subject existentially homeless (Dovey 1985).

Such conceptualisations of home as integrating one’s life into an existential whole have not remained unchallenged, most crucially due to their lack of attention to the implicit power politics attached to home. They have been criticised for their romanticisation (especially of gender roles and unpaid labour within the home), their static and masculinist underpinnings (Young 1997), and for their lack of understanding of how experiences of dwelling cannot be separated from social structures and often discriminatory institutions that make and shape our experiences of home. Seeing both individual and communal experiences of home as entangled with issues of power outlines how home can be threatening rather than integrating for some groups, e.g. for women, asylum seekers, or people with disabilities (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 14). Home has therefore been explored as indeed central “for the construction and reconstruction of one’s self” (Young 1997: 153), but the focus on home as a positive, integrative site for (implicitly white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, or heterosexual) identity formation has been amended by the study of home as a site of potentially violent, constricting identifications, e.g. of gender, sexuality, or ‘race’, to name but a few (see for example Back et al. 2007; Gorman-Murray 2006; Pink 2004). These explorations have included more recent phenomena like the Covid-19 lockdowns and the governmental imperative to ‘stay at home’, more established analyses of the logics of imperialism and colonialism, as well as assessments of the securitisation of nation-states along the lines of a home in need of defense in what William Walters has termed “domopolitics” (2004). 

In effect, a focus on politics of home and home-making makes visible that “[h]ome does not simply exist, but is made” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 23). A look at concrete imaginaries, practices, and forms of home can make explicit different, concrete uses made of such politics of home and outline how artists, activists, and other practitioners across different fields have made visible how politics of home shape how people and communities can or cannot co-exist. 

In this special issue of Coils of the Serpent, we want to address the variety of forms and functions of politics of home and the different engagements with these politics across the arts, disciplines, and historical contexts. We welcome contributions that engage with politics of home and their representation and contestation in the areas of cultural and literary studies, (human) geography, urban studies, anthropology, or sociology, to name but a few. We are inviting contributions on topics that include (but are not limited to)

• narrating and representing politics of home across periods, genres, and media,
• forms of community and social relationships enabled or restricted within the home,
• home as a site of inclusion and/or exclusion,
• the politics and political rhetorics of home and homeland,
• home and home-making practices as sites of resistance,
• domestic violence and the home as a site of threat,
• the home as a prison,
• the politics of homelessness and its regulation, management, and representation,
• economies of home and the role of paid/unpaid labour,
• diaspora, migration, transnational mobility and their re-assessments of politics of home,
• planetary and environmental perspectives on politics of home,
• politics of home in urban planning and gentrification,
• the politics of specific sites of home, e.g. the suburb or the owner-occupied house-as-home,
• the body politics of home and bodyless homes (e.g. in cyberspace).

Please send an abstract of approximately 500 words and a short bio to the editors Kristin Aubel and Sarah Heinz (kristin.aubel@univie.ac.at & sarah.heinz@univie.ac.at) by 30 November 2023. Abstracts should include a title, topic outline, and information on the kind of text (essay, statement, scholarly article) as well as the approximate length of the planned text. Submissions can be in the form of a traditional journal article, but this is not a requirement. Submissions can also be more creative, of a personal nature, and/or experimental. The editors will get back to you by 22 December 2023. Full articles will be due 31 May 2024. The special issue is scheduled to be released in winter 2024. Please read the journal’s submission guidelines: https://coilsoftheserpent.org/submissions/

Works Cited (see the attached CFP)

CFP

CotS-Politics-of-Home-CfP

(Posted 14 July 2023)

Novel Media / Media Novel: Theorising Digital Media Cultures in the Contemporary Novel.
Deadline for expressions of interest/abstracts: 1 December 2023.

Contemporary novels are marbled with representations of digital media. Despite the notable attention to digital technologies already present in post-war literature, the twenty-first century has witnessed the unprecedented integration of digital media into everyday lives, where digital objects and systems are shaping social and cultural paradigms anew. Contemporary writers, in and through their writing, actively engage with the digital media experience of the twenty-first century. In Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) the protagonist grapples with her personal history of trauma through the short form of tweets and in Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2023) the world of game design structures the protagonists’ experiences of the world from early childhood to middle-age. Such writing complicates the configuration of digital media and traditional print form and engages in innovative and experimental ways with how digital cultures shape our human experience. This special issue seeks contributions about ‘the digital’ in ‘media novels’ – that is novels “in which media other than writing appear as a thematic or structural element” (Punday 2012: 3). From the daily routine of email writing to social media browsing, from Twitter politicians to Big Data surveillance, and the effects of a digital landscape made up of platforms: our contemporary digital economy has changed the habitual and political aspects of everyday life in which we find our minds and bodies structurally repurposed and affectively mobilised. These shifts in our media culture are made visible when digital media find their way into literary narratives, when the technicity and politics of the digital meets its poetics. 

Rather than reading the contemporary novel as mimetic in nature, we invite papers which explore to what extent novels can function as a vital source of theorising the digital media cultures of our times. What are the societal contexts of staging digital media forms in literary writing in which the presence of digital media is not only the background for everyday life but plays a central role in the formal make-up of the narrative? Could we go as far as announcing that some of the contemporary novels featuring digital experience constitute the ‘novel of digital ideas’ as a new configuration of the ‘novel of ideas’ (LeMahieu 2015)? What, if any, is the symbolic function of digital media in contemporary writing? And how can interdisciplinary readings of contemporary literature contribute to innovative ways of theorising media and literature? Therefore, instead of limiting contributions to readings facilitated by current approaches within media studies, we are looking for critical contributions that develop ways to theorise digital media cultures through, with, and in contemporary fiction. Contemporary fiction, in our understanding, thus serves as a vehicle for theory formation, or even the formation of entirely new scholarly fields (cf. Rimmôn-Qênān 2004; Mack 2014).

To that end, we invite contributions with a critical perspective from literary studies, media studies, cultural studies, philosophy, gender and queer studies, comparative studies, postcolonial studies, educational studies or any other relevant cognate disciplines. Possible topics for contributions include but are not limited to: 

• The representation and structural incorporation of digital media forms (social media, emails, video games etc.) in novels 
• Digital media as a symbolic form or a cultural logic 
• The role of fiction in negotiating the interface of digital media and human experience The limitations of print within the novel form 
• New formalism and digital media 
• The novel vs/and digital short forms (Tweets, captions, text messages etc.) 
• E(-)pistolary narratives 
• Digital media and (post) pandemic experience 
• Key figures of digital culture (hackers, programmers, users etc) 
• The ‘digital divide’ and/or discriminatory and emancipatory aspects of digital media The role of digital media in forming online identities and communities 
• Young adult fiction and the formative role of digital media during adolescence 

We would particularly like to encourage early-career researchers and researchers from underrepresented backgrounds to consider submitting an expression of interest. Additionally, we strongly encourage submissions that showcase awareness of issues related to diversity and inclusivity and contribute to promoting works by authors from underrepresented backgrounds. If you are interested in contributing to this special issue, please submit your 300–500-word 

abstract (+bibliography), or an equivalent expression of interest in your preferred multimedia format to novelmedia@st-andrews.ac.uk. We are also commissioning book review essays (circa 3000 words) which critically engage with recent scholarship on the relationship between the novel and digital cultures. We are open to receiving suggestions for books you would like to review; however we also have a list of possible books for review available upon request. 

Deadline for expressions of interest/abstracts: 1 December 2023 

Bibliography 

• LeMahieu, Michael. ‘The Novel of Ideas.’ In The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945, edited by David James, 177-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 
• Mack, Michael. ‘Literature as Theory: Literature and Truths.’ In The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, edited by Barry Stocker and Michael Mack, 429-41. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 
• Punday, Daniel. Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 
• Rimmôn-Qênān, Šûlammît. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London/New York: Routledge, 2004.

Please do not hesitate to contact us at novelmedia@st-andrews.ac.uk if you have any questions.

CFP

Novel-Media-Media-Novel_C21-Special-Issue

(Posted 20 October 2023)

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities: Imagination Today: Between Theory and Practice of Phantasia.
Deadline for abstracts: 1 December 2023.

This special issue of the journal Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities in 2026 will delve into the challenging debates abundant in 20th and 21st-century continental philosophy about the place of imagination not only in aesthetics, but also in metaphysics, epistemology, and practical philosophy, as well as its importance in the separate, yet intricately connected domains of literary theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and the behavioral sciences.

Since the history of the concept of imagination can be traced back to the archaic times of Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle, and later to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the ground-breaking treatment of phantasia and imagination in those works surely invites us to go back in time in search of origins. However, to reconsider the value imagination still holds in theoretical – and why not – in practical areas of the human experience, focusing on interpretations mostly related to the traditions of modernity will be a small attempt to narrow our analysis in the vast sea of ongoing discussions about the nature/structure/role/purpose of imagination.
We propose, therefore, a specific return to the traditions of Kant and the school of German Idealism though probing those philosophical contributions from the vantage point of modern and contemporary continental philosophy and the relevance of these traditions for the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. With a look at the Kantian “transcendental imagination” in the groundbreaking Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787) and the role of imagination in the Critique of Judgment (1790), and later the Fichtean “productive imagination,” we would get the sense of preoccupation that Kant and the philosophers after him rightfully ascribe to imagination, not besides, but together with reason. Once the metaphysical and ontological importance of imagination is secured, it will be Nietzsche who will disrupt the status quo that, it might be argued, had been preserved for too long, in order to replace the revered concepts of truth, the good, and reason in the Western tradition with the poetic, the visionary, the Dionysian in the very end of the long 19th century. Europe would react to the Nietzschean revolution not just as a gesture of philosophical dissent, but as an epochal marker of what we call ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’. The long shadows of those philosophers will later re-emerge in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, to name just a few.

While the German tradition in philosophy is an impressive, challenging line to adopt in the approach to the concept of imagination, the rest of Europe provides just as many interesting contributions to consider: philosophers as different as Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Ricoeur, Bachelard and Bataille, Foucault and the extremely impressive post-1970 tradition in French philosophy are matched by diverse voices in sociology, anthropology, and literary theory who explore in various ways the role of imagination in their works. But then again, if we limit the scope to the philosophers, we would have omitted equally important psychoanalysts like Freud, Klein, Lacan, and Kristeva who find a combination of the metaphysical, the ontological and the embodied at work in the patient’s ‘imagines’ and imagination.

We invite papers which significantly engage with the works of the modern European thinkers, from Kant onwards, on the topic of imagination, but, at the same time, we would like to see papers which discuss the important re-interpretations which the 20th and 21st-centuries contribute to the analysis of the role of imagination in the humanities and in the production of cultural artefacts.

Please send an abstract (up to 500 words) and a current cv to artemis.r@unic.ac.cy by 1 December 2023. Notifications of accepted proposals will be sent by 5 January 2024. Complete papers (approx. 9,000-10,000 words) will be due by 1 November 2024. For further inquiries, please contact Prof. Rossie Artemis at the email above. Subject to approval by the responsible editor, special issues of Angelaki are republished 9-12 months after the issue as hardback books in the Angelaki: New Work in the Theoretical Humanities series.

CFP

CFP-Imagination

(Posted 15 November 2023)

Lingvisticae Investigationes: Fuzziness, vagueness and underdetermination in reference.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 5 December 2023.

Issue edited by Laure GARDELLE & Frédéric LANDRAGIN

Issue theme presentation 

The act of reference links a linguistic expression, called a referring expression, to one or more entities that belong to the extralinguistic world or to a mental representation of a possible world. Most referring expressions, in their context of use, allow for the precise identification of a referent. But in a number of cases – which will be the focus of the present issue – it is not clear which referent(s) are really involved in the act of reference. This concerns, among others, the phenomena sometimes described as a case of fuzzy, vague or underdetermined reference, such as plural referents, evolving referents, human impersonal pronouns.

With these examples, the very nature of fuzzy reference challenges the principle of an absolute search for the exact referent. Why can we say ‘the Gauls invented many Celtic cosmetic instruments and products’, when it was not the same Gauls who invented each of the instruments or cosmetic products? Why choose ‘it’, not ‘them’, even though the referent is clearly in several pieces, and why is it that some languages, such as French, do not license a personal pronoun in an exact translation? Why does the language offer so many possibilities to switch from singular to plural (‘Paul bought a Toyota because they are sturdy’, Kleiber 2001), from part to whole (‘Brussels’… ‘the European Commission’), from a given referent to a near-identical one (Recasens et al. 2010), from several referents to resumptive anaphora capable of regrouping and recategorizing? Above all, why do these cases of vagueness and imprecision pose no problem at all for the recipient (Sanford et al. 2008), who interprets the message without wondering whether he/she has identified the referent(s) precisely and accurately?

Timeline 

• Deadline for submission: 5 December 2023
• Notifications to authors: January 2023
• Submission of final versions: 10 February 2024
• Publication: the second half of 2024

Website

https://www.lingvisticae-investigationes.org/

Contact details

• laure.gardelle@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
• frederic.landragin@ens.psl.eu