Books and special issues of journals – Deadlines October-December 2017

Jane Austen Ours
The Winter 2017 issue of The ESSE Messenger
Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2017

The ESSE Messenger invites submissions for its Winter 2017 section of professional articles on the topic: Jane Austen Ours

2017 marks the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. What she left as her bequest to the world was to become a prolific space where sense, persuasion, sensibility and pride remained pre-eminent and where the Elinors, Mariannes, Janes, Elizabeths, Emmas, Darcys, Brandons, Willoughbys and Dashwoods still congregated together or at least briefly crossed each other’s paths. More than 200 years after their first publication, her novels are still avidly read as books and even transformed into successful film adaptations. In the 21st century her creations still provide a source of fascination and continue both to captivate well-seasoned readers and to animate fresh audiences. The questions that naturally arise are, then:

  • Why are people still so obsessed with Jane Austen?
  • Why is her legacy still alive and spreading?
  • Is it because she has a sincere, direct, natural and convincing way of depicting human nature?
  • Is it because her works are easily translated or adapted across various mediums, cultures and time periods?
  • What is it that constitutes Jane Austen’s face in the 21st century?

Questions such as these may help to suggest some of the topics for the Winter 2017 issue of the ESSE Messenger.

Proposals should be submitted to the Editor by 1 October 2017.

(posted  30 July 2017)


LondonIsOpen: London as a Cosmopolitan City in Contemporary Culture
Nr 20 of  Other Modernities, November 2018
Deadline for proposals: 15 October 2017

Edited by Anna Viola Sborgi, Lawrence Napper and Nicoletta Vallorani

This issue of Other Modernities will investigate cultural representations of contemporary London, from the viewpoint of the present historical moment, looking back at how the perception of the city’s cosmopolitan identity has developed. In the 20th and 21st century London has emerged as a global, cosmopolitan capital attracting visitors and migrants alike for its close association with an image of cultural openness, diversity, and inclusion. This association, however, has repeatedly been contested. Periodical resurgences of nationalism in specific historical moments leading to radical socio-political transformations and upheaval have often undermined the perception of a peaceful and inclusive cohabitation within the city: the 1931 Battle of Cable Street, the mid-1970s rise of the British National Front, the Brixton and London riots in 1981 and 2011, respectively, and, more recently, the post-Brexit cultural shock. Although these could be understood as episodic moments of crisis, they were also prepared by an endemic coexistence, within the very space of the metropolis, of different and often very contradictory discourses. London has always been, at one and the same time, a space of opportunity and of widening social inequality, of inclusion and exclusion.
An exploration of these conflicting discourses and of their cultural representations becomes urgent and crucial in this particular historical moment, in which on the one hand, London is experiencing a deep “crisis of conviviality” (Georgiou 2016) and might be on the verge of losing its cosmopolitan status – and, on the other, the preservation of this particular identity has been strongly advocated both by London dwellers – who perceive themselves as very distinct from the rest of the country – and by the local institutions, in particular by the newly elected mayor Sadiq Khan, with his media campaign #londonisopen.
The urban space is a privileged site of negotiation for a series of challenges such as overpopulation, pollution, gentrification, urban sprawl and socio-political conflict, social, ethnic and gender inclusion and exclusion (Harvey 2001, Lees 2016, Madden and Marcuse 2016, Massey 1994). These challenges are not only mirrored in cultural representations of the city – from cinema to television, from photography to the press – but they are constantly re-defined and negotiated within these different media, shaping, in a two-way process, the political and social debate about urban life (Brunsdon 2007 and 2009, Georgiou 2013, Shiel 2001, Shonfield 2000, Webb 2014).
We welcome proposals analysing the cultural representations of London in the 20th and 21st century in a wide range of formats and media (the press, popular and urban culture), with a particular emphasis on the visual (film, television, photography, visual adaptation of literary works), and through different theoretical frameworks – media and urbanism, cultural geography, Queer and Cultural Studies – and approaches – close analysis, historical and archival research.
Topics for discussion may include, but are not limited to:

  • Racial tensions within the city and immigration
  • Cosmopolitanism
  • Brexit and London
  • Crisis
  • Social inclusion and exclusion, especially in relation to class
  • Gender and the urban space: appropriation and loss of spaces (i.e. Soho and the queer community)
  • Housing as a site of social contestation: from the early 20th century slum clearances, to the post-war egalitarian housing project and its crisis
  • The financialisation of the economy, austerity, the economic crisis and the widening inequality gap
  • Gentrification, redevelopment and social displacement
  • Public space and private space
  • Environmental challenges within the city: green spaces, pollution

References
BRUNSDON C., 2007, London in Cinema. The Cinematic City the Cinematic City since 1945, Palgrave, London.
GEORGIOU M., 2013, Media and the city: cosmopolitanism and difference, Polity Press, Cambridge.
LEES L., H. BANG SHIN, E. LÓPEZ-MORALES (eds.), 2016, Planetary Gentrification, Polity, Bristol.
LYNCH K., 1960, The Image of the City, MA: MIT Press, Cambridge.
MASSEY D., 1994, Space, Place and Gender, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
SHIEL M., T. FITZMAURICE (eds.), 2001, Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Blackwell, Oxford.
SHONFIELD K., 2000, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City, Routledge, London.

To this purpose, the editorial board has established the following deadlines; authors should send in their proposals in the form of a 10 (min.) – 20 (max.) line abstract with a brief bio-bibliography to amonline@unimi.it (both in English and in the language of their choice) by 15th October 2017.
Full papers must be received by 15th February 2018. Other Modernities accepts contributions in Italian, Spanish, French and English.
The issue will be published late November 2018.
We also welcome book reviews and interviews to authors and scholars who investigate the aforementioned topics. Contributors are free to contact the editors to discuss and clarify the objectives of their proposals, with a view to making the issue as homogeneous as possible also from a methodological point of view. The editors can be contacted via the Editorial Secretary (amonline@unimi.it).

(posted 29 September 2017)


Body, Voice and Language Learning in Higher Education
Volume 37 No 2 (June 2018) of The journal Researching and Teaching Languages for Specific Purposes
Deadline for proposals: 30 October 2017

http://apliut.revues.org/5688

The journal Researching and Teaching Languages for Specific Purposes publishes the results of research carried out in the domain of language teaching and learning in Higher Education, for all languages and cultures. Since its beginnings it has been oriented towards both theoretical and applied research while maintaining a pedagogical dimension through the publication of notes on teaching experiences in each issue.

The journal has four main objectives. The first is to encourage the publication of research carried out in the field of teaching and learning languages in Higher Education. The second objective is to contribute to the training of teachers of languages for special purposes by publishing research results and notes on teaching experiences. From the beginning, the third objective has been to encourage the teaching and learning of all foreign languages. Even though most articles are written in French and English, they deal with the teaching and learning of different languages. The fourth objective is to promote young researchers. The journal is recognized for encouraging new authors and, thanks to its wide circulation, allows young researchers to be introduced to the academic community.

Volume 37, number 2, to be published in June 2018, will adress the key question of “Body, Voice and Language Learning in Higher Education”. We welcome all contributions written in either English or French.

Submissions to our journal are peer-reviewed. They must follow fall within one of the four following categories:

  • research articles (25 000 to 40 000 characters altogether, spaces not included);
  • reports (10 000 to 20 000 characters altogether, spaces not included;
  • notes on teaching experiences (8000 to 15 000 characters altogether, spaces not included);
  • book reviews (8000 to 15 000 characters altogether, spaces not included).

Deadline for proposals is October, 30th 2017.

Please send your submission to: apliut@revues.org and linda.terrier@univ-tlse2.fr.

In order to be submitted to the peer-review process, contributions must respect the guidelines for authors as well as the maximum lengths indicated above. See recommendations for authors : http://apliut.revues.org/1965.

(posted 24 June 2017)


Narratives of Religious Conversion from the Enlightenment to the Present
An issue of Vol. 23 of EJES to be published in 2019
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2017

Guest editors: Ludmilla Kostova (Veliko Turnovo), Efterpi Mitsi (Athens)

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for essays, as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both editors: Ludmilla Kostova: ludmillak3@gmail.com and Efterpi Mitsi: emitsi@enl.uoa.gr

The deadline for proposals for this volume is 31 October 2017, with delivery of completed essays by 31 March 2018.

The full call for papers is available at https://essenglish.org/ejes/current-cfps/

(posted 24 March 2017)


Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Narratives
An issue of Vol. 23 of EJES to be published in 2019
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2017

Guest editors: Jan Alber (Aachen) and Alice Bell (Sheffield Hallam University)

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for essays, as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both editors: Jan Alber: jan.alber@ifaar.rwth-aachen.de and Alice Bell: a.bell@shu.ac.uk

The deadline for proposals for this volume is 31 October 2017, with delivery of completed essays by 31 March 2018.

The full call for papers is available at https://essenglish.org/ejes/current-cfps/

(posted 24 March 2017)


Shame and Shamelessness
An issue of Vol. 23 of EJES to be published in 2019
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2017

Guest editors: Kaye Mitchell (Manchester), Katrin Röder (Potsdam), Christine Vogt-William (Berlin)

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for essays, as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to all three editors: Katrin Röder: kroeder@uni-potsdam.de, Kaye Mitchell: Kaye.Mitchell@manchester.ac.uk and Christine Vogt-William: cvogtwilliam@yahoo.com

The deadline for proposals for this volume is 31 October 2017, with delivery of completed essays by 31 March 2018.

The full call for papers is available at https://essenglish.org/ejes/current-cfps/

(posted 24 March 2017)


Beyond Books and Plays. Cultures and Practices of Writing in Early Modern Theatre
Journal of Early Modern Studies, Volume 8, 2019
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2017

Edited by Lene Buhl Petersen and Raimondo Guarino.

The 2019 issue of JEMS will address the major cultural phenomenon of the production of written texts and, in a broader sense, the uses of writing in early modern theatre. Thus the volume is situated at the crossroads between textual studies, performance studies, and studies of orality vs. literacy. Going further than the relationships between book and stage, initiated by D.F. McKenzie and R. Chartier, and developed in a number of important studies concerning the printing of early modern drama, the range of suggested topics is expected to address textual practices both as sources and offshoots of theatrical enterprises, the skills related to writing and reading in players’ cultural environments, and the relationship between the popular professional theatre and literary milieux.

This call for papers invites researchers interested in the production of manuscripts (plays, promptbooks, parts, plots) in theatrical practice, from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, not only in the contexts of major national traditions (i.e. Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, Siglo de oro, French Classical theatre, Italian Academic and professional theatrical environments) but also in peripheral and lesser known areas. Specific attention could also concern the connections between printed texts (not only printed plays, but also treatises, reports and players’ literary works) and performances, including civic and religious representations. In addition to philological and historical assessments, articles could draw attention to players’ literary competence, texts as tools for memorization, practices of oral/aural reproduction, the setting up of dramatic repertoires; and/or the rise of specific professional figures such as prompters and scribes employed in professional theatres to keep and reproduce manuscripts. Thus, the collection of articles should hopefully open up new horizons in the syntheses and synergies between literary traditions and performance cultures in early modern Europe.

Main deadlines:

  • 31st October 2017: adhere to project and send working title and abstract to Raimondo Guarino (raimondo.guarino@uniroma3.it) and Lene Buhl Petersen (lenebuhlpetersen@gmail.com).
  • 28th February 2018: finalize paper for submission to referees. Articles must comply with the editorial norms and must not exceed 12000 words, including footnotes and bibliography. All articles are published in English. Please be so kind as to have your paper revised by a native speaker.

Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS) http://www.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/index is an open access peer-reviewed international journal that promotes interdisciplinary research and discussion on issues concerning all aspects of early modern European culture.

(posted 4 August 2017)


Museums in literature – Literature in museums
A forthcoming issue of Journal MuseumEdu
New extended deadline for proposals: 31 November 2017

Editor Dr. Evgenia Sifaki, Lecturer, University of Thessaly

The special Museumedu issue Museums in literature – Literature in museums is edited by Dr. Evgenia Sifaki. It aims at considering questions regarding the relationship between literature and museums, as well as the presence of literature within museum spaces. More specifically, it will investigate how both the concept and images of the museum -as well as other spaces of cultural reference- function within literary texts and, vice versa, how literature, both fiction and non-fiction, is presented and experienced inside such spaces and in relation to museum objects.
We invite proposals for papers concerned with literary representations of museum spaces, their role in the text and their impact on the construction of subjectivity with respect to literary characters, narrators, poetic speakers, readers. Simultaneously, we plan to include papers focusing on the position and role of literature inside museums and other cultural spaces, namely, its role regarding the representation and interpretation of such spaces and in shaping the experience of the visitors.
We place no limitation on the writers’ choices of theoretical approaches and methods, but we would like these to be stated with clarity.
Aiming at outlining -not restricting- the thematic content of the issue, we suggest the following topics:

  • Spaces of cultural references as the setting in works of fiction
  • Museum snapshots in literature
  • The contribution of museums and other cultural spaces to the development of narration and/or characters
  • Discourse, image and material objects
  • The wicked, the ugly, the cheap, the vulgar: intertextual relationships in literary and museum representations
  • Violence and terror in literature and the museum
  • Freud and archaeological relics
  • Spaces and objects of cultural reference in psychoanalytic essays
  • The contribution of literature in the arrangement of exhibitions and the interpretation of the exhibits
  • The contribution of literature (fiction and non-fiction) to the composition of the museum narrative
  • Transformations and metaphorical uses of archaeological and historical spaces, and witness accounts, in critical and poetic discourse
  • Memory, trauma, death in fiction and museums
  • The “other” in museums and literature
  • Poetry and the museum
  • Museums in children’s literature
  • Exhibition display and representation of literary texts
  • The literary experience in museums and spaces of cultural reference

Please send abstracts, outlines and expressions of interest by 31 Novemeber 2017 (new extended deadline) to Dr. Evgenia Sifaki evsifaki@gmail.com

Informal Inquiries about possible paper submissions are welcomed. The deadline for submission of manuscripts is 31 March 2018.
You may also contact:
Irene Nakou inakou@uth.gr
Niki Nikonanou niknik@uth.gr
and Panagiotis kanellopoulos pankanel@uth.gr

(posted 25 September 2017, updated 1 November 2017)


Staging motherhood and mothers in British drama across centuries
A thematic volume
Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2017

Due to the ongoing discussions on the value of family in the contemporary world, the subject of motherhood returned to the forefront of public discourse in Europe and incited new polemics on – as is suggested by rightist politics – the natural drive towards maternity. Moreover, ‘ideological apparatuses’, to use Althusser’s nomenclature, such as the Church, promote motherhood and popularize pro-familial ideology, even offering particular “models of mothering” (Gawlina 2003: 37). Apart from using religious argumentation in propagating motherhood, conservative discourse conceptualises mothering as a moral value, the negation or rejection of which is presented as equal to monstrosity (Jones 1997; Łamejko 2003). Additionally, as Deirdre Johnston and Debra Swanson remind patriarchal culture perpetuates the idea that “[t]he maternal bliss myth – that motherhood is the joyful fruition of every woman’s aspirations – perpetuates systems of patriarchy by attributing any maternal unhappiness and dissatisfaction to failure of the mother” (2003). On a more demographic and social politics level, there are continuous attempts to encourage European women to have children and devote themselves to motherhood, prioritising it over career (in the Polish context, the recent controversial campaign, “Nie odkładaj macierzyństwa na potem!” [‘Don’t delay motherhood’] is a good example). Taking such a socio-political and religious background into consideration, we wish to broaden the research on motherhood and focus on topics and tropes of motherhood, mothers, maternity, and mothering as shown on stage and presented in published/written British drama.

We invite you to send abstracts on literary/dramatic and linguistic/semantic aspects related to the idea of dramatised motherhood. We are particularly looking for papers on:

  • Staged mothers and mothers on stage
  • Motherhood as a trope, staging motherhood as an idea
  • Good and bad mothers and anything in-between
  • Monstrous mothers and ‘mothering’ a monster
  • Mother(ing) as a metaphor, the idea of the ‘motherland’
  • (m)othering
  • stepmothers and stepping in as a mother
  • Staging maternity and mothers-to-be
  • Single mothers
  • Older and aging mothers
  • Holy mothers
  • Matricide and infanticide
  • Unwanted motherhood
  • Mothering fathers
  • Gender and motherhood
  • Queering motherhood
  • Surrogate motherhood
  • absent mothers and losing a mother
  • Suffering mothers
  • Mothers of nations, generations of mothers
  • Immigrant mothers and migrating mothers

Interested authors are kindly asked to send 500-word abstracts by 1st of November 2017 to dr Katarzyna Bronk (kbronk@wa.amu.edu.pl and bbronkk@gmail.com). If accepted by the editors, dr Bronk and dr Rogos-Hebda, selected abstracts will be collated into a thematic volume and proposed to an international publisher. Upon acceptance by the publisher, the authors will be asked to write full versions of their papers.

Bibliography

  • Althusser, Louis. 2008. On ideology. London: Verso.
  • Gawlina, Z. 2003. „Macierzyństwo jako wartość w kontekście przemian społecznych”. Blaski i cienie życia rodzinnego”. Roczniki Socjologii Rodziny, XV. Poznań: Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 33-45.
  • Johnston, D. and D. H. Swanson. 2003. ‘Invisible Mothers: A Content Analysis of Motherhood Ideologies and Myths in Magazines’. Sex Roles, Vol. 49, Nos. ½, PP.21-33.
  • Jones, V. 1997. Women in the eighteenth century: Constructions of femininity. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Łamejko, D. 2003. „Macierzyństwo jako wartość filozoficzna i moralna”. Etyka 36, 193-208.

(posted 14 August 2017)


(Im)possible Worlds
Journal of Philology and Intercultural Communication
Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2017

The editorial board of the JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION invites papers on the theme of “(Im)possible Worlds” from a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives: comparativism, discourse analysis, cultural studies, gender studies, philosophy, imagology, pragmatics, semiotics, cognitive linguistics, intercultural communication, new media and anthropological mutations, pragmasemantic aspects of communication and so on.
Please note that the above topics are not exclusive and all contributions on the proposed theme are warmly welcomed. Likewise, the journal section titled Miscellaneous may include papers that are not related to the present theme.

Contributions should be sent by November 1st 2017 to:
– Adela Catana: adela.catana@yahoo.com or
– Daniela Mirea: daniela_mirea@yahoo.com

For more information, feel free to check our website: http://www.llcs.journal.mta.ro/en_US/home/Journal of Philology and Intercultural Communication
39-49 George Cosbuc Ave., Sector 5, 050141, Bucharest, Romania
E-mail: jpic@mta.ro

(posted 13 September 2017)


Scottish Kitsch
Scottish Studies / Études écossaises nr 18, 2018 Issue
Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2017

“It is easy to sympathise with Fordyce Maxwell [in a Scotsman article from 30 November 2000] in his lament over the amount of kitsch used to promote Scotland and its products. However, whatever we think of it, it is there, as it has been since we can remember, because people furth of Scotland buy it, either as advertising or as kilted dolls to take home as souvenirs. It is likely that other nations dislike the concentration on their perceived icons as promotional material as much as we do. And there remains the question: if not that, what?” R. J. McLEAN, December 2001 (http://www.scotsman.com/news/scottish-kitsch-1-588261)

In the popular imagination, clichés about Scotland abound. One particularly persistent notion is the association of Scotland, the land of ghosts and storm–battered castles and landscapes, with a perceived Gothic character.

But to judge from a not-so-recent preoccupation with the tourism industry and the widespread dissemination of a national imagery and paraphernalia sometimes cut off from their historical or geographical contexts, one could think that if its “perceived aesthetics” are Gothic, Scotland has had, for some time already, a far more evident susceptibility to and affinity with kitsch.

It is all too easy to be dismissive of a purported artificiality of “Scottish Kitsch” when a considerable part of Scotland’s economic prospects, and a good deal of its international image, depend upon it. A reassessment might prove a productive challenge for the specialist.

Of course, inseparable from the imposition of aesthetic categories like the Beautiful, the Sublime, the Picturesque, or kitsch in a modern sense, is the opposition between good taste and bad taste and the attendant, often self-imposed, responsibility of the proponents of such categories to educate the public through the senses. There is a political side to aesthetics, as the sociology of taste demonstrates, and normative tastemakers of all kinds are always exponents of a view of the public good; aesthetic pronouncements are acts of power. Who determines what is kitsch, for what purposes and to what effects? What are the social, political and economic implications of controversies over the nature of Scottish Kitsch, at home or abroad?

“Scottish Kitsch” conditions the perception of Scotland, within and without. Several positions are possible: resisting Scottish kitsch is a political act, as is the tolerance for it, or even the fact of embracing it to reconfigure Scottishness, in a postmodern gesture. As the quotation above exemplifies, Scotland’snegotiation of its self-image through its abrasive relationship to kitsch problematizes both its relation to itself and its integration in the alliance of nations (“if not that, what?”), and has done so for quite some time. In opposition to nationalism’s assured rhetoric of authenticity, this uneasiness and sense of alienation will prove helpful in understanding the problem that is “Scottish Kitsch”, the focus of the upcoming issue of Scottish Studies / Études écossaises, a multidisciplinary journal.

Of course, the issue’s theme lends itself particularly well to developments about the many forms of the tourism industry and “the brand, Scotland”. Cultural policy from official or unofficial agents (the Homecoming project, for example) is also a stimulating topic.

However, more properly aesthetic considerations will be accepted: proposals about Scottish painting, whether modern/contemporary (Vettriano?) or more dated, as well as elements about literary aesthetics (Kailyard/counter-Kailyard…).

Other forms of “gaudiness” might also prove to be fruitful areas of study, especially sports: the Highland Games, Scotland’s place in the Commonwealth games (see for example Ian Jack’s article “The Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony: Just the Right Side of Kitsch” from Friday 25 July 2014)… and their self-conscious displays of a certain Scottishness.

A brief proposal (200-300 words) should be sent by 15 November 2017.

Papers (45,000 signs max., including spaces) may be submitted in French or English, but authors must first obtain the appropriate style-guide. The deadline for finished papers is 10 January 2017.

Contact : cyril.besson@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

The journal Études écossaises/Scottish Studies contributes to the ongoing research project of the Institut des Langues et Cultures d’Europe, des Amériques, d’Afrique, d’Asie et d’Australie (ILCEA4 — Grenoble Alpes University).

EA 7356, ILCEA 4, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, ILCEA4, 38000 Grenoble, France

(posted 9 September 2017)


English Studies and Digital Humanities
A special issue of  Représentations dans le monde anglophone
Deadline for proposals: 24 November 2017

Représentations dans le monde anglophone, Representations in the English-Speaking World, is the Journal of the CEMRA research group, Grenoble-Alpes University, France

In the last decades, digital Humanities have become ubiquitous both in France and abroad. Taking a moment to look back on the transformation of a field whose very definition is itself controversial might thus prove useful. Oxymoron for some, genuine revolution for others, ephemeral utopia, pragmatic choice or inevitable and lasting evolution, the digital humanities are far from a consensual area.

However, at the heart of the various etymological and epistemological debates or sometimes parallel to them, digital humanities’ initiatives have been multiplying and English studies have been no exception.

Consequently, this issue of Représentations dans le monde anglophone proposes to gather feedback from researchers from the various disciplines of French and foreign English studies in order to map out this digital migration of contemporary research. 

To comply with the editorial line of the journal, this issue aims in particular at carrying out a reflection on the relationship between practices and discourse in the field of the digital humanities. Indeed, in its most frequent representation, research in the digital humanities is associated with notions of modernity, openness, objectivity, reliability, or even representativeness, but this vision coexists with other forms of representations, less canonical and sometimes more critical of the transformations related to this gradual digital migration in science at different stages of the research process, from the generation of corpora to the dissemination of results. Authors are therefore invited to present their projects whilst at the same time assessing their practical experience against their initial representations and expectations.

Please send your abstracts (500 words approx.), in English or in French, before November 24, 2017 to Geraldine Castel at the Grenoble Alpes university (Geraldine.castel@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr).

(posted 16 October 2017)


The Afterlives of Modernism: modernist continuities in contemporary English-language fiction
A thematic issue of HJEAS
Deadline for proposals; 30 November 2017

HJEAS (Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies) seeks essay submissions for a thematic section of its Fall 2018 issue on ‟The Afterlives of modernism: modernist continuities in contemporary English-language fiction.” HJEAS is a peer-reviewed journal of the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary, publishing critical articles and book reviews in the fields of American, British, Canadian, and Irish literature, history, and culture, and is available from JSTOR and ProQuest. (www.hjeas.hu)

Ever since the 1990s, “modernism(s)” has exponentially increased its “visitability” as an academic discipline, largely defined by – and against – a receding, still fuzzy concept of “postmodernism,” itself academically produced. Both a “begetter” of postmodernism and its “progeny,” as Steven Connor recently stated (in Sherry, ed., The Cambridge History of Modernism, 2016), modernism re-affirmed itself during the debates of the 1980s-90s around the definition of postmodernism, to proliferate into “modernisms” as variegated as postmodernism has once been. Yet, Connor warns, “one of the many things that modernism can be is, simply, not over; the way to be new for modernism is for it unexpectedly to have stayed news.” Perhaps the most poignant of these multiple conceptualizations is that of Gabriel Josipovici for whom Modernism is not a time-bound artistic current, but a (discontinuous and ahistorical) tradition “of those who have no tradition” (What Ever Happened to Modernism?, 2010), of those whose artistic ventures are a predicament or, to speak with Beckett, “in the clutch of,” rather than “in search of difficulty” (“Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,” 1949).

Beyond the mainstream debates on the relation between modernism(s) and the many “posts” of today’s discourse, there may be a contemporary modernism, identifiable in the persistence of cultural and experiential positions ranging from the critical and the anarchic to the aestheticised view on the self as ceaseless negotiation with other subjects and objects. Ian McEwan, Will Self, George Saunders, Ali Smith, Eimear McBride are just a few casually picked examples of novelists who re-employ experimental forms associated with High Modernism in exploring the interface between the self and its language on the one hand, and the world of objects and things on the other hand. Probing the resistance of both language and the world to our modes of knowledge, recent novels engage in a reevaluation of realism, modernism and postmodernism alike, rooted in the early twentieth-century’s self-reflexivity and interrogation of the boundaries between the “real” and the “made,” and aimed at meeting the challenges of scientific thought and technological advances to the traditional status of the printed book. Caught between the investigation of a haunting, traumatic past and the anticipation of unforeseeable, more often than not catastrophic futures, contemporary fiction inevitably restages and revises modernist reactions to the new, this time in the shape of a further derealisation of the world under the pressure of the digital, whose paradoxical combination of the predetermined and the arbitrary had been long anticipated by modernist experimental writing.

Papers may refer to but are not limited to the following topics:

  • re-evaluations, revisiting of the narrative strategies and compositional designs of realism, modernism, or postmodernism with their epistemological positions
  • the free indirect discourse and the stream of consciousness as devices of contemporary writing
  • contemporary fictional experiments with time and its perception
  • reconstructing individual consciousness in the light of discoveries in biology and the digital revolution
  • creative engagement with the advances of contemporary technology and its impact on print culture, on the human body, or on the ecosystem
  • planetarism and the reevaluation of modernist internationalism
  • contemporary probing of the opacity and resistance of language, engaging with the modernist tradition of language skepticism
  • continuities of modernist/post-modernist self-referentiality in contemporary fiction

Completed manuscripts of 5000-10,000 words must follow the MLA parenthetical citation with Works Cited. Please follow the HJEAS Style Sheet available at http://www.hjeas.unideb.hu/submitting-manuscripts.html

Proposals of 500 words with a 100-150 bio are due by November 30, 2017; Final papers are due by March 15, 2018. Please send the submissions and all inquiries to the editors, Petronia Petrar (petronia.petrar@gmail.com) and Erika Mihálycsa (erika.mihalycsa@gmail.com)

(posted 23 October 2017)


Unsettling Oceania
Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 41.1 (Autumn 2018)
Daedline for proposals: 1 December 2017

This issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies will focus on textual productions from Oceania – which is understood here as the region comprising Australia, New Zealand, as well as the Pacific Islands that were integrated into their sphere of influence. The term Oceania draws attention to the centrality of the sea for Pacific Islanders, and emphasizes the relations among them (Hau’Ofa 2008), looking outwards. By contrast, in the imaginary of Australia, the island-continent, the pull is inwards, towards the centre and the desert. The focus of this issue will be the multifaceted process of re-imagining Oceania in the contemporary period (late 20th-21st centuries), looking simultaneously towards the future and back in time towards the colonial period and the mythical times before that. The colonial history of Australia and New Zealand, of “settler societies” that led to the dispossession of Indigenous people, gave rise in these literatures of the South Pacific, among other trends, to a strong, unsettling sense of the uncanny, in the Freudian sense of “the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar – the way the one seems to inhabit the other” (Gelder & Jacobs 1998: 23). In the postcolonial context, the uncanny emphasizes “the contradictions that mark points of intersection between [various] worlds” (White in Hau’ofa 2008: x). Australian literature is thus “recurrently afflicted […] by some deep-seated sense of ontological dis-ease,” as it continues to free itself from residual colonial ideologies, to reimagine “a nation of self-mythologized ‘unsettled settlers’” (Huggan 2007: viii, xi). In contemporary New Zealand literature, “writers go back to the colonial past for their subject matter but as a way of reinventing literature or unsettling history, not as a homage or a record but as a source of something new and often disquieting” (Stafford and Williams 2012: 941). Indigenous Pacific literatures in English emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in a period of worldwide decolonisation and civil rights protest. While many Pacific writers draw on indigenous traditions, much contemporary Pacific writing is still engaged with colonialism and its legacies (Keown 2007: 7).

We welcome articles that explore any aspect in literature and the arts of these processes that aim at reinventing the meaning of home and of relations, in both a post/colonial context and a globalised world. Relevant areas of interest include:

  • Indigenous writings, arts and spirituality
  • post/colonial representations of Pacific history
  • imagined geographies of Oceania
  • Gothic fiction, including Aboriginal Gothic
  • visions and utopias
  • science-fiction stories, fantasy
  • eco-criticism
  • spirituality, New Age environmentalism

CES is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal. Please send 250-word proposals for articles up to 6,000 word including an abstract, five keywords and a bibliography to guest editors Salhia Ben-Messahel salhiabm@free.fr and Christine Lorre-Johnston christine.lorre@univ-paris3.fr by 1 December 2017. Confirmation of acceptance will be sent out within a month after this deadline, and draft versions of papers will be due by 1 April 2018.

(posted 1 August 2017)


OK Computer, twenty years on: Radiohead’s musical, cultural, and political legacies
A special issue of LISA e-journal
Deadline for proposals: 15 December 2017

OK Computer, Radiohead’s third album, has captivated many rock music fans worldwide and continues to this day to feature in the music press’s lists of the best rock albums of all times. A complex, at times experimental, album, OK Computer stood at odds with the dominating trends in mid-to-late 1990s British music and culture, especially Britpop, and the album’s bleak, subversive lyrics provided a sharp contrast with the features of the Cool Britannia phenomenon.

Following a symposium held at Rennes 2 University last may, further contributions (in English or French) are now sought in order to publish a wide-ranging collection of articles appraising OK Computer’s musical, cultural and political legacy twenty years after its release. The peer-reviewed collection will be published in a special issue of the LISA e-journal (https://lisa.revues.org/?lang=en) in 2018. The aim of this publication is to bring together contributions from scholars who wish to confront Radiohead’s work with their own disciplinary methodologies, including (but not limited to) musicology, sociology, art history, political science, literature, cultural studies or even economics. Potential topics may include:

  • The literary, philosophical, artistic concepts which may have influenced Radiohead during the album’s recording;

  • The use of visual arts as a way to convey and deepen the album’s socio-political message (e.g. the use of video clips and the album’s and singles’ cover art);

  • OK Computer’s appraisal and reception by fans and critics;

  • OK Computer’s impact on the evolution of contemporary British rock music;

  • The way Radiohead have reacted and adapted to the overhaul of the music industry and consumption mechanisms since the late 1990s

Abstracts (400 words maximum) and short biographical notes should be sent to Guillaume Clément  (prof.guillaume.clement@gmail.com) and David Haigron (david.haigron@univ-rennes2.fr) by 15 December 2017. Selected authors will be notified quickly thereafter and final papers should be submitted by April 1st, 2018.

(posted 10 October 2017)