Time
Études Médiévales Anglaises nr 100
Deadline for papers: 10 January 2022
The French Journal of Medieval English Studies Études Médiévales Anglaises is seeking submissions for its 100th anniversary issue focusing on the notion of “time”. The papers, written in French or English, should be submitted to Fanny Moghaddassi and Martine Yvernault by 10 January 2022 (see more information below). Authors who wish to submit a paper are advised to get in touch and submit a title with a brief description of content as soon as convenient.
As the foundation of human experience, time unites natural and cultural phenomena. In 1977, Jacques Le Goff (Pour un autre Moyen Âge, 75) posited that “time related to natural cycles, agrarian activities and religious practice was the essential medieval timeframe”. Medieval societies organized working hours and prayers and liturgical celebrations – Church time – in connection to, and sometimes in contrast with, the necessities of natural and agricultural temporalities. Medieval time – unlike Early Modern time – was not constrained by measure and accuracy, but experienced as a flow, marked by cyclical agricultural activities, and the articulation of daily life with exceptional events, in the form of rituals and celebrations, which often included music and its both specific and complex relation to the measuring of time.
Yet Le Goff also stressed that the rise of “commercial capitalism” (Pour un autre Moyen Âge, 47) led to a partition in the medieval conception of time: Church time, “ruled by God only” spread in linear fashion towards God (Gourevitch defines such a movement as “fusion with eternity”, Catégories de la culture médiévale, 96), became distinct from merchant time, structured by dates, deadlines, context, anticipation, or, reversely, economic and weather accidents. From an ecocritical perspective, the desired, actual or dreaded domestication of natural environments acted as temporal landmarks, namely reflected in medieval literature.
In pagan polytheist cultures before the advent of Christianity, a mythological approach to the world structured conceptions of time and space, which were centered on the past and organized in cycles (Gourevitch). Christianity, grounding time on an only God, introduced the notion of eternity while still preserving some of the forms and landmarks of pagan time. Both Le Goff and Gourevitch showed that merchant time and productive time stemmed from the rise of cities and the development of a new approach to the world, and to time. Townhalls started to display clocks as secular time, anchored in activity and production, started to challenge theological time, regulated by churches. Now partition and measure came to draw a clear line between material and theological times (Schmitt, « Le temps. ‘Impensé’ de l’histoire ou double objet de l’historien ? », 46-7). The growing gap between these conceptions of time induced by galloping industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries led thinkers, artists and writers to invent and romance a pre-productive medieval period.
Gourevitch also pointed to the links that exist between space and time, as experienced both objectively and subjectively. According to him, man’s relation to time and space evolved dramatically from ancient times to the medieval period, from the Early Modern age to modern day, as life rhythms accelerated and the world seemed to narrow in the context of its discovery and exploration (Catégories, 34-5). Paul Ricoeur stressed a similar correspondence between (“experienced, geometric, lived-in”) space and time, which for him was equally dialectically divided in “lived time”, “cosmic time” and “historical time”, as the effort at dating mirrored a corresponding need for localization (Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 191).
Medieval conceptions and practices of time have always been the focus of critical attention, in historical, theological, philosophical and literary fields alike. Recent publications testify to an interest for gender-related practices of time and to an effort at tracing specifically female experience of time, for instance in childbirth rituals and daily life (E. Cox, L.H. McAvoy & R. Magnani, 2015). The reconstruction of the historical past in the medieval period (Rouse, 2005), the complex articulation of memory and the future (Critten, 2019), and conceptions of the future (Boyle, 2015) have also been scrutinized by recent criticism.
On the occasion of its anniversary issue, Études Médiévales Anglaises invites papers on the measuring of time, as well as on the marginal treatment of time in ritualized celebrations which punctuate daily life, sometimes subverting its usual hierarchies, as in the case of carnival and misrule. Papers can consider material representations of time and its measure, as well as the subtle representation of past, present and future in medieval literature: romance worlds often conflate several layers of time which coexist in the mind of the reader. (Rouse, 2019, 163).
Études Médiévales Anglaises invites papers from all disciplinary backgrounds on time in the medieval British Isles, including:
- Conceptualising time
- Measuring time, technical approaches to time.
- The ages of man.
- Seasons and nature.
- Academic divisions of medieval time: defining the medieval period in Anglo-saxon and French historiographies.
- Expressing Time
- Time-related formulas.
- Expressing memory, scrutinising traces. Conversely, observing the ephemeral and the forgotten, and the future.
- Narrated time.
- Medieval practices of time
- Contrasting practises of time in daytime and night-time, for instance in mo- nastic and urban contexts.
- Escaping daily time through rituals and celebrations.
- Contesting time, marginal time (carnival, disorder and misrule).
- Time and the otherworld.
The papers, written in English or in French, must be sent before 10 January 2022 to Fanny Moghaddassi f.moghaddassi@unistra.fr and Martine Yvernault martine.yvernault@unilim.fr. Études Médiévales Anglaises uses double-blind peer review. The stylesheet to be used may be found on our website: https://amaes.jimdo.com/submit-a-paper/
References:
– Barron, Caroline. “Telling the time in Chaucer’s London.” “A Verray Parfit Praktisour”. Essays Presented to Carole Rawcliffe. Eds. Clark, Linda and Danbury, Elizabeth. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2017. 141-151.
– Bede and the Future. Ed. by Peter Darby and Faith Wallis, Studies in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
– Boèce. Traité de la musique. Introduction, traduction et notes par Christian Meyer. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004.
– Boyle, Elizabeth. “Forming the future for individuals and institutions in medieval Ireland.” Mittelalterliche Zukunftsgestaltung im Angesicht des Weltendes/ Forming the Future, Facing the End of the World in the Middle Ages. Ed. Schmieder, Felicitas. Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 77. Köln: Böhlau, 2015. 17-32.
– Critten, Rory G. “Via Rome: medieval medievalisms in the Old English Ruin.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 49, no. 2, 2019. 209-231.
– Davies, Morgan Thomas. “Warrior time.” Kings and Warriors in Early North-West Europe. Eds. Rekdal, Jan Erik and Doherty, Charles. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2016. 237-309.
– Godden, Richard H. “Gawain and the nick of time: fame, history and the untimely in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Arthuriana, vol. 26, no. 4, 2016. 152-173.
– Gourevitch, Aaron J. Les catégories de la culture médiévale. Paris : Gallimard, 1983. Chapitre I, « Les représentations spatio-temporelles », ‘Qu’est-ce que le temps ?’. 96-154.
– Harris, Jonathan Gil. Untimely Matter in the Age of Shakespeare. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2009.
– Le Goff, Jacques. Pour un autre Moyen Age, Temps, travail et culture en Occident : 18 essais. Paris: Gallimard, nrf, Bibliothèque des histoires, 1977.
– Langeslag, Paul S. Seasons in the Literatures of the Medieval North. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015.
– Liuzza, Roy Michael. “The future is a foreign country: the legend of the Seven Sleepers and the Anglo-Saxon sense of the past.” Medieval Science Fiction. Eds. Kears, Carl and Paz, James. King’s College London Medieval Studies, 24. London: King’s College London, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2016. 61-78.
– Ricœur, Paul. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 2000.
– Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture, Ed. by Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Roberta Magnani. Gender in the Middle Ages, 10. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2015.
– Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period. Ed. Jon Whitman. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
– Rouse, Robert Allan, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance. Studies in Medieval Romance 3. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005.
– Rouse, Robert Allan. « ‘Riche pelure and spicerye’: Mercantile Readers and the Imagined World of Medieval Romance ». ÉMA 94, 2019. 149-170.
– Rudd, Gillian. Greenery: Ecocritical readings of late medieval English Literature. Manchester University Press, 2007.
– Schmitt, Jean-Claude. « Le temps. ‘Impensé’ de l’histoire ou double objet de l’historien ? ». Poitiers, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 2005. 31-52.
– Time in the Medieval World. Ed. Chris Humphrey & W.M. Ormrod. University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies: Boydell & Brewer, 2001.
(posted 13 May 2021)
New Humanities 1: Perspectives on the Anthropocene
Academic Quarter, vol. 25
Deadline for abstracts: 15 January 2022
Academic Quarter presents a new call addressing new perspectives on the Anthropocene in the humanities.
Five years ago, British writer Robert Macfarlane introduced us to “Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever”. The Anthropocene denotes a new epoch of geological time in which human activity has such a strong influence on the planet that it will leave a geological strata record (Macfarlane 2016). The term goes back to the year 2000 with Crutzen & Stoermer’s article “The ‘Anthropocene’”. Macfarlane presents a large number of aesthetic responses to the Anthropocene, novels and films in particular, but he also sees it as a challenge to the humanities: “The indifferent scale of the Anthropocene can induce a crushing sense of the cultural sphere’s impotence.”
In a similar, and more recent blend of pessimism and call to action, Carolyn Merchant asks, “How, for example, is the air and water pollution associated with global warming reflected in history, art, literature, religion, philosophy, ethics, and justice?” (2020, p. x) She consequently lauds the emerging multidisciplinary concept of environmental humanities as necessary, her reason being that the hu
manities have not responded adequately to relevant questions: “today there are relatively few analyses of the Anthropocene as it relates to the humanities.” The humanities must be reconceptualized “in new ways that make them compelling for the twenty-first century.” (p. xi)
It is these challenges that the issue of Academic Quarter about the Anthropocene seeks to meet. We ask for new perspectives on the Anthropocene. How can the humanities throw a new light on the Anthropocene and articulate new perspectives on it, possibly from an activist standpoint? How to create “arts of living on a damaged planet” (Tsing et al. 2017)? Articles could for instance focus on themes and approaches such as dark ecology (Morton 2018), new materialism (Sanzo 2018), object-oriented ontology (O3) (Harman 2018), rewilding – virtual and real (Lorimer 2015; Jepson & Cain 2020), swamp theory (Sutherland 2021; Urbonas et al. 2022), (eco-) feminism and queer theory (for instance Grusin 2017), and de-colonialist perspectives (for instance Stenbeck 2020).
Aesthetic responses to the Anthropocene are already manifold, and there are also scholarly treatments of it and related fields. Examples are: Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006), Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014), Gaia Vince’s Adventures in the Anthropocene (2015), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World – On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2017). The post-apocalyptic movie and computer game genres with locations of a collapsed and potentially lethal world are represented by for instance Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), the Mad Max franchise, The Walking Dead streaming series, and The Fallout computer game series. Scholarly publications on the subject include Carolyn Merchant’s The Anthropocene and the Humanities. From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability (2020), Nomeda Urbonas et al.’s Swamps and the New Imagination. On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture, and Philosophy (2022), Alanda Y. Chang’s Playing Nature Ecology in Video Games (2019). The Anthropocene has been reflected and debated within the art institution, for instance with various events and research initiatives at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2013, and Danish artists and artistic researchers such as Rikke Luther, Eva la Cour and Jakob Kudsk Steensen have worked with this theme, Steensen in his Berl Berl exhibition in Berlin 2021.
One challenge to the humanities is whether an activist approach may be expected from them, as contemporary environmental movements might reflect. In Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Macfarlane elaborates on the unique imaginative challenge posed by the Anthropocene and calls for “a retrospective reading of the current moment”, i.e. “a palaeontology of the present” (2019, p. 78) in which we confront ourselves from a distant future as “the sediments, strata, and ghosts” we have become, and ask ourselves the question (originally phrased by Jonas Salk, and pursued by strands of indigenous research): “Are we being good ancestors?” (p. 77) This call from Academic Quarter is the first of three serialized issues under the common theme “New humanities” from an active and committed standpoint.
This issue of Academic Quarter is dedicated to articles from the fields of:
- literature
- art
- film, tv and media
- architecture
- computer games
- music
- museology and curating
- fashion
- experience design
- gender
- leadership
- organisation research
- history
- human geography
- cultural anthropology
- religion
- philosophy
- indigenous research
and other pertinent approaches and critiques of the concepts of the Anthropocene itself are also welcome. We especially value new perspectives on the antropocene from the humanities in a wide and inclusive sense.
References
Crutzen, Paul J. & Stoermer Eugene F. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene’”. IGBP Newsletter 41. May 2000. 17-18.
Enderby, Emma (ed.). 2021. Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Berl-Berl. Berlin:
Lass & Koenig Books.
Grusin, Richard. 2017. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Harman, Graham. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.
Jepson, Paul & Blythe, Cain (2020). Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery. London: Icon Books.
Lorimer, Jamie. 2015. Wildlife in the Anthropocene Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2016. “Generation Anthropocene: How Humans have Altered the Planet for Ever”. The Guardian, April 1, 2016.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2019. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Merchant, Carolyn. 2020. The Anthropocene and the Humanities. From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2018. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rimanoczy, Isabel. 2021. ”Anthropocene and the Call for Leaders with a New Mindset”. In: Ritz A. A., Rimanoczy I. (eds.) Sustainability Mindset and Transformative Leadership. Sustainable Development Goals Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76069-4_6.
Sanzo, Kameron. 2018. “New Materialism(s).” In Critical Posthumanism. Genealogy of the Posthuman. Posted On: April 25, 2018. Available at https://criticalposthumanism.net/new-materialisms/.
Stenbeck, Katarina. 2020. Forms of Entanglement. Omsorg og verdensskabelse i det antropocæne. Ph.d.-dissertation, Copenhagen University.
Sutherland, Dane. 2021. “A View from the Swamp.” In Enderby, Emma (ed.). 2021, 92- 104.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt et al. 2017. The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Urbonas, Nomeda, Urbonas, Gediminas and Sabolius, Kristupas (eds.) 2022. Swamps and the New Imagination. On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture, and Philosophy. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Wright, Christopher, Daniel Nyberg, Lauren Rickards, and James Freund. “Organizing in the Anthropocene.” Organization 25, no. 4 (July 2018): 455–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508418779649.
Practical Information
Abstracts in English, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish will be accepted. Abstracts and articles should be sent to Annemette Helligsø (anhe@hum.aau.dk).
Please check our Submission guidelines: https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/ak/Submission
Deadlines
Submission of abstracts: 15.1.2022
Response to authors of abstracts: 1.3.2022
Submission of articles: 1.7.2022
Reviews will be sent to authors: 1.9.2022
Final articles submitted:1.10.2022
Layout copyedit: 1.11.2022
Publication expected: 1.12.2022
Word count
Abstract: 150 words
Article: 3,000 – 3,500 words
Video essays
7–12 minutes. Detailed author guidelines and further information can be found on the journal’s website: https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/ak/index
You are welcome to use the possibility of producing a video essay following these guidelines:
- Video essays should be 7-12 minutes long and accompanied by an academic guiding text between 1,000-1,500 words.
- The video essay should be of scholarly quality and may be argumentative (documentary) or symbolic (metaphorical) or a combination.
- The guiding text should clearly explain the argument in the video essay as well as the insight that the viewer may gain from watching it. This guiding text should follow the directions in the article style sheet.
- Video essays should be final and handed in as a separate mp4video-file. Academic Quarter supports only publication and not the technical development of video essays.
- Video essays and the guiding text will be reviewed together. Criteria for reviewing video-essays are a// the lucidity of the argument, b the technical and stylistic execution of the video material and c/ the clarity of the guiding text.
(posted 29 November 2021)
Journal of Ecohumanism – Special Issue: “Decolonial Echosophy: A Deliberative Encounter with Indian and non-western Eco-Theologies”
Deadlines: for abstracts: 5 February 2022.
The dense interplay between the multiple strands of eco-criticality in the current times that effectively exposes the ambivalences of state machinery’s eco-political intervention culminates in yielding ecosophical assemblages that works with a new ‘conceptual grammatology’, a grammatology that could be turned into an effective praxis to bring about multiple forms of eco-healing and create effective ways of existing in a ‘qualitative diversity’ beyond anthropocentrism. However, it is the ethics of post-structuralist micropolitics that drives these assemblages. So, the relation these assemblages bear with humanism is productively disjunctive, inclined towards ‘difference engineering’ the latter into an expanding problem field, rather than treating it as a dispensable metaphysical abstraction. As a result, humanism gets to persist in these assemblages as hauntological traces or better inexpugnable stains, brooding over latter’s ecosophical reconstruction of the Bio. Moreover, if the current epistemology stands impregnated with a desire to remove this invisible human mediation it is because the current pandemics we are enmeshed in has generated an aggressive form of desire to exorcise the vestiges of the human. The attempt to work out a form of a-humanism that we encounter in epistemology is a fall out of this desire.
However, the need of the times is to broaden and diversify this attempt by coupling the radical western epistemology with ongoing processes of decolonization. This is a project that demands not only provincial forms of decolonization expressed by Western epistemology’s drive towards a-humanism, but a kind of transversal wedding between radical western epistemology and non-western parallax views.
However, except a few random attempts by some Western thinkers to work out semblances of decolonial enquiry by inventing a form of a-humanism engaging with minor positionalities or ‘thresholds’ of epistemology none of what we get encounter as eco-critical interventions or ecosophical assemblages keenly partake of any form of decolonial enquiry. The Heideggerian concept of self-care or Simondon’s non-anthropocentric approach to technology connect with life promoting process that thinkers such as Levi-Strauss were keen to initiate yet they creatively disjunct from Straussian conviction while reworking anthropocentrism into a redeemable assemblage. In the current times Bernard Steigler’s “Neganthropocene” and Sloterdjik’s anthropotechnic or anthropotechnogenic exist as paradigms of non-anthropocentric assemblages, but the nuanced non-anthropocentrism they offer stand as problematic fields demanding renewal. Their non-anthropocentrism orient us towards making the earth habitable by providing a homotechnologicalturn, a turn that is not contra-natural, but co-natural, entrapping both human and non-human—not unlike Deleuze and Guattari’s reconstructive version of non-humanism—in a process of non-linear co-becoming. But what we desire currently are much broader ecosophical “spherological” assemblages that could synthesize differential forms of a-humanism with broader processes of decolonization entailing a sustained interaction with South Asian epistemic and non-epistemic practices.
In this sense, positioning non-western, in particular Indian and Western philosophy in a process of dynamic interactionism is not only the means of working out a broader decolonial framework, but also a way of producing an effective ahumanist radical sensibility that may work towards creating a new Earth devoid of the traces of humanism. The dense overlap that exists between the Western and the Indian eco-theology has been already teased out and archived. Philosopher Henryk Skolimowski, the proponent of Eco-philosophy, has effectively teased out eco-theological strands of Indian mythology. For him the myth of Shiva happens to be a force which transforms and re-creates the world. Skolimowski holds the view that Shiva’s dance propels towards becoming a dance of healing and infusing the cosmos with a new creative substance and energy. Advaita Vedanta’s concept of Brahman accentuates admiration for all life and for nature as a whole. It is this form of adherence which acts as a ground of any eco-centric philosophy or what we call Deep Ecology. This happens to be a radical strand of Indian philosophy that may not in the outset seem ecological, but by refusing to discriminate between humans, animals, trees, it works out a-humanist tangle. By cutting and combining portions from Western and Indian eco-theology one may work out broader, denser and equally decolonial ecosophical assemblage aptly represented by Sloterdjik’s spherology.
However, the need of the time is to turn them into an effective praxis. Undoubtedly, the dissemination of a range of decolonial ecosophical affectualities among the masses could ensure that they acquire a radical sensibility. But it is only by providing a praxial turn to the broader, expansive and decolonial ecosophical assemblages we work out by connecting with Indian and non-western eco-theology that a transformative ethico-politicality could be worked out. Further with this ethico-political restructuration it may be possible to restructure the current degenerative state of democracy into what Skolimowski in his book Philosophy for a New Civilisation calls ecocracy. So, in this issue of Journal of Ecohumanism we invite articles that:
i. could possibly expose how the model of eco-criticality that the governmental apparatuses routinely works by betraying dense overlap with these apparatuses and overt bio-political and necropolitical agendas.
ii. creatively map the ways by which western a-humanist Ecosophy seeks to decolonize itself by engaging with cult, magic and minor positionalities lying within its immanent exterior.
iii. creatively map the limits of Western Ecosophy and come up with a creative art of decolonizing
them, a process that entails a radical critique of Western posthumanism, non-humanism and a-
humanism.
iv. could make an attempt to pose a deliberative encounter between western Ecosophy and Indian
eco-theology and go on to create decolonial ecosophical assemblages geared to Sloterdjik’s
idea of spherology.
v. could suggest creative ways of turning these ecosophical assemblages into effective praxis.
vi. could even connect with other forms of divergent non-western, eco-activist, eco-critical
parallax views with the intent of folding them into a critique of current western epistemology’s ecosophical drive that stands vulnerable to appropriation by the phenomenon of ‘green Capitalism’.
Editors
Dr. Saswat S. Das is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He has jointly edited books Taking Place of Language (Peter Lang, 2013) and Technology, Urban Space and Network Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and Deleuze, Guattari and Global Terror (Edinburg University, December, 2021) He is currently co-editing Deleuze, Guattari and the Global Pandemics (Bloomsbury Publication forthcoming). His book reviews are regularly published in Postcolonial Studies, South Central Review, Cultural Politics, French Studies, and Philosophy in Review.
Dr. Ananya Roy Pratihar is Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at the Institute of Management and Information Science, Bhubaneswar, India. She has jointly edited Technology, Urban Space and Network Community(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and currently co-editing Deleuze, Guattari and the Global Pandemics (Bloomsbury Publication, forthcoming). Her book reviews and articles are published in Philosophy in Review, French Studies and Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal (University of Warwick).
About the Submissions
You are welcome to submit full-length papers of approximately 5000-6000 words. The language of submissions is only English.
All submissions shall follow the latest guidelines of APA style referencing. More information about the style sheet is found here: [https://journals.tplondon.com/ecohumanism/about/submissions].
The submissions of full-length papers, including an abstract and short bio/CV, will be sent directly to both Editors’ e-mails as well as any queries that you may have. The Editors’ e-mails are [saswatdas.bapi@gmail.com], [ssd@hss.iitkgp.ernet.in] and [aroypratihar@gmail.com].
The abstracts’ deadline is until the 5th of February 2022.
The deadline for the final papers’ submissions is the 31st of May 2022.
Journal’s website: [https://journals.tplondon.com/ecohumanism/announcement/view/27]
Contact details: The Editors’ e-mails are [saswatdas.bapi@gmail.com], [ssd@hss.iitkgp.ernet.in] and [aroypratihar@gmail.com].
(Posted 14 January 2022)
Linguaculture – International Journal of Iaşi Linguaculture Centre for (Inter)cultural and (Inter)lingual Research. Vol. 13, no. 1, 2022
Deadline for contributions: 15 February 2022
Issue editors: Dr. Rodica Albu and Dr. Teodora Ghiviriga
For this thematic issue we welcome original contributions in the areas of narratology, literature (with a special focus on fantasy, on possible worlds in language structures, at the crossroads between referential semantics and fiction studies), translation studies (the challenge of translating fantasy for readerships of various ages and its effect on reception), semiotics, philosophy, logic, theology, cultural and arts studies, preferably focusing on the works of C. S. Lewis and of authors belonging to the literary group known as the Inklings. The theme may be approached from a specific or an interdisciplinary perspective. Equally welcome are reviews of books, particularly – but not compulsorily – devoted to authors of the same literary circle.
Contributions to be published in the June 2022 issue are expected by February 15, and they should not have been published or submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will go through a blind peer-review process and notification of acceptance will be sent by April 1.
Please consult our Instructions for Authors page (https://journal.linguaculture.ro/index.php/home/instructions-authors) for further information about submissions and additional requirements.
Use the Submissions page (https://journal.linguaculture.ro/index.php/home/about/submissions) to send us your contributions.
Dogmas in Literature and Literary Missionary: Text, Reader and Critique – chapter contributions
Deadline for chapter proposals: 28 February 2022
This book project aims to examine the existence of dogma in literature and some cult texts, and how dogmas in literature are conveyed to various audiences as a mission by some literary readers, experts and academics. The questions leading up to the volume are varied and their answers require lengthy examination and interpretation. So, this project investigates; Is literature dogmatic? What about literary theories? Can they be dogmatic, too? The answers to these questions are open to clarification, but the responses can also initiate an extensive discussion and manifestation. However, above all, literature does have an aspect that drags the readers, habitually burying them in its pages, and blindly attaching them to itself. Blind devotion stems from the factors that are effective in determining the readers’ faith. Theories of literature, similarly, might bring about the generation of blind adherence and dogmatic approaches. Frank Ritchie, in his revealing essay ‘Literary Dogma’ defines pure belief underlining “A creed, so long as it is merely the expression of the genuine belief of an individual, is innocent enough,”1 and he continues, “but when it is put forth with the sanction of a well-known name, and when its promulgator is inspired with a missionary spirit, it is apt to exercise an unwholesome influence.”2 Do the dogmas in literature then begin precisely ‘with the sanction of a well-known name’? Do literary readers and critics turn to literary missionaries after this ‘blind devotion’? While the philosophies fashioned by some well-known literary theorists are typically accepted, very few scholars participate in speculative inquiries and discursive criticisms towards them. Here we, as one of the few scholars, will survey the dogmas in literature in this study.
Generally, dogma is a word related mostly to religion. In this frame, Mathew Arnold’s “Dogma in Religion and Literature” is of great importance as long as religion is concerned. However, there are dogmas in every field, literature being no exception. Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote stupendous works, turned out to be well-known, and in 1928 she delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, where women were once not allowed, that formed the basis for the celebrated A Room of One’s Own (1929). Her metaphorical wit “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”3, which she ingeniously expressed in her work, has been recognized as a cult by various people, especially suffragette writers and women, and practically everyone seems to be blindly attached to the idea that ‘a woman without room and money cannot write’. But does this ‘blindly’ acceptance have to do with the fact that Woolf was already a famed writer when she proclaimed this history-defying motto? So, if any woman had said that, would the literary world have reacted in the same way? Undoubtedly, Woolf is quite right when she claims that a woman writer if she desires to be an authoress, should have a room of her own and a salary or money of her own. However, it does not mean that otherwise female writers cannot write. There are a huge number of examples to claim the opposite. The Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, to mention but a few, never had a room of their own. Even Simone de Beauvoir herself confesses that “I didn’t have a room of my own. In fact, I had nothing at all.”4 Interestingly, even those who could afford a room of their own, preferred other ways of “accommodation”. Maya Angeloo, for instance, wrote mainly in a hotel room; Tony Morrison wrote with a paper on her lap. Fortunately, there are recently a number of notes against this statement. One of them is by Ida Rae Egli titled No Rooms of their Own.5 The most poignant is Asja Bakic’s “Not all Writers Can Afford Rooms of their Own”.6 She rents a flat and that’s what she says: “Had Virginia Woolf been forced to walk Mayor Bandic’s gravelly paths in search of inspiration, her cult essay would’ve sounded quite different.
Roland Barthes’ 1967 ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (‘The Death of the Author’)7 essay might be another text that some of its literary readers have developed a dogmatic commitment to. It seemed so unfair and unjust towards writers. In the same vein, some scholars vehemently protested against those who applied this conflicting theory to Shakespeare. “Does it matter who wrote his works”8 exclaimed some critics considering the opposite view sceptically. And that is what is dangerous: to consider all the literary theories by prominent critics and philosophers unchallenging. Recently, even very reputable writers and critics do not consider the theory very reliable and state that “the time for the dead author is over. Now is the age of Living Dead authors.”9 After all, one shouldn’t forget that theory does not mean ‘it is’, rather it means “it might be’. This theory is good for experimenting. Several academics used it at the exams giving students modernist or realist texts without mentioning the writer. and having them determine the literary movement and genres.
Examples abound. Indisputably, one of the most vital hitches that arise is connected to the ‘reader’s intention’. In a way, it is the reader who undertakes the missionary role of the literary text. To put this in two examples, does every text in which Western writers treat Easterners have an Orientalist point of view? Or does the reader produce it? Does the work of every woman writer have feminist elements? How exactly do biases work in the interpretation of a text? How does the reader’s intention affect the fate of the text? Or how accessible is the idea that a text, whether lyrical or prose, is shaped entirely or indirectly by the reader’s emotions? So, the question is, are fallacies? These and similar questions will gather possible answers in this book.
Possible topics to cover but not limited to:
- Dogma(s) in literature
- Literary dogmas
- Dogmatic literary theories
- Dogma, literature and author relationship
- Dogma and the literary reader
- Dogma and literary text
- The relationship between dogma and fiction
- Dogma and creativity
- Readers as literary missionaries
- Reader’s bias and intention
- Author’s intention
- Literary fallacies
A renowned international publisher (US based) with peer-review system has already expressed their interest in this collection. The project is currently under contract.
The anticipated completion deadline for this work is December 2022.
Deadline Processing
28 February 2022: Call for chapter proposals of 500 words along with CVs
15 March 2022: Announcement of the accepted proposals
15 July 2022: First Drafts of Full Papers
15 August 2022: Announcement of Revisions of First Drafts
01 October 2022: Second Drafts of Papers Revised
01 November: Announcement of Final Revisions
01 December 2022: Completing the materials and submitting them to the Publisher
Please send your 500-word proposal along with your recent CV and all your other inquiries to: ondercakirtas@bingol.edu.tr
Contact details
Editor: Önder Çakırtaş, Bingol University, Department of English Language and Literature, Bingol TURKEY, Email: ondercakirtas@bingol.edu.tr
(Posted 16 January 2022)
Literary writings of non-literary artists – special issue: “Poli-femo”
Extended deadline: 20 March 2022
Literary writings of non-literary artists
First of all, let us set the boundaries by means of exclusion: this issue of Poli-Femo does not deal with the work of the category of artists defined as literary authors: writers of poems, novels, short stories, fables, dramas, etc.; rather, it deals – in a positive sense – with the written work of all the other kinds of artists, representing not literature but the many other arts. A rudimentary classification of which might include the visual arts (painting, sculpture, etc.), the performing arts (music, dance, theatre, musical theatre, etc.), the constructive arts (architecture, design), the arts of electr(on)ical media technology (photography, cinema, video art, radio drama, etc.) and all those that have emerged more recently as hybrids or extensions or twists of the traditional arts (conceptual art, installation, performance art, land art, net art, comics, videogames, etc.).
In the most recent historical period, from modernism onwards, there has been a strong tendency to deconstruct the explicit and implicit codes of the system of literature (or, more generally, of writing). Including codes relating to genres and their classification. On the creative front, authors are increasingly inclined to transgress the order of centuries-old or millennia-old codified genres, crossing or abolishing the boundaries – on different planes – between poetry and prose, between fictio and dictio, between high and low literature, between pure writing and writing mixed with other material media, etc. On the historical-theoretical-critical front, scholars increasingly recognise the lability of established categories of genre, even in their application to history: hence, those categories prove to be not entirely effective in accounting for past phenomena, let alone the present.
In such a context, if we want to deal with a textual genre other than codified ones, we should proceed with caution. The writing of non-literary artists does not form a single, separate, compact genre; on the contrary, it takes the most diverse forms and constitutes a heterogeneous whole. Alongside the obvious interest in this issue in production of a more specifically fictional or poetic nature, there is also interest in other categories of artists’ writings, such as, typically, manifestos, or the presentation of the artist’s own work, or essays (concerning the artist’s own art or even other arts or non-artistic fields), epistles, interviews, or articles with a publicist slant. Much of this production has declared literary ambitions or reveals an intention, albeit not explicit, in this sense. It is precisely this literary intention that will be the object of investigation in this issue of the magazine.
Despite the heterogeneity of forms and objectives, the writing of non-literary artists is a sufficiently clear and distinct category to be the object of a specific, dedicated investigation. It is worth isolating and focusing on this field of investigation, which does not appear to be devoid of scientific interest. The working hypothesis is that, without presupposing the existence of a unique and autonomous (macro)genre of “writings by non-literary artists”, it is nonetheless useful, at least from a heuristic perspective, to bring together in a single volume a set of analyses and theoretical studies on texts by artists from different artistic backgrounds in order to allow the emergence of characteristic traits or significant common elements inherent in the so-called “dual talent”. Moreover, while there are collections of authors’ writings (sometimes in specialised series), in-depth studies on the writings of individual artist-authors, reflections on the writings of authors belonging to individual artistic fields (the writings of painters, the writings of composers…), as well as precise analyses of significant examples of dual talent (cf. “Literature and Art”, no. 18, 2020), it does not appear that a general study of artists’ writings across the different arts (a study that will presumably have to be collective and interdisciplinary) has already been firmly established, indeed it may almost have to be invented. The basic question could be the following: can the inevitable interferences between artistic languages that characterise the production of non-literary artists be traced back to a series of characteristic traits?
The writings of non-literary artists (actually, with regard to what follows, also those of literary authors) can be divided into two macro-categories (whose boundaries are obviously not rigid, but nor are they inconsistent or entirely arbitrary):
- literary writings, belonging to greater or lesser established genres, typically – but not exclusively – fictional, e.g. a novel by a painter or a poem by a composer, etc.;
- non-literary writings, not belonging to established literary genres and typically nonfictional, including, for example, manifestos, self-presentations, essays, analyses, epistles.
The volume to which this call for papers refers will therefore be subdivided into two sections, respectively concerning the two above-mentioned macro-categories (without excluding contributions that may also profitably challenge them).
“Poli-Femo” therefore invites researchers from various disciplines – those inherent to literature and those inherent to the other arts – to propose articles aimed at studying the literary and non-literary writing of non-literary artists.
The monographic theme of this issue can be approached in a completely free manner, but some suggestions for lines of enquiry may be:
- within the work of the same individual author, the unity or separation – genetic and then actual – between the products of their non-literary art and those of their writing;
- even in the case of separation of the products of the two distinct activities, the possible interference of the artist’s individual poetics in their (non-literary) art with their writing;
- the artist’s ability to innovate with respect to canonical writing genres;
- any historical or geographical tendencies relating to the propensity of certain categories of artists to write about their own art (poetic, critical, theoretical, didactic texts etc.), about a different art or about something else entirely;
- the possible impact of the fictional production of non-literary artists on contemporary literature; – the question of ‘dual talent’ (where relevant) approached from a theoretical point of view; – exploration of language affinities/differences.
Proposals for study on the subject put forward by those intending to collaborate in the publication will be examined by the Scientific Committee, in order to widen the field of exploration undertaken in this issue of the Magazine. Contributions will be accepted in Italian, English and French.
To this end, the Editorial Board proposes the following deadlines: a preliminary and essential step is to send an abstract (min.10/max.20 lines), keywords and a brief curriculum vitae of the proposer, to redazione.polifemo@iulm.it by 20 March 2022 (absolute deadline). The Editorial Office will confirm to the authors the acceptance of the contributions by 30 March 2022. The deadline for submission of contributions is 15 June 2022.
All contributions will be subject to double blind peer review. The issue, edited by Prof. Laura Brignoli and Prof. Stefano Lombardi Vallauri, will be published in December 2022.
(Posted 12 February 2022)
Territory in the English-speaking world
RANAM 56, to be published in June 2023
Deadline for proposals: 1 March 2022
Please note that proposals (250 words) should be sent to Gwen Cressman (cressman@unistra.fr), Fanny Moghaddassi (f.moghaddassi@unistra.fr) and Jean-Jacques Chardin (chardin@unistra.fr) by March 1st and full papers by October 15, 2022.
We welcome proposals from the humanities, social sciences and related disciplines on the following themes. We expect contributors to approach territory in practical and conceptual terms.
…Tell me, my daughters
(Since now we shall divest us of both of rule,
Interest of territory, cares of state)
Which of you shall we say doth love us most.
(King Lear, I,1)
King Lear’s test of filial obedience at the beginning of the play connects territory with ruling and organizing space into a geographic and political entity.
The notion of territory is generally admitted to articulate the concept of space with that of its appropriation by a community (the Latin word territorium links the idea of space to that of jurisdiction: Varron’s “Ager Romanus”, Lingua latina, V, §55, defines the territory that all Roman tribes owned in common). In Pour une géographie du pouvoir (1980) for instance, the French geographer Claude Raffestin states that territories are being generated from space through the actions of an actor who territorializes space. In French geographical historiography, a remarkable expansion of the use of the concept of territory since the 1980s has led to its acquiring a nearly hegemonic status in the field. The reasons for such success lie in the very broad definitions territory has received in Francophone contexts. Brunet and Théry for instance note that “The notion of territory always includes legal, social and cultural, and even emotional dimensions. Territory differs from space in that it always implies a form of appropriation of space” (1993). Maryvonne Le Berre also notes that “Everything leads to discussing the idea of territory. Anything can be a territory”, while Yves Jean (2002) stresses that geographers sometimes define territory as “an imaginary and real space” or as “signs, symbols and images inscribed in time”. Using ethological notions of territory, Deleuze and Guattari have produced philosophical concepts of territory, territorialization and deterritorialization that are used in extremely varied research contexts. The fields of geography, history, anthropology, law, urbanism and social sciences have resorted to the concept, which is often used metaphorically as well.
By contrast, Anglophone historiography seems to restrict the use of the word territory to more explicitly political contexts. In a seminal publication about The Significance of Territory (1973), Jean Gottman thus argued that “Territory is a political organization of space that defines the relationships between the community and its habitat”, and many Anglophone publications resorting to the concept of territory endorse that primacy given to the political dimension of the notion (for instance Moore, 2015). Explorations of other ways of appropriating territories (social, personal, emotional, literary, artistic…) resort, perhaps more often than in French, to the word ‘space’, associated to various forms of qualification.
The present call for papers however means to draw attention to a defining feature of the concept of territory in both Anglophone and Francophone historiographies: its emphasis on the relationships territories imply between space and its usages by human actors, who try to organize space, physically, legally, linguistically, ethnically…
To analyze territory is to examine the negotiations and collaborations, sometimes the rivalries, in order to produce forms of space appropriation, ranging from adaptation to domination. Territorializing means naming and identifying space both in communal and personal terms, resorting to the projections of collective or more individual identities. Territory embraces such issues as social, local, regional, national, ethnic, religious, or linguistic identities in relation to the notion of otherness. Whether it be a geographic, or political entity, territory constructs, and is constructed by discourse.
1/Geography, politics, power
- The specific historical contexts within which relations of domination and contestation have produced singular territories;
- The cultural and political construction of territories through linguistic, literary and/or administrative mapping;
- The cultural and ideological dimensions in the process of territorialization – understood as defining limits and boundaries, whether they be jurisdictional, geographic and/or political;
- Processes of territorial appropriation and reclamation and the complexity of extra-, inter and intra-territorial relations implied;
- The tensions, exchanges and forms of negotiation induced by multiple and overlapping layers of authority in the organization of territories;
- The emergence of third spaces (such as co-working areas) as alternative territories productive of social relations that seek to redefine notions of consensus and dissensus;
- Environmental politics and the territory (resource management, sovereignty).
2/ Social practices and territorial identities
- Cultural production of identity in relation to territory (discourse and practices) (territory producing identity and being produced by social relations);
- Social, ethnic, religious, linguistic, personal identities and their Others in relation to national, regional and local territories;
- Sociolinguistic policies and how territories construct, and are constructed by language;
- Social belonging and interpersonal conversation as forms of territorial delimitation;
- Mapping as sociohistorical where history and memory are constructed as territorial palimpsests;
- The production of mythical territories and the manufacturing of knowledge;
- Fluctuating territories or the territory in a permanent process of redefinition by its actors;
- Mapping the territories of discourse: gender, genre and the canon.
3/ Territories of the mind and the body
- Imagining and constructing the self as territory;
- Forms of language and artistic expression that capture the complexities of the relation between the self and the territory;
- Territories of the self through sensory perceptions (visual / sound territories…);
- Historical relation between the self, the territory and the environment: eco-critical approach, territory as experienced physically (illegal migration, aesthetic experiences of landscape and territory);
- Subjective territories : the inscription of the individual in constructed and real territories or landscapes: finding one’s way and place, psychological topographies;
- Imaginary and fictionalized territories : how the self defines, and redefines territory and its place within it;
- Territories as projections of the mind: imaginary territories, video games, literature, film studies…
- Discourses about the self that include the idea of territory, namely in psychology: line between mental health and pathological;
- Verbal representations of territory in terms of metaphorical discourse, how metaphors can express our bodily experiences of territory (cognitive metaphor theory).
References :
Roger BRUNET, Hervé THERY, « Territoire », in BRUNET, Ferras et THERY, Hervé (dir.), Les mots de la géographie. Dictionnaire critique. Reclus, La Documentation française, 1993 (1e éd. 1992).
André CORBOZ « Le territoire comme palimpseste », Diogène, n° 121, janvier-mars, 1983.
Gilles DELEUZE, Félix GUATTARI, Mille plateaux, Paris, Ed. de Minuit, 1980.
Stuart ELDEN, The Birth of Territory, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Jean GOTTMANN, The Significance of Territory, Charlottesville, Unversity Press of Virginia, 1973.
Yves JEAN, « La notion de territoire : entre polysémie, analyses critiques et intérêt » in Lire les territoires, Yves JEAN et Christian CALENGE (dir.), Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, coll. Perspectives Villes et Territoires, 3, 2002, 9-22. https://books.openedition.org/pufr/1765
Zoltan KOVECSES, Metaphor and Emotion, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Zoltan KOVECSES, « Methodological Issues in Conceptual Metaphor Theory”, in S. Handl & H. Schmid (eds.), Windows to the Mind: Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Blending, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011, 23–40.
George LAKOFF and Mark JOHNSON, Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.
George LAKOFF and Mark JOHNSON, Philosophy in the Flesh, New York: Basic Books, 1999.
George LAKOFF and Mark JOHNSON, “Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism”, Cognitive Linguistics, 2002: 13(3), 245–263.
Ronald W. LANGACKER, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Ronald W. LANGACKER, Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999.
Maryvonne LE BERRE, « Territoires », in Antoine BAILLY, Robert FERRAS, Denise PUMAIN (dir.), Encyclopédie de géographie, Paris, Economica, 1995, 603.
Margaret MOORE, A Political Theory of Territory, New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Thierry PAQUOT, « Qu’est-ce qu’un « territoire » ? », Vie sociale, 2011 : 2 (n°2), 23-32, online : https://www.cairn.info/revue-vie-sociale-2011-2-page-23.htm?contenu=article#no10 (16 Nov. 2021)
Claude RAFFESTIN, Pour une géographie du pouvoir, Paris, Librairies Techniques, 1980.
Leonard TAMLY, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Jakob von UEXKÜLL (1864-1944), Mondes animaux et monde humain, Paris, Denoël, (1934) 1984.
(posted 7 December 2021)
Thematic issue of Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae – “Ulysses 100 years after”
Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland
Deadline for paper proposals: 15th March 2022.
“Science, it cannot be too often repeated, deals with tangible phenomena.
The man of science like the man in the street has to face hardheaded
facts that cannot be blinked and explain them as best he can.
There may be, it is true, some questions which science cannot answer – at present…”
(James Joyce, Ulysses)
On 2 February 2022 the literary world will celebrate the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, about which the author famously stated that he put so many enigmas and puzzles into it that it will keep the professors busy for centuries. After one hundred years, how much do we actually know about it? How many puzzles have been solved, and which still remain a challenge? What insights have we gained into Joycean enigmas? Which of them are intersubjectively verifiable, and which are just fanciful flights of critics’ imagination barely grounded in rigorously conducted research? Which results obtained in Joycean scholarship have stood the test of time? What are milestones of Ulysses research, which are seminal critical texts, which of them have fruitfully informed other research, and which have been blind paths?
Beyond questions of factual knowledge, accurate information and its deliberate misrepresentation by the author, there is also the question of the reader’s background knowledge, their choice of methodology, and bias. What some critics perceive as highly relevant, others may tend to ignore. This may result not only in different, but even contradictory findings and interpretations. We may comment on this, quoting Joyce again: “though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?”
This raises questions about soundness, applicability and relevance of various methodological approaches, not only for Ulysses but for literary works in general. Thus, we invite the authors to reflect on the nature of knowledge, its verifiability, deliberate manipulation, and (degrees) of ignorance, with regard to Ulysses, and other Joyce’s texts. The proposed paper may deal with:
- facts and fictions in Ulysses
- science, knowledge, epistemology in Ulysses
- historical reconstructions, accuracies and inaccuracies
- impact of Joycean scholarship on translation reception, and teaching of Ulysses
- genetic Joyce studies
- relevance and Joyce studies
Please send an abstract of approximately 200 words to Katarzyna Bazarnik (k.bazarnik@uj.edu.pl), and/or Dirk Vanderbeke (vanderbeke@t-online.de), and/or Jolanta Wawrzycka (jolanta@radford.edu). The deadline for paper proposals is 15th March. Paper proposals will be reviewed and the authors will be notified about their acceptance. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 25th March. The deadline for the final papers is 15th July.
Selected, peer reviewed papers will be published in a thematic issue of Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis. The publication is planned for December 2022.
For the journal website, see https://www.ejournals.eu/Studia-Litteraria/.
Cfp for the thematic issue of Studia Litteraria_Ulysses 100 years after
(Posted 10 January 2022)
The Myths of Modernism / Modernism and Myths: Then and Now
The Polish Journal of English Studies
Deadline for proposals: 31 March 2022
The year 2022 marks the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. To celebrate this watershed in the history of the English-language literature The Polish Journal of English Studies invites papers for inclusion in a special issue titled The Myths of Modernism / Modernism and Myths: Then and Now.
As suggested by the title, the project has not only a dual, but a repeatedly bifurcating nature. On the one hand, it centres on the modernists themselves: their love of myths, as well as the myths that now surround them. After all, modernist writers from Joyce and Yeats to Woolf and Lawrence were fascinated by their own literary predecessors, the classics, “the dead poets and artists” whom Eliot mentions in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” At the same time they were driven by the desire to break with the past. Once rebels, even outcasts, some of them authors of outlawed works, they have long been canonised and mythologised. Thus, on the other hand, the project also looks at the generations of writers who have followed the modernists, and have engaged in their own rewriting of ancient scripts and/or have entered into a dialogue with the modernists themselves as pivotal figures within the literary mythos.
Both laudatory and critical/revisionist approaches are welcome. Philip Larkin observed, irreverently:
What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the hands of a critical industry which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this I do rather lay at the door of Eliot and Pound… I think a lot of this myth-kitty business has grown out of that, because first of all you have to be terribly educated, you have to know everything to know these things, and secondly you’ve got somehow to work them in to show that you are working them in. But to me the whole of the ancient world, the whole of biblical and classical mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writer’s duty to be original.
Is this a fair – or unjust – assessment of the modernists’ supposedly (?) elitist esotericism? How did the modernists approach “the pastness of the past” and “its presence”? What relations did they form with their “ancestors”? What is the use of “this myth-kitty business” today? Does “the whole of the ancient world, the whole of biblical and classical mythology mean very little” to contemporary writers? Or, on the contrary, far from creating the feared “dead spots,” ancient myths can be given a new life in new texts that – exactly by taking us to their distant origins – illuminate the most vital issues of our present moment? Our special issue offers an opportunity to reflect on the above, and other related questions.
Please send a 150-200-word abstract (titled Surname_PJES_Myths) together with a short biographical note to izabela.curyllo-klag@uj.edu.pl and ewa.kowal@uj.edu.pl. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 31 March 2022. Notifications about proposal acceptance will be sent by 15 April 2022. The deadline for submission of completed papers is 15 July 2022. Planned publication: December 2022.
The topic of this special issue of PJES will be discussed during a panel at the 31st PASE conference titled “Transitions,” held by the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, on 1-2 July 2022. Detailed information about the arrangements concerning the PASE conference will be provided at a later date.
Special Issue Editors / Panel Organisers:
Dr Izabela Curyłło-Klag
Dr Ewa Kowal
(posted 6 December 2021)
Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – special issue: “Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Examining the Implications of Climate Change in the narratives of Global South”
Deadine for abstracts: 31 March 2022
Call for papers for a special issue of Journal of Narrative and Language Studies
Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Examining the Implications of Climate Change in the narratives of Global South
The term ‘Anthropocene,’ which refers to the current geological epoch as a result of the escalation of anthropogenic activities, has sparked much debate since its proclamation by Paul J. Crutzen in 2000. Crutzen argues that the beginning of the Anthropocene coincides with the beginning of the fossil fuel energy regime in the late eighteenth century (Crutzen 2000). In other words, the onset of the Anthropocene marks an increase in the carbon concentration in the atmosphere, eventually contributing to global warming. Anthropocene, the human dominated geological epoch, being arguably tied with the fossil fuel extractions, calls for the convergence of natural and human capitalist histories (Chakrabarty 2016). The capitalist history indicates an imperial past that has thrived on fossil fuel extraction from the Asian and African colonies. The flourishing of the empire at the expense of the environmental health of the colonised has created an ecological divide between the imperial power holders and their subjects. There is no significant change in the present scenario given the expansion of the neo-colonial regime of the Global North that exploits the ‘extraction ecologies’ (Miller 2021) and ‘resource cursed’ (Nixon 2010) nations of the Global South.
The European and American powers’ politics of de-nationalising the resources of the decolonized nations has created an opportunity for the Global North multinationals to exploit the resources of the Global South, thereby damaging the immediate ecology of those countries. Such a divisive and exploitive scenario calls for the assignment of the epoch as ‘Capitalocene’, the ‘geology of capital accumulation’ (Malm 2016), instead of ‘Anthropocene,’ meaning the ‘geology of mankind’. The term ‘Capitalocene’ points to the economic divide between the developed Global North and the developing Global South and the climate change-related inequitable experiences of the two economically divided parts of the globe. Critics argue that the poor and other dispossessed communities are relatively more vulnerable to the current climate change than those capitalist states that primarily contribute to it. The geographical peculiarity of the Global South, with its remnants of the colonial past, requires an assessment of the anthropogenic ecological degradation contextualised within the geopolitics of the Global North and the Global South.
Thus, the special issue of the Journal of Narrative and Language Studies aims to introspect into the politics of unequal human agency and its resultant consequences related to climate change in the literature of the Global South. In this issue, we would like to place a special emphasis on the ‘Anthropocene fictions’ (Trexler 2015) produced within the literary culture of the Global South, addressing the problems of the present climate crisis and speculating on the future in order to understand ‘what anthropogenic climate change is and how long its effects may last’ (Chakrabarty 2016). In doing so, we invite abstracts that will explore the varied implications of ‘Anthropocene’/ ‘Capitalocene’ through the literary practises of the Global South, emphasising the issues related to climate refugees, eco-cultural calamities, environmental justice, citizenship, human-nonhuman interrelationship, dispossession of indigenous communities, and capitalism versus climate and island vulnerability. Thus, the special issue intends to invite submissions making theoretical and literary investigations into the multifaceted ‘Anthropocene’, particularly contextualised in the Global South, which demands greater representation within the climate change discourses. In the special issue, we also seek to examine the role of the authorial voices from the Global South in explicating the dire climatic conditions of the region in relation to geopolitics and in presenting an alternative environmental historiography of the Global South.
We thus invite scholars to submit abstracts/paper proposals that address the following (but not limited to) issues contextualised in the Global South and literature:
- The critique of human agency in the Anthropocene
- The critique of unequal human agency in the Capitalocene
- Capitalism and climate change
- Environmental justice and citizenship
- Indigenous communities and the climate crisis
- Speculative fiction and climate change
- Human-nonhuman interrelationship
- Fossil fuel energy regime and ‘extraction ecologies’
- Ecological and cultural calamities
- Postcolonial ecology and climate change
- Graphic narratives and climate change
- Racism and speciesism
- Island ecology and the Anthropocene
The abstracts (300 words) should be submitted to specialissuegk@gmail.com no later than March 31st, 2022.
Intimation of the selection of abstracts: 15 April 2022
After an initial review of abstracts by the editors of the special issue, selected authors will be invited to contribute full-length (5.000–7000 words) articles written according to APA 7th edition and adhering to standard NALANS guidelines for authors that can be found here: https://www.nalans.com/index.php/nalans/about/submissions. The deadline for submission of full articles is June 30, 2022. This issue is expected to come out in October 2022.
NALANS (ISSN: 2148-4066), the Journal of Narrative and Language Studies is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal published by Karadeniz Technical University. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS, MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, The Linguist List, Google Scholar, DRJY, ASOS, Academic Resource Index, Turkish Education Index, SOBIAD. All other important information on the Journal can be found here: https://www.nalans.com/index.php/nalans/index
Issue editors
Goutam Karmakar, Ph.D. (English), is an Assistant Professor of English at Barabazar Bikram Tudu Memorial College, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, India. His forthcoming and recently published edited books are Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature (Routledge), The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature (Routledge), and Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (Routledge, 2021). He has been published in journals including MELUS, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, South Asian Review, Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, and Asiatic among others.
Somasree Sarkar is an Assistant Professor of English at Ghoshpukur College, University of North Bengal, West Bengal, India. She is also pursuing her Ph.D. from the Department of English, University of North Bengal, West Bengal, India. Her articles have been published in an edited volume, Partition Literature and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (UK: Routledge, 2020). Her articles have also been published in Journal of Gender Studies, South Asian Review and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
Mustafa Zeki Çıraklı, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Narrative and Language Studies.
(Posted 7 Fenruary 2022)