Books and special issues of journals – Deadlines October-December 2018

Nature, environment and environmentalism in Ireland
Spring 2019 issue of Etudes Irlandaises
Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2018


Identifying Ireland with nature has been a commonplace for so long that their complex relationship has become obscured and now calls for renewed examination. Essentialist tropes positing Ireland as a refuge of authenticity and wilderness in the Western world have endured from the colonizer’s naturalizing discourse to British conservationism and now strive in the Irish tourism industry. The Celtic Tiger years successfully relied on, and reflected, a dual picture of global business attractiveness and unspoiled nature, promoting the pure waters of Green Erin—together with its fiscal leniency—as the ideal setting for pharmaceutical and IT companies and a unique location for salmon fishing. Only after the fall of the Celtic Tiger did another landscape begin to emerge: that of a dilapidated, polluted environment, symbolized with striking effect by the mushrooming “ghost estates” that now scar the Irish countryside and suburban areas. Such visions of the New Ireland reflect the concrete, geographic impact of post-industrial late capitalism, thus placing Ireland onto a global map of environmental crises and largely debunking a myth that is still desperately advertised by the national tourism industry today.
All consumers of the Irish landscape and its natural resources—foreign tourists and nationals alike—share an ambivalent attitude towards Irish nature, which can be traced back to the colonizing process. The colonizer went through a symbolic process of dehumanization in order to reduce natives to mere parts of the landscape—a landscape whose ownership by the colonizer was posited as a natural process of history. For the colonized Irishman, symbolic humiliation was a prelude to the confiscation of natural and agricultural resources and the alienation of cultural heritage, epitomized by the brutal overhaul of toponymy and subsequent destruction of the symbiotic link between place and language. In such a context, it is no surprise that, according to Hilary Tovey, the early ecological activism of 1970s Ireland largely considered environmental degradations in terms of damages inflicted by outsiders and denounced the globalized avatars of British capitalist imperialism rather than homegrown policies.
One can indeed legitimately ask if and how Irish artistic and cultural production has become a fertile ground for critical and retrospective reflection on Ireland’s ambiguous relationship with its “nature” understood as a form of congruence between its identity and its environment. Thus the mythical status of the West, the central question of land ownership but also the puzzling under-representation of the sea given Ireland’s insular status constitute so many aspects of a national ecopsychology (Theodore Roszak) that transpire in artistic productions.
Literary form is of course essential here and Seamus Heaney asked the fundamental question in this respect in “Known World”: “How does the real get into the made-up?” The idea that one of art’s functions should be to probe the link between form and material reality seems to interrogate the notion of the arbitrariness of the sign inherited from the linguistic turn in critical studies. Thus the question of the representation of the material environment also becomes that of the materiality of the work of art itself, which opens new perspectives for a neo-materialist study of Irish cultural production. This is especially perceptible in artistic performance or in the new travel diaries (see for instance Garrett Carr’s The Rule of the Land, 2017), the ultimate goal being to wonder whether beyond their mimetic function of representation, literature and poetry can make Ireland a habitable place.

Contributions are welcome (but by no means limited to) the following issues:

•    Literature and environment in Ireland
–       fauna and flora
–       representing the ecological crisis
–       writing as a technology or tool
–       ecology and literary form
–       Textual materialism
•    Irish environment and visual arts: from mimesis to Land Art
–       Ecology and performance; theatre and activism
•    The Great Famine (1845-51) as environmental disaster
•    The environmental effects of the Celtic Tiger
•    Environmental Policies, economic and social stakes
•    Environmental justice
•    The environmental impact of colonization
•    Irish nature and nationalism
•    Irish environmentalism
•    Ecocriticism and postcolonialism
–       green capitalism and nature, conservationism and “development”
•    Toponymy as the memory of place

Please send your articles by 1 October 2018 (new extended deadline) to:
catherine.conan@univ-brest.fr et flore.coulouma@gmail.com.

Articles should be submitted with an abstract and a list of key words.
Cf http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/2729

(posted 28 July 2018)


Language Contact Phenomena
Winter 2018 issue of The ESSE Messenger
New extended deadline: 15 October 2018

The multilingual context we live in leads to constant interaction between languages. As a result, there are various language contact phenomena that have become common practice among speakers and that are constantly shaping the individual’s language use and identity.

This issue of the ESSE Messenger invites scholars to send their articles on topics related to micro-sociolinguistics (borrowing, code-switching, translanguaging, polylingual languaging, metrolingualism, translingual practices), macro-sociolinguistics (language shift, language maintenance), and how these phenomena influence the speakers’ linguistic practices and identity.

More information on the Messenger website: https://essenglish.org/messenger

(posted 1 October 2018)


Configuring non-Linearity: A Reassessment of Nadine Gordimer’s Art
41.2, Commonwealth Essays and Studies
Deadline for proposals: 30 October 2018
Alongside her developing a forceful “art of the present moment” (Gordimer 1968 15), Gordimer’s writing is nonetheless haunted by the ghostly traumas of a colonial past and “always in some way in dialogue with an absent future” (Clingman 13). This resonates in new ways a few years after her death as post-apartheid South Africa continues to undergo major social, economic, political and cultural changes. Incidents and accidents, interruptions and disruptions take place on the full range of scales in her works, from the intimate to the national, from the individual to the global. While all chronological (let alone teleological) timelines also appear fractured in Gordimer’s oeuvre, some reconfigurations of linearity find their way in, making for patterns which radiate at all other levels: spatial, ideological, narrative and metafictional, among others. In other words, the irruption of violence in the diegesis can also be read as reiteration, but also possibly as a (tragic?) means towards a new order. Such literary moments of non-linearity and reconnection are crucial to a consideration of how the South African author intended to intervene in the world she depicted, and to how transformative and performative her writing may be in its re-casting of different modes of fissured agencies. Calling attention to such processes as linkage and re-connection is also a way of considering anew the “interregnum” in and on which she dwelt (see Gordimer 1988), a space-time where destruction rules but where odd collocations emerge where and when least expected. Likewise, unusual reconfigurations can be witnessed at temporal but also narratological levels, suggesting possibilities for meaning to circulate again.
This issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies is meant as a timely re-assessment of Gordimer’s literary experimentations and innovations in relation to her writerly commitment. Foremost among these concerns we wish to address and qualify the category of realism often used to describe Gordimer’s fictional aesthetics, and which in fact often tends to morph into fables and fantastic tales, into postmodern narrative unreliability and satirical irony. The notion of linearity also enables an investigation of the act of reading Gordimer, a writer who tended to favour such potentially fragmented forms as the collection of essays or of short stories. Such a wide variety of texts, spanning different genres, is testimony to Gordimer’s diverse political and aesthetic engagements and invites reflection on epistemological construction.
We invite articles addressing aspects of her work from a wide range of critical viewpoints, and are particularly interested in innovative approaches to her oeuvre (which might include trauma studies, queer and/or feminist, decolonial, transcultural/transnational readings).
Abstracts (150 words) and a short bio-bibliographical note must be sent by July 31st to Kerry-Jane Wallart (kjwallart@yahoo.fr) and Fiona McCann (mccannfiona@gmail.com). Final articles (6000 words, see CES stylesheet: http://www.univ-paris3.fr/commonwealth-essays-and-studies-16669.kjsp) must be submitted by October 30th, and will be blindly peer-reviewed. The issue will be released in May, 2019.
Stephen Clingman. ‘Nadine Gordimer: A Writing Life’, in A Writing Life, Celebrating Nadine Gordimer. Ed. Andries Walter Oliphant. London: Viking, 1998. 3-18.
Nadine Gordimer. ‘The Short Story in South Africa’, in The International Symposium on the Short Story, Kenyon Review XXX (1968): 457-463.
—-‘Living in the Interregnum’, in The Essential Gesture: Writing Politics and Places. Ed. Stephen Clingman. London: Cape, 1988.
(posted 29 June 2018)

Representing Trans
One of the three issues of volume 24 of EJES (2020)
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2018

The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for the three issues of the journal to be published in 2020. Potential contributors are invited to submit detailed proposals of up to 1,000 words to the guest editors of the topic they are interested in. The deadline for proposals for this volume is 31 October 2018.

EJES operates a two-stage review process.

  1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 31 October 2018.
  2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a spring 2019 deadline.
  3. The full-length essays undergo another round of review, and a final selection as well as suggestions for revisions are made. Selected essays are then revised and resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2019 for publication in 2020.

EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling and punctuation.

Call for papers

Guest editors: Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Berlin), Anson Koch-Rein (Grinnell) and Jasper Verlinden (Berlin)

The last couple of years have been shaped by a paradoxical simultaneity of unprecedented trans visibility in the arts and media and of ongoing transphobic violence, disproportionately affecting economically disadvantaged and communities of colour. How can we approach the (international) success of shows such as Transparent, Hit & Miss, Orange is the New Black, Sense8, The OA or the independent film Tangerine (2015), foreign-language Oscar-winner Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman, 2017) or Arekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story, 2010), and others? How do these visual representations negotiate traditional gendered binaries of the ‘male gaze’ (Villarejo 2016) and the dynamics of trans feminine hypervisibility and trans masculine invisibility? How do these artefacts navigate “the trap of the visual” that offers trans visibility as the “primary path through which trans people might have access to livable lives” (Gossett, Stanley and Burton 2017)? Have we indeed reached a “transgender tipping point” in public and political discourse as the June 2014 heading of Time Magazine, featuring actress Laverne Cox as the first open trans woman on the cover, suggests? What kind of tensions does the mainstream marketability and recognition (e.g. of celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner or Chaz Bono) create?

How do trans visibility and new regulative attempts such as the House Bill 2 (HB2) that gave rise to a new form of ‘bathroom panic’, but also media-savvy counter strategies by trans activists on social media, shape public discourse and how will politics be affected by more trans people running for political office? How does the predominance of US-centred trans representations reflect “the complex global flows of shared subcultural knowledges” (Aizura 2006) and how do they circulate globally and get received, resisted, or repurposed locally? Are there specific national investments in a visibility of legible scripts of trans lives based on identitarian political representation and how does this relate to visual representations of other non-normative forms of embodiment that might not easily fit such narratives?

Topics

The editors invite papers that address trans representations in TV, film, visual art, performance art, video, and social and other media exploring, among others, the following topics:

  • self-representation/trans-produced representations
  • debates about representation, identity, and the conditions of production, for instance, in the call to cast trans actors in trans roles
  • genderqueer and non-binary representations
  • discourses of hypervisibility/invisibility
  • differences in representing trans masculinities and femininities
  • recognition and violence
  • transnational comparisons/US-centrism and postcolonial critique
  • race, class, and intersectionality in trans representations
  • convergences in disability, intersex and transgender studies/activisms

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to all editors by 31 October 2018: Elahe Haschemi Yekani: elahe.haschemi-yekani@hu-berlin.de, Anson Koch-Rein: akr@alumni.emory.edu and Jasper Verlinden: j.verlinden@fu-berlin.de.

(posted 13 March 2018)


Neo-Victorian Negociations of Hostility, Empathy and Hospitality
One of the three issues of volume 24 of EJES (2020)
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2018

EJES operates a two-stage review process.

  1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 31 October 2018.
  2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a spring 2019 deadline.
  3. The full-length essays undergo another round of review, and a final selection as well as suggestions for revisions are made. Selected essays are then revised and resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2019 for publication in 2020.

EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling and punctuation.

Call for papers

Guest editors: Rosario Arias (Málaga) and Mark Llewellyn (Cardiff)

What does it mean to be sympathetic to or antagonistic towards our nineteenth-century past? How do we negotiate the territory between self/other, host/guest, stranger/friend?

This special issue explores the concepts of hostility, empathy and hospitality in neo-Victorianism.

The term ‘hospitality’ encompasses the tension between host and other since, as Emily Ridge has recently noted, hospitality “at its very etymological root, harbours an otherness [and] manifests a paradoxical character.” This leads to an ambiguous understanding of the term, opening up this notion to the analysis of contemporary literary and political landscapes. There has been a recent move to address hospitality in Victorian fiction. In Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics (2013), Rachel Hollander – drawing on Levinas and Derrida among others – has highlighted “an ethics of hospitality, in which respecting the limits of knowledge and welcoming the stranger define fiction’s relationship to both reader and world.” There has been no such critical intervention into the applicability or challenge to such understandings in neo-Victorianism. The aim of this special issue is therefore to examine neo-Victorian representations of ‘hospitality’ in its amplest sense, inclusive of the states of empathy (a term coined at the turn of the nineteenth century) and hostility as staging points on the spectrum of the hospitable as an ethical, political and aesthetic principle. Taking the double orientation of the neo-Victorian mode as a point of departure (cf. Heilmann and Llewellyn; Gamble; Johnston and Waters), we wish to solicit articles that argue that readings of neo-Victorian host-guest exchanges relate to contemporary anxieties about the glocal and the global, about individual and collective identities, and about affect in host-guest interactions.

We welcome essays dealing with literal and metaphorical readings of hospitality, hostility and empathy in neo-Victorian studies. These essays should address not only the home and the relation between domestic and public spheres but also the receptiveness of contemporary fiction and culture to the Victorian past. We are interested in essays that mobilise the ambiguous nature of hospitality, as well as (troubled) host-guest relations, in neo-Victorianism.

Relevant topics in this context might include (but are not limited to):

  • Hospitality as explicated by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, and concepts such as conditional hospitality and absolute hospitality
  • Hospitality in relation to home/homelessness and domesticity
  • Hospitality as a relationship between host and guest
  • Hospitality to the (Victorian) past
  • Hospitality vs. Hostility and/or empathy e.g. Victorian/Non-Victorian; European/Non-European

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both editors: Rosario Arias: rarias@uma.es and Mark Llewellyn: LlewellynM4@cardiff.ac.uk

(posted 13 March 2018)


Decentering Commemorations: Literary, Cultural, Historical and Political Commemorations across and beyond the British Isles
One of the three issues of volume 24 of EJES (2020)
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2018

The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for the three issues of the journal to be published in 2020. Potential contributors are invited to submit detailed proposals of up to 1,000 words to the guest editors of the topic they are interested in. The deadline for proposals for this volume is 31 October 2018.

EJES operates a two-stage review process.

    1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 31 October 2018.
    2. Following review of the proposals by the editorial board panel, informed by external specialists as appropriate, the guest editors will invite the authors of short-listed proposals to submit full-length essays for review with a spring 2019 deadline.
    3. The full-length essays undergo another round of review, and a final selection as well as suggestions for revisions are made. Selected essays are then revised and resubmitted to the guest editors in late 2019 for publication in 2020.

EJES employs Chicago Style (T&F Chicago AD) and British English conventions for spelling and punctuation.

Call for papers

Guest Editors: Antonella Braida-Laplace, Jeremy Tranmer and Céline Sabiron (Lorraine)

At a time of crisis concerning Europe’s identity and ideals, commemorations are not only intended as a nation-building process. They can also be appropriated by various actors at national, regional, and local levels, such as cultural institutions, political parties and social media. Increasing mobility and instability trigger off tendencies to go back to the past, to search for one’s roots and to emphasise the importance of heritage. Governments and lobbies/corporations such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple use landmarks to impose their readings of political, cultural and literary events, while grassroot communities organise their own remembrance events or commemorate differently and sometimes more informally and spontaneously.

The years 2018 and 2019 mark multiple anniversaries that will be commemorated transnationally, including the Armistice (1918) and the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the events of May 1968 in France, women’s suffrage in the UK (1918), the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the release of the Beatles’ album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) or the Woodstock Festival (1969). This EJES issue explores why and how these historical events, cultural productions and literary figures will be remembered across Europe. It intends to investigate in what ways and to what extent these commemorations are transferred from one cultural space to another, across and beyond the British Isles. It will also examine their transformations in the contemporary digital age and the shift towards new forms of democratic participation.

The editors invite proposals for articles dealing with transregional and/or transnational commemorations. Essays should account for the relationship between two or more regions or countries, one of them being the United Kingdom. Theoretical or practical approaches to the following topics, from different disciplinary perspectives, are welcomed:

  • forms and modes of commemorating
  • commemoration as an expression of soft power or a means of empowerment
  • commemoration and technology in the digital age
  • commemoration and cultural policies
  • commemoration and hyphenated/conflicting identities (bi-nationals, and European nationals) in the UK due to Devolution and Brexit
  • posterity and the literary canon
  • literary and visual adaptations
  • publishing policies
  • commemorations as a way of asserting human rights

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to all three editors by 31 October 2018:
Antonella Braida-Laplace: antonella.braida-laplace@univ-lorraine.fr
Jeremy Tranmer: jeremy.tranmer@univ-lorraine.fr
Céline Sabiron: celine.sabiron@univ-lorraine.fr

(posted 13 March 2018)


Approaches to the Literary Animal
An edited volume of collected critical essays
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2018

Submissions are sought from academics, scholars, research aspirants and animal advocates.

The rise and expansion of Animal Studies over the past decades can be seen in the explosion of various articles, journals, books, conferences, organisations, courses all over the academic world. With the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975 and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights in 1983, there has been a burgeoning interest in nonhuman animals among academics, animal advocates, and the general public. Interested scholars recognise the lack of scholarly attention given to nonhuman animals and to the relationships between human and nonhuman, especially in the light of the pervasiveness of animal representations, symbols, and stories, as well as the actual presence of animals in human societies and cultures.

Animals abound in literary and cultural texts, either they are animals-as-constructed or animals-as-such. However, we can approach any literary text from a theoretical lens where the representation of nonhuman animals is the main operative analytic frame. In literature nonhuman animals are given the titular role, they carry symbolic function, they speak human language and so on. But these create problematics and bear the politics of representation.

Proposals for articles on topics relevant to this collective volume may include, but are not limited to:

Theoretical Background

• HAS or CAS or Anthrozoology
• Animals and Animality Studies
• Animal Studies and Ecocriticism
• Animal ethics and rights
• Darwinism
• Posthumanism
• Womanimalia (woman = animal)
• Animal alterity
• Animal Ontology
• Postcolonial Animal
• Domesticated animal
• Meat eating, fishing and farming

Textual Readings

Contributors have the liberty to choose literary texts for their case study, but the papers must theorise the significant presence of nonhuman animals in the selected texts. Photo-essays are also welcome.

Papers should be around 3000 words following the latest MLA style sheet and must have abstract of 250 words with keywords, relevant endnotes, references and authors’ bio-note. Papers will be scrutinised thoroughly and checked for potential unethical practices. Selected papers will be collected in a book (with ISBN) to be published by a reputed publisher.

Submission Deadline: 31st October 2018

Submit to the Editor Krishanu Maiti here: studiesanimal@gmail.com

(posted 30 July 2018)


Aesthetics and Terrorism
A special volume of Contemporary Aesthetics
Deadline for full articles: 31 October 2018

Guest Editor Dr. Emmanouil Aretoulakis
Contact: emmareto@enl.uoa.gr.

Terrorism is unfortunately ubiquitous in the contemporary world. In the post-9/11 era, so-called “political violence” in the form of state or anti-state activity has placed itself at the very center of international politics and policies. But, of course, terrorist violence is not a recent phenomenon; rather, it has always preoccupied the minds of authorities, shattered the every-day routines of citizens, victimized thousands of people, but at the same time intrigued or even fascinated humanity with its unpredictability and suddenness. Through this lens, it is not paradoxical to admit that terrorism looms large in the artistic, literary, and philosophical imagination, and also in aesthetic debates. Although it may at first sound oxymoronic to articulate the concepts of terrorism and aesthetics in a single breath, not only is extreme political violence against (usually) non-combatants relevant to aesthetic matters and preoccupations, but it turns out that there may even be a structural link between the two. Aesthetics, here, does not necessarily hinge upon the question of beauty or artistic representation, but is more broadly defined as aesthetic experience understood as sense perception. In such a context, aesthetic sensibility has a lot to say about how terrorism is represented, employed, disseminated, reproduced, or even opposed.

The relationship between aesthetics and terrorism has generated considerable interest, and three articles on the subject have already been published in Contemporary Aesthetics:

  • “Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11” by Emmanouil Aretoulakis (Vol. 6, 2008)
  • “Art, Terrorism and the Negative Sublime” by Arnold Berleant (Vol. 7, 2009)
  • “Terrorist Aesthetics as Ideal Types: from Spectacle to ‘Vicious Lottery’” by Marshall Battani and Michaelyn Mankel (Vol. 15, 2017)

In light of this interest, Contemporary Aesthetics invites original, innovative, full-length articles that explore the connection between aesthetics and terrorism or terror across cultures, ages, genres, or discourses. CA welcome submissions on topics related (but not limited) to the following:

  • Aesthetic Theories, Political Violence, and the Philosophy of Terror
  • The Aesthetics of Suicide Attacks/Terrorism and the Body
  • The Politics of Aesthetics (or Aesthetics of Politics) in Terror(ism)
  • Radicalization as an Aesthetic Posture
  • Post-9/11 Political Discourse and Aesthetics
  • Ethics, Aesthetics, Narrativity in the Media Communication of Terror
  • Terrorist Discourse and the Sensorial Aspects of Terrorist Communication
  • Terrorism through the Perspective of Art (in its widest sense)
  • Morality, Ethics and Aesthetics in the Artistic Representation of Terror
  • Terrorism as Theatre/Performance
  • Society and the Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism
  • Counter-Terrorism, Law and Aesthetics
  • Urban Defense, Architecture and (Counter)Terrorism
  • Terrorism, Aesthetics and Ecological Consciousness
  • Postcolonial Aesthetics, Imagination and Terror
  • Religious (or not) Terrorism and the Aesthetics of Pain/Suffering
  • Aesthetics, Terror, Culture, and the 21st Century

Length: maximum 7,000 words, including abstract and notes. Only electronic submissions are acceptable. Deadline for submitting the full article and a short CV is October 31, 2018.

The article should be attached (as a word document) to your e-mail and sent to the guest editor, Dr. Emmanouil Aretoulakis emmareto@enl.uoa.gr.

For submission guidelines, see:  http://www.contempaesthetics.org/pages/guidelines.html

(posted 23 August 2018)


Student Empowerment: Reflections of Teachers and Students in Higher Education (working title)
An edited volume
Deadline for proposals: 5 November 2018

The focus of this volume is to present chapters on student empowerment by both teachers and students in higher education. We would like all the authors to engage with two critical aspects: reflection and student empowerment.

For teachers:

The aim of the chapters in this volume is for teachers to draw on their own experiences and reflect on the various ways in which they have provided support for their students to encourage them to be the best that they can be and to set them up for success. Teachers in primary and secondary education are continuously engaged in reflecting on their teaching practice. Most keep some kind of journal or teaching portfolio in which they document what went well and what could be done better next time. This type of practice provides teachers with an impression of their growth over time, which results in viewing teaching as an ongoing process that involves inquiry, experimentation and reflection. For academics teaching in higher education, formalised reflection is not usually customary. This does not mean that academics don’t reflect on their teaching practice, but simply that this is not something which they regularly document or are expected to document as part of their continuous professional development.  One of the primary aims of this volume then, is to encourage academics to reflect on their teaching practice and consider ways in which they have empowered students.  Questions that may be addressed in the chapters include: What inspired you to take this approach? What, if anything, was unique about your approach? What was the outcome, for you and your students? What’s next – will you continue the same approach or have you reflected some more and are planning further revisions? Or maybe your plan is to try something entirely new? Was this practice shared with your colleagues –formally or informally? How did you disseminate this information, if at all?

For students:

The aim of the chapters in this volume is for students to look back on the various strategies employed by their teachers in higher education, which led to an increase in their confidence and eventual success. Students in all levels of education rarely consider the reason behind a particular approach being used in the classroom.  This is most likely because this is something that is not expected of them. One of the primary aims of this volume then, is to encourage students in Higher Education to reflect on a teaching approach used by a specific teacher and consider ways in which this has led them to be empowered. Questions that may be addressed in the chapters include: In what ways have you been empowered in higher education? How did this take place? Who was it that empowered you? What did you appreciate about their approach? How did this empowerment affect you – what was the outcome for you and the individual that empowered you? Did you use this strategy in your other courses? Have you used this approach elsewhere outside of academia?

Areas of focus may include, but are not limited to:

  • Designing and planning learning activities
  • Creating a conducive learning environment
  • Methods of teaching and/or supporting students
  • Activities and/or techniques used to support student learning
  • Formal/informal formative and/or summative assessment strategies
  • Innovative ways of providing feedback

Submissions are invited from teachers and students in Higher Education.  Co-Authored papers written by teachers and students are particularly encouraged.

Deadline for abstract submission: 5 November 2018

Abstracts can be submitted by completing the online form available at https://bit.ly/2oSRoOy

(posted 1 October 2018)


Borders and Spaces in the English Speaking World
RANAM 52, to be issued in June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 20 November 2018

In the age of globalization, the concepts of borders and spaces have taken new significances. Globalization implies economic and cultural deterritorialization and the consequent issue of the intensification of social relations. But globalization paradoxically generates renewed interest in borders and an anxious desire to stabilise definitions of spaces, as exemplified by the thousands kilometres of border walls built in the world since 2000.

Discourses on borders are fraught with political implications, as borders circumscribe particular spaces, making them concrete, and contributing to a sense that their identities can be delimited and differentiated from those of other spaces. Borders imply power relations, control and sovereignty and therefore participate in processes of stabilisation of space, population, and imagined identities. Setting borders does not only lead to the fencing of territories, it also means organizing spaces through regulations, codes and norms, highlighting the extent to which delineated spaces are social and cultural constructs that shape the way identities are conceived and understood.

Borders however embody the problematic aspect of space division, as they also connect spaces, being points where the known and the other, the recognised-as-familiar and the conceived-as-alien, intersect. Borders are ever permeable, though to various degrees. As a consequence, spaces can be defined not as fixed entities, but as living organisms that are constantly being redefined by means of discourses, political agenda, media representations, literature and art. RANAM 52 will focus on a number of questions linked to current reflections on borders and spaces. How do cultural and artistic productions contribute to the creation of spatial and political borders? Literature and art being themselves institutionalized spaces regulated by social and generic norms, how do they reflect or revisit the concept of borders?
RANAM 52 invites contributions on historical, geographic or artistic issues related to borders and spaces and also on the way political and aesthetic borders and spaces interact.

Submissions should be sent to Jean-Jacques Chardin (chardin@unistra.fr), Anne Bandry (bandry@unistra.fr), Fanny Moghaddassi (f.moghaddassi@unistra.fr) by 20 November 2018.

(posted 29 June 2018)


Restoration Fiction (1660-1714)
A special issue (n°79) of The Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (RCEI)
Deadline for abstracts: 30 November 2018

The Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (RCEI) seeks contributions for a special issue (nº 79) on “Restoration Fiction (1660-1714),” to come out in November 2019. The literary period to be examined under the title of ‘Restoration’ is not confined to Charles II’s reign but covers the age of the later Stuarts, which proved a period of great narrative experimentation and generic instability.

As guest editor, I wish to encourage scholars and PhD students to submit innovative contributions on the prose-fiction in English during the later Stuarts. RCEI/79 monograph section aims to further examine not only the production of narrative and generic experimentation, but also the ways in which this corpus of texts responded to the political, philosophical, religious, social, moral and cultural challenges during these decades of intense transformations. Suggested topics include, though not limited to, the following:

  • The politics of fiction in the late seventeenth-century.
  • Restoration society, debates, controversies and conflicts in fiction.
  • Ethic and morality in the late seventeenth-century fiction.
  • Strategies of ideological persuasion in the Restoration fiction.
  • Printing and publishing in the late seventeenth century.
  • Authorship, gender, and anonymity.
  • Ways of reading Restoration fiction: Readership and critical reception.
  • Late seventeenth-century translations. Transnational novel/fictional relations.
  • Prose fiction as part of an individual author’s production.
  • Restoration critical debates on prose fiction.
  • Prefatory and peritextual material.
  • Genre hybridity.
  • Narrators, style, and language.
  • History, pseudo-history, and roman à clef.
  • Types and characters.
  • Restoration prose-fiction and other (verbal/non-verbal) genres.

Detailed abstracts in Word format (up to 1,000 words), as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to Tomas Monterrey (jmonterr@ull.es) by 30 November 2018. On acceptance, full length essays (7,000 or 8,500 words, following MLA Style guidelines) should be submitted before 31 May 2019. Decision on acceptance of contribution is subjected to a double-blind peer-review process. RCEI/79 will be released in November, 2019.

Journal websites:

http://publica.webs.ull.es/publicaciones/detalle/revista-canaria-de-estudios-ingleses/rcey-revista-canaria-de-estudios-ingleses/

http://publica.webs.ull.es/publicaciones/lista-volumenes/rcey-revista-canaria-de-estudios-ingleses/

(posted 13 July 2018)


Beyond Rubashov: Arthur Koestler’s Lesser-known Fiction and the Genre of the Novel
Contributions are invited to an edited volume
Deadline for proposals: 23 December 2018

Arthur Koestler, the man, has been in the forefront of academic interest in the past twenty years. In this period, three critical biographies have been published in English alone, another three in Hungarian, two in German, one in Spanish, and another one in French, in other words, on average, one volume every second year. While this is a luxurious situation few other authors can claim, the fact remains that although Koestler was a writer who wrote seven novels and a play, six volumes of autobiography, and more than twenty book-length works of non-fiction, the last book in English devoted to his oeuvre was published in 1984. In terms of academic articles and book chapters, the situation is hardly any better. In terms of his fiction, with the exception of a handful of recent texts (Steen 2009; Weßel 2014; Vernyik 2016a, 2016b; MacAdam 2017), all that has been published in English in the last thirty-five years is limited to discussions of his most successful novel, Darkness at Noon (1940).

Yet, the topics discussed in his other novels could not be any more up-to-date and relevant: terrorism, massive migration, espionage, rape trauma, war trauma, the crisis of faith, the role and responsibility of intellectuals in major international crises; propaganda and fake news are all hot issues, thematizing daily news, political debates, and everyday discussions alike. In other words, Koestler’s novels are just as topical as they were at the time of their publication, if not more so. Thus, even for this reason alone, they would warrant meticulous scholarly analyses and a reintroduction into public discourse.

Beyond this, however, these books are also poignant love stories, journeys into the human mind and soul, dramatic renditions of the central dilemmas of human existence. They are written in a unique and personal style and have captivating plots. In addition, they are inhabited by characters who are unique and intriguing, yet, at the same time have a reference and validity beyond their specific context. In other words, these books are not only topical and interesting, but also literary works of art.

The planned volume is thus looking for proposals of book chapters on Arthur Koestler’s fictional works excluding Darkness at Noon (1940), focusing either on specific novels or comparative treatments of topics, features or symbolism in a range of his literary texts. The aim of the volume is to situate Koestler’s fiction in the Euro-American tradition of the novel, paying attention to its subgenres, historical, political and geographical variations. Thus, prospective authors should focus on one, or ideally more, of the following issues, either in terms of Koestler’s fiction in general, or in relation to specific novels:

  • The Modernist, the Postmodernist and the Anti-modernist Novel
  • Realism(s) and the Novel
  • The Bildungsroman
  • The Philosophical Novel
  • The Campus (or Academic) Novel
  • The Psychological Novel
  • The Historical Novel
  • Classical and contemporary influences and parallelisms (e.g. Conrad, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Hamsun, Hemingway, Huxley, Kafka, Kisch, Maupassant, Melville, Németh, Orwell, Proust, Silone, Tolstoy, Waugh, Zola)
  • The Political Novel

Chapter proposals of approximately 350 words, along with a 150-word bio-note, should be sent to the editor, Zénó Vernyik (zeno.vernyik@tul.cz) by December 23, 2018. Decisions about proposals are sent by January 6, 2019.

(posted 7 December 2018)


Contemporary Literature and/as Archive
Special Issue, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory
deadline for submissions: 31 December 2018

Recent technological and environmental developments have complicated literature’s role as a repository of the past and as the site for the recovery of forgotten voices. In an age of ubiquitous computing and Big Data, digital practices of instantaneous archiving produce the present as much as they record the past. Such technological developments resonate with ecological changes: under the rubric of the Anthropocene, the whole Earth has become an archive of human action; and in the context of the so-called “Sixth Extinction,” many life forms threaten to be obliterated and to only survive in archives. The result of technological acceleration and ecological threat has been a sense of “archive fever” in which we manically record forms of life in the face of their obsolescence.

This special issue welcomes contributions that explore the altered relation between contemporary literature and the archive. Authors are invited to build on recent theoretical reflections on the archive, and on more practical engagements with the archive through new digital methods and the so-called “archival turn” in the humanities and the arts. How do new theories of archives alter the way we understand the relationship between literature and the archive? How do contemporary writers imagine literature’s relation to competing practices of data management? To what extent does the emergence of all-encompassing digital archives affect literature’s engagement with the past? And can a rethinking of archives and databases shed light on recent and ongoing literary developments?

Possible topics include, but are emphatically not limited to:

  • the altered scales of the archive (digital, geological)
  • fictions of extinction (human, nonhuman)
  • archival genres (database, elegy, epic)
  • poetic archives (Goldsmith, Rankine)
  • archiving and curatorship
  • literature as an “encyclopedic” archiving of life (Saint-Amour)
  • the memoir as self-archiving practice (Heti, Knausgaard, Lerner)
  • literary writing and/as geological inscription
  • reading literature as data, reading literature against data
  • literature and other archival media (film, photography)

Submissions must use MLA citation style and should be between 5,000-9,000 words (including notes and works cited). Please direct any questions relating to this cfp to both guest editors, Tom Chadwick (tom.chadwick@kuleuven.be) and Pieter Vermeulen (pieter.vermeulen@kuleuven.be). Submissions should be emailed to litjourn@yahoo.com by 31 December 2018. Please include your contact information and a 100-200 word abstract in the body of your email. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory also welcomes submissions for general issues.

(posted 1 March 2018)