Books and special issues of journals – Deadlines October to December 2020

Cases on Technologies in Education From Classroom 2.0 to Society 5.0
An edited book
Deadline for proposals: 2 October 2020

Editor:

Jonathan Bishop
Congress of Researchers and Organisations for Cybercommunity, E-Learning and Socialnomics

Call for Chapters

Proposals Submission Deadline: October 2, 2020
Full Chapters Due: December 31, 2020
Submission Date: May 23, 2021

Introduction
Since the early 2000 a number of projects collectively called Classroom 2.0 set the standard in computer-supported cooperative learning. Many were halted following austerity measures following the 2008 financial crisis.

Objective

This book seeks case studies from those involved in Classroom 2.0 (networking of education institutions and learners), School 3.0 (situated learning in community venues beyond the classroom), Society 4.0 (sharing education practice and delivering learning remotely) Society 5.0 (ubiquitous education in smart cities, towns and villages).

Target Audience

This book will be of greatest use to schools, colleges and universities looking to embed technology into the way they deliver education. By drawing on case studies for the compulsory (e.g. K-12, 16 to 19 pathways) and post-compulsory (e.g. adult and community education) educators from all backgrounds can enhance the way they educate their learners through technology. This book is particularly significant to educators interested in future technology, as case studies include Society 4.0 and Society 5.0, which are at the cutting edge of technology for education beyond the classroom.

Recommended Topics

– Classroom 2.0: In the case of England, Curriculum and Pedagogues in Technology Assisted Learning (CAPITAL); in the case of Wales, Digital Classroom of Tomorrow (DCOT), in the case of Scotland, Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), in the case of Italy, Classi 2.0, in the case of Spain, Escuela 2.0; in Canada, E-Learning 2.0; in South Korea, Education 3.0.

– School 3.0: In the case of Wales, Clicks and Mortar Environments for Learning and Leisure Experiences (CAMELLE); in England, Curriculum and Pedagogy in Technology Assisted Learning for Infrastructure-Supported Education (CAPITALISE); in Spain, Escuela 3.0; in Italy, Scuola 3.0; in Australia, Beyond the Classroom (BTC).

-Society 4.0: In the case of Ireland, Professional Development Service for Teachers (PDST); in the case of Scotland, Curriculum for Excellence in the Recovery Phase (CfERP), in the case of Wales, Supporting Information and Education with Multimedia and E-Learning for Networked Societies (SIEMENS); in England, Curriculum and Pedagogy in Technology Enhanced Learning using Internet-Supported EdTech Demonstration (CAPITALISED); in Canada, E-Learning 4.0; in Latin America, Educación 3.0.; in Italy, Smart School 4.0.

– Society 5.0: In Wales, Distributed, Online and Wireless Networked Education in Societies (DOWNES); in Canada, E-Learning 5.0; in Indonesia, School 5.0; in England, Dubai and Singapore, IoT@School.

Submission Procedure

Every effort will be made to directly contact those known to be participating in the projects covered by these books directly. It is likely that some taking part in the projects in this books will find about this book through this call for chapters. • Those involved in projects such as Demonstrator Schools in England, Young Enterprise UK-wide, or Global Enterprise Challenge worldwide, or other similar CSCW/CSCL schemes, should state in the extr.a information box on the proposal form which country their case study relates to

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science Reference,” “Business Science Reference,” and “Engineering Science Reference” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2021.

Important Dates

  • Proposal submission deadline Oct 2, 2020
  • Full chapter submission deadline Dec 31, 2020

Inquiries

Jonathan Bishop (jonathan.bishop@crocels.ac.uk)

(posted 26 August 2020)


Fine-combing the past: frames, patterns and metaphors
Études Irlandaises, French Journal of Irish Studies, Spring/Summer 2021 issue
Deadline for proposals: 15 October 2020

Issue editors: Nathalie SEBBANE et Mathew STAUNTON

The raison d’être of this thematic issue is to showcase innovative, experimental and disruptive approaches to transforming the traces of the Irish past into evidence and narratives from as broad a range of perspectives as possible.

Feeding the processes involved in working through the past that are expressed by the German word vergangenheitsbewältigung through an Irish Studies prism, we reinscribe the Irish expression mionchíoradh an am atá caite (fine-combing the past) as a prompt for engaging with and processing the time before our perpetual present and organising the articles in this volume.

As in the German, the Irish phrase implies the evolution, renovation or creation of methodologies to disentangle and sift the traces of the past and carefully work towards healthier narratives. Simultaneously, Cíoradh also implies disturbing, shaking things up, harassing and aggravating, and we are particularly interested in subjects that are generally avoided: the difficult, unpopular, awkward, inconvenient, undocumented, invisible and impossible.

As Ireland moved into modernity concerted efforts were made to turn a page on its past without having fully examined issues such as child and institutional abuse, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and colonialism. Some see no contradiction in advertising a track record in human rights even though a thorough and proper examination of a past (and present) of human rights abuses has not been undertaken. This task has often been left to journalists and politicians, who have offered partial, partisan and altogether unsatisfactory narrative starting points that historians have been slow to engage with. Unhappily, many issues impacting the lives of ordinary people remain unaddressed and the past is aestheticized as what should have been rather than what was and was not.

The aim of this publication is to question existing narratives of the past and explore ways and means of achieving more truthful, joyful, playful, irreverent and, ultimately, more satisfying versions by engaging with experimental methodologies and unexplored sources.

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

  • Archival research
  • Archeological assessment
  • Genealogy
  • Literary criticism
  • Memory and commemorations
  • Visual/material culture
  • Evidence, traces, visibility and invisibility, shame
  • Representations, perceptions
  • Narrative(s)

Articles, along with an abstract and a list of keywords, should be submitted no later than October 15, 2020, to:
nathalie.sebbane@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
mathew.staunton@gmail.com

(posted 8 June 2020)


The New Woman and Humour
A special issue of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 96 (2022)
Deadline for abstracts: 30 October 2020

https://journals.openedition.org/cve/?lang=en

In late Victorian satirical magazines, comedies and conversation, the New Woman was an inexhaustible source of fun. For the opponents of women’s emancipation, ridicule was a weapon, which could win them allies even among women. For the feminist writers, ridicule was a constant threat, which they usually negotiated by asserting their womanliness and inviting their readers to take their demands seriously.
Hence, the woman’s rights woman was constantly criticized for her total absence of humour. “For the New Woman there is no such thing as a joke”, Ouida wrote in 1894. A year later, Hugh Stutfield commented in his antifeminist essay “Tommyrotics” that there was “no place left for humour” in New Woman novels: her fiction was spoiled by excessive realism, ponderous didacticism and a tendency to take things much too seriously.
As a target of satire and a comic victim, the New Woman quickly learnt how to put humour to her own use. By being funny, she made herself more pleasant to male readers and more tolerant of them. Ella Hepworth Dixon’s _My Flirtations_ (1892), originally published anonymously in the _Lady’s Pictorial_, was considered by the _Saturday Review_ as one of the most amusing books we have come across for a long time” (qtd in Fehlbaum 189). Even in her more pessimistic _The Story of a Modern Woman_ (1894), Dixon’s emancipated female protagonist maintains that a sense of humour is “what women ought to cultivate above all things” (chapter IV). In the New Woman’s satires of patriarchal thinking and male self-sufficiency, wit does have an instructive, “serious” function. Epigrammatic dialogues feature prominently in the novels and short stories of Sarah Grand and Mona Caird, as well as in their militant periodical essays which employ humour and irony to turn the tables on male critics. Irony, parody and comical reversals, in fiction and non-fiction alike, were among what Ann Heilmann has described as the New Woman’s “indirect strategies”.
In the twentieth century, the suffragettes’ methods were regularly described in the press as hysterical and not worth serious consideration. However, if we are to believe the American actress and feminist writer Elizabeth Robins, by the time the suffragists hardened their strategies in the early twentieth century, they had learnt how to use publicity, repartee and humorous effects to their advantage. In her comedy _Votes for Women_ (1909), the suffragettes’ public demonstrations are considered “excellent Sunday entertainment”. “[R]idicule crumples a man up”, their sharp-witted public speaker exclaims, “It steels a woman. We’ve educated ourselves so that we welcome ridicule.” (II, 1) Negotiating laughter has become integrated into the New Woman’s political apprenticeship.
Going counter to the perception of the New Woman’s humorlessness, this collection of essays will examine the rich and contradictory ways in which laughter, jokes, satire and comedy were deployed and reconfigured by New Women around the English-speaking world. It will engage with the political uses of humour, as it creates and invites distance. It will consider humorous practises as a source of empowerment: the use of comedy to destabilize power relations and to create a sense of shared enjoyment, community, and sisterhood. How did humour become integrated into feminist rhetorical practices? To what extent is it possible to speak of feminist humour?
While we will consider proposals on the New Woman as a target of satire, we would like to focus more specifically on her own capacity to respond to humour, to take a humorous distance and use laughter to her own ends. We invite contributions on the politics and poetics of humour and the use of irony. We will consider essays on the New Woman in the Victorian press, the visual arts, fiction, poetry and drama, as well as in autobiographies, memoirs and correspondence. We also welcome papers on Neo-Victorian rewritings of New Woman fiction in novels or graphic novels.
The essays will be published in Spring 2022 in the double-blind, peer-reviewed, open-edition French journal of Victorian studies _Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens_ (https://journals.openedition.org/cve/?lang=en)
Please send proposals (300 words) with a short biographical note by October 30, 2020 to Catherine Delyfer (catherine.delyfer [at] univ-tlse2.fr) and Nathalie Saudo-Welby (nsaudo [at] hotmail.com). Notifications of acceptance will be sent by November 30, 2020. Full articles will be due by June 1st, 2021.

Selective Bibliography

  • Barreca, Regina. They Used to Call Me Snow White… But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1991.
  • Blanch, Sophie. “Women and Comedy” in Joannou, M. ed. The History of British Women’s Writing 1920-1945, Palgrave Macmillan 2013, p. 112-128.
  • Chothia, Jean, éd. The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
  • Cixous, Hélène. Le Rire de la Méduse et autres ironies. Paris : Galilée, 2010.
  • Fehlbaum, Valerie. “Ella Heptworth Dixon’s My Flirtations: The New Woman and the Marriage Market.” Victorian Review 44.2 (2018): 189-192.
  • Fuchs Abrams, Sabrina. Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
  • Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004.
  • Horlacher, Stefan. “A Short Introduction to Theories of Humour, the Comic, and Laughter”, Gender and Laughter (2009): 17-47.
  • Kohlke, Marie-Luise and Gutleben, Christian. Neo-Victorian Humour: Comic Subversions and Unlaughter in Contemporary Historical Revisions. Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi, 2017.
  • Kranidis, Rita S. Subversive Discourse: The Cultural Production of Late Victorian Feminist Novels. New-York: St Martin’s, 1995.
  • Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.
  • Little, Judy. Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark and Feminism. Lincoln/London: U of Nebraska Press.
  • Mangum, Teresa. Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1998.
  • Marks, Patricia. Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990.
  • Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Londres: Women’s Press, 1978.
  • Stetz, Margaret Dina. British Women’s Comic Fiction 1890-1990. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.

(posted 20 May 2020)


Parliamentary Practices and the Challenges of the XXIst century  in the English-speaking World and beyond
A special issue of Lisa e-journal
Deadline for proposals: 1 Novembe 2020

In parliamentary as in presidential regimes, whether based on formal texts or on customs and traditions, the work of representatives takes place in a specific framework whose legitimacy is accepted by the majority of politicians and the population. Establishing guidelines has been a long-standing concern, as illustrated by A Treatise upon the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament of Eskine May for Great Britain in 1844 or the Manual of parliamentary practice for the use of the Senate of the United States of Thomas Jefferson of 1801. However regulating practices represents a contemporary interest as well, as the number of seminars, reports and codes of conduct prove, from the Guide to parliamentary practice published by the UNESCO and the Interparliamentary Union[1], the Westminster seminar on parliamentary practices and procedures organized annually since the 1950s by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association[2] or the 2011 report of the European Parliament entitled Parliamentary Ethics. A Question of Trust[3].

The purpose of this issue of the LISA e-journal is to examine the practices of assemblies, the functioning of this microcosm and the activities of its representatives, as well as the functions and uses of parliamentary mandates. Articles will analyse the evolution of behaviours and the regulations and mechanisms of assemblies in the XXIst century.

Indeed recent years saw the questioning of established practices. The 2010 British General Elections jeopardized the traditional two-party system, two elections were held in seven months in Spain in 2019 due to the incapacity of the Congress to invest a president of the government, the Covid-19 sanitary crisis led to the establishment of virtual parliaments, the debates on Brexit disrupted the usual British parliamentary habits (unconstitutionality of the Prime minister’s suspension of Parliament, controversial role of the Speaker…) and the 2019 American shutdown over the vote of the budget was the longest in American history. Moreover some abusive practices were revealed: scandals related to lobbying (Jack Abramoff in the United States in 2005), to the salary of parliamentary assistants (in France and in the European Parliament) and to the expenses of representatives (Great Britain, 2009).

Moreover since the end of the XXth century, the emergence of 24h news media and Internet and social media have created both a demand for greater transparency among citizens and the necessity to adapt to new means of communication and media for institutions. Since 2008, the Interparliamentary Union has published world reports on e-parliament, which focus on how assemblies have integrated these new tools of information and communication[4]. In 2010 the Spanish Senate launched a project of digital transformation which requires the « permanent remodelling of procedures, organisation and culture of the institution »[5]. Within nations public opinion and the media have asked for greater transparency and high standards. Parliamentary committee inquiries have become the subject of intense media scrutiny and Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations have multiplied; more than 200 groups in over 80 countries play a key role in checking parliamentary power and supporting reforms (Regardscitoyens in France, The Public Wip in the UK, Abgeordnetenwatch in Germany, Open Australia in Australia, Public Citizen – Congress Watch in the US)[6].

The turn of the XXIst century constitutes a perfect opportunity to assess and question parliamentary practices all over the world and to wonder about the need for reform and modernisation.

Articles may explore one specific English-speaking sphere, as well as devolved institutions and world organizations, but comparative approaches, in particular European ones, are welcome.

Contributions should not exceed 10,000 words in length and should be sent together with a short biography of the author (max. 200 words) and an abstract (max. 300 words). Please follow the norms for presentation indicated on the LISA e-journal website http://lisa.revues.org/index.html).

Please send your proposals (maximum one A4 page) together with a short biography to Karine Rivière-De Franco (kriviere@free.fr) by 1st November 2020 (the deadline for completed articles is 1st June 2021).

[1] A Guide to Parliamentary Practice, Inter-Parliamentary Union, 1997, <http://archive.ipu.org/PDF/publications/unesco_en.pdf>.

[2] Annual parliamentary seminar on parliamentary practice and procedures, Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, <http://www.cpahq.org/cpahq/Main/About/History/Main/About/Organisation/History/History.aspx?hkey=0fa9d55b-589a-47e8-843d-87d2b2afb4d0>.

[3] Parliamentary Ethics A Question of Trust, EU Parliament, <https://www.parlament.cat/document/intrade/59368>.

[4] <http://archive.ipu.org/pdf/publications/eparl16-fr.pdf>, 2016, p. 3.

[5] <https://www.ipu.org/fr/bulletin-de-linnovation/histoires/transformer-le-senat-espagnol>.

[6] Strengthening Parliamentary Accountability, Citizen Engagement and Access to Information: A Global Survey of Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations, National Democratic Institute, World Bank Institute, 2011, <https://www.ndi.org/sites/default/files/governance-parliamentary-monitoring-organizations-survey-september-2011.pdf>.

(posted 7 October 2020)


“Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em wait”: Sensation, mystery and detection in the Victorian novel
Winter 2020 issue of the ESSE Messenger
Deadline: 15 November 2020

The phrase “Make ’em laugh; make ’em cry; make ’em wait” usually ascribed to Charles Reade – an English novelist and dramatist active in the second half of the 19th century – was to become famous after William Wilkie Collins rearranged it as “Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em wait” and used it as a sort of manifesto of the Victorian sensation novel.

The term “sensation” had sometimes an unjust pejorative connotation but that did not hinder its popularity. In the time of its highest fame it was considered a low genre and the main accusations of the critique were that the novels of the sensation tradition were written mainly to produce thrilling sensations in readers without almost any concern of the moral, philosophical, social or religious features of the traditional literature. The reproach is not entirely lacking substance because the sensational novels are indeed characterized by the presence of secrets and mysteries, scandals and crimes, which disrupt the peaceful domestic lives of the middle class so dear to realist paradigm.

This new kind of literature developed in the particular social and economic environment of the Victorian era. It can be considered part of popular fiction as it was generally intended to fill ‘the needs of escapism and relaxation’ (Flint 20) of the working class. In fact, a clear distinction between readers starts being observed. At one end, there is the average reader of the working class with his or her needs of being entertained and, at the other, a more educated public able to taste elaborated concepts, such as art for art’s sake. The Saturday Review describes this average reader in 1887 as not being a critical person or as a person with quite reduced artistic demands. Definitely, according to the commentators employed by this magazine, the average reader of sensation novels is not a sophisticated person because ‘all he asks is that he may be amused and interested without taxing his own brains’ (Flint 20, my italics).

The sensation novels were the first truly popular bestsellers, they were products of Victorian mass culture, soon to become a commodity, produced as they were in accordance with “the market-law of demand and supply” so as to lead to immediate sales. One of the reasons that generated such products was the high-interest in the serialised fiction to maintain a stable readership, which forced the writers to write in such a way as to keep their readers’ interest awake and determine them to buy the next instalments.

Sensation literature was not totally opposed to Realism which, in its nineteenth-century context, tried to present the reality as it actually was. Practically, sensation literature combines ‘romance and realism’ in a way that ‘strains both modes to the limit.’ The sensationalists construct characters and stories that might be found in the daily reality of every rich or poor, educated or less educated person and associate them with another side or dimension of reality, the side that is not part of ordinary experience. If we analyse the characters that take part in this out-of-the-ordinary experience, we discover that they are the common people of the middle class till the moment when something comes up and trouble their ordinary life. There is a specific feature in the sensational novel that could be named trigger, a special event, a hidden (guilty) secret that transforms the most common, sometimes idle life of a character into an uncommon experience and existence and the most boring and unreadable story into a palpitating novel.

Sensation fiction may be seen as a romantic (melodramatic) and suspenseful form of fiction, a kind of civilized melodrama, modernized and domesticated – a sort of everyday Gothic, minus the supernatural and aristocratic accessories, but also a middle-class Newgate, featuring spectacular crime unconnected with the usual criminal classes.

Sensation fiction domesticated crime, secrets, and illicit sexuality and located them within the ordinary middle-class home and family, where the most apparently respectable neighbour might turn out to be a serial poisoner; the most angelic of women, at least a bigamist and potentially a cold-blooded killer, every spouse could play the role of spy, every servant, the role of blackmailer.

In criminalizing the Victorian home, the sensation novels succeeded in defamiliarizing it and refamiliarizing it according to other dimensions. This went in parallel with the fact that suspense was heightened to the intense point, and crisis became narrative routine; plots often went up and down, exploding in multiple climaxes or ‘sensation scenes’; plot took precedence over narrative voice as well, i.e. the primacy of plot, went with the accompanying ‘diminution’ of the character treatment and the narrator. The sensational narrator had to withhold secrets from his readers while the sensation novels eroded narrative authority – the narrator was no longer trustworthy, perhaps no longer omniscient. Like the reader, he became an accomplice in crime or even criminal himself.

The ESSE Messenger invite contributions that address:

  • reasons and factors that lead to the popularity of such kind of novels;
  • construction and narrative techniques of sensational plots;
  • treatment of sensational characters;
  • contribution of these novels to the creation of popular fiction and reasons for them becoming bestsellers;
  • contribution of Victorian writers such as Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle to the prosperity of such novels;
  • reception of such novels by the Victorian reading public and critics in the context of the imposed belief in morality and order, expected aesthetic value and worldview of Victorian realism;
  • reception of such creations by the reading public today and their echoes in contemporary fiction.

Sources

Flint, Kate. “The Victorian novel and its readers.” The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. David, Deirdre (ed.). Cambridge UP, 2001: 17-36.

Hughes, Wilfred. “The Sensation Novel”. A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Patrick Brantlinger and William Thesing (eds.). Blackwell, 2002: 260-278.

(posted 15 August 2020)


Going Viral: Chronotopes of Disaster in Film and Visual Media
EJES, Volume 26 (2022)
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2020

The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for the three issues of the journal to be published in 2022.

Guest editors: Sotirios Bampatzimopoulos (Ankara University) and Geli Mademli (University of Amsterdam)

In her seminal text Illness as Metaphor (1978), Susan Sontag approaches the discourses around contagious diseases as systems of power and control over civil disobedience and difference. The text poignantly foreshadows the “treatment” of the HIV outbreak by Western public health providers and in the cultural imagination alike. The recent outbreak of the coronavirus around the world prompts us to revisit Sontag’s suggestion in the context of the expanding global crisis. In globalized media, a universally perceptible iconography of catastrophe and annihilation is constantly (re)produced. However, narratives of contamination and epidemics in film and television have been flourishing in the past two decades. It is in these times that we consider it essential to examine these narratives, as they offer a vital space to reflect on the (post-)human, on conflicting modes of physical and virtual interaction, the permeability of all physical borders, the normalization of bodily vulnerability, the legitimization of authoritarian politics in states of emergency, and the biopolitical use of science and technology.

Surprisingly, there has been very little research in English Studies on the audiovisual experience of the “virus” as a laboratory for our perception of disorder. Implementing mechanisms of empathy, testing the pandemic effect of synaesthesia, and constantly challenging the way we make meaning through our encounter with crisis landscape, cinema, TV series, virtual reality films or even video art and net.art construct what Luciana Parisi defines as an architecture of infection: “an experiential mutation between the abstract and the concrete.” At the same time, the multiplicity of these audiovisual narratives and our overexposure to them create a chaotic, nondirectional effect where meaning is contaminated and the medium becomes a “pharmakon” (Derrida): a poison that contains the cure, a critical tool for dissecting virus as a language (to reverse William Burroughs’s famous quote). Understanding virus as a complex system and addressing the need to explore its mechanisms in the language of visual media, we invite contributors from across Europe to submit papers related to the representation of virus in contemporary cinema and visual media in all its possible facets. Research can touch upon, yet is not limited to, one of the following topics:

  • Experiencing the post-human / Designing the post-social
  • Gamification of disaster
  • Overexposure to crisis (in Europe and beyond)
  • Disease and Public Space: sharing an environment of emergency
  • Trauma and victimhood
  • Gendered “troubles”
  • Contagiousness of representation
  • Viral hypes
  • Damage and error as an emotion (or affect)

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max. 100 words) should be sent to the editors by 30 November 2020: Sotirios Bampatzimopoulos (sotirios@ankara.edu.tr) and Geli Mademli (geli.mademli@gmail.com).

Potential contributors are reminded that EJES operates a two-stage review process. The first is based on the submission of detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) and results in invitations to submit full essays from which a final selection is then made. The deadline for essay proposals for this volume is 30 November 2020, with delivery of completed essays in the spring of 2021 and publication in Volume 26 (2022).Procedure
EJES operates a two-stage review process.

  1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2020.
  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 2021 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 2021 for publication in 2022.

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

(posted 8 May 2020)


Victorian Materialisms
EJES, Volume 26 (2022)
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2020

The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for the three issues of the journal to be published in 2022.

Guest editors: Ursula Kluwick (University of Bern), Ariane de Waal (MLU Halle-Wittenberg)

Matter ineluctably matters; it composes, decomposes, and recomposes the bodies and environments we inhabit. New materialist ideas surrounding the vitality (Jane Bennett), sympoeisis (Donna Haraway), and intra-actions (Karen Barad) of matter have paved intriguing pathways for literary and cultural analysis. Yet the notion that matter is in motion, rather than inert, and that humans are entangled in dense webs of responsive and partly also agential materials is not a new one. Victorian microscopists, chemists, botanists, physicists, geologists, physiologists, and novelists diligently dissected the material structures of chemical substances, plants, animals, atoms, subterranean strata, and human bodies. In the process, they not only developed precise tools and terminologies to quantify and describe matter, but concomitantly questioned the taxonomies that differentiated human from nonhuman entities.
Victorian scholars have responded productively to the new materialist turn. Yet in the wake of Asa Brigg’s influential Victorian Things (1988), studies have tended to maintain an ontological distinction between Victorian ‘people’ and ‘things.’ While there is a wealth of scholarship on even the most inconspicuous Victorian objects, and while virtually all human body parts and organs have come under critical scrutiny, the co-constitution of human and nonhuman materials remains somewhat underexplored. However, as this special issue argues, Victorian interrogations of the boundaries between human and nonhuman as well as active
and passive matter anticipate new materialist approaches. Hence, they invite us to reconsider relationships between nineteenth-century and contemporary conceptualisations of materiality.
This special issue has two objectives: first, it aims to investigate a broad array of Victorian materialities, with a special focus on the conceptual and physical entanglements between human, animal, plant, chemical, biotic, and inorganic matter in scientific, popular, and literary texts. Second, the issue seeks to trace continuities and intersections between Victorian and new materialisms while also exploring critical avenues that this dialogue might generate within the wider field of English Studies.
The editors invite proposals that examine the non/human materialities of Victorian literature, photography, art, or artefacts from matter-oriented perspectives alongside theoretical-methodological discussions of Victorian materialisms. Approaches that question and expand the conventional rubrics of Victorian Studies are especially welcome. Potential topics could include yet are not limited to the following areas:

  • NATURAL HISTORY: overlapping taxonomies of plant/animal/human species; vitalism;
  • THE ENVIRONMENT: matter in Victorian ecology and energy science; non/human response-abilities; thinking beyond anthropocentrism;
  • MEDICINE: anatomical, pathological, and healthy matter and its motions; the interplay of human and nonhuman microorganisms and parasites;
  • CHEMISTRY: interactions between chemical and literary/poetic transformations of matter;
  • PHYSICS: the physics of matter and the “physics of character” (Brilmyer 2015);
  • AESTHETICS: representations of material assemblages and the vibrancy of matter; specific literary modes and representational strategies for the expression of material agency.

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max. 100 words) should be sent to the editors by 30 November 2020: Ursula Kluwick (ursula.kluwick@ens.unibe.ch), Ariane de Waal (ariane.de-waal@anglistik.uni-halle.de)

Potential contributors are reminded that EJES operates a two-stage review process. The first is based on the submission of detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) and results in invitations to submit full essays from which a final selection is then made. The deadline for proposals for this volume is 30 November 2020, with delivery of completed essays in the spring of 2021 and publication in Volume 26 (2022).
Procedure
EJES operates a two-stage review process.

  1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2020.
  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 2021 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 2021 for publication in 2022.

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

(posted 8 May 2020)


Patriarchal backlashes to feminism in times of crisis
EJES, Volume 26 (2022)
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2020

The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for the three issues of the journal to be published in 2022.

Guest editors: Florence Binard (University of Paris) and Renate Haas (University of Kiel)

Plus ça change, moins ça change.”

Susan Faludi’s bestseller Backlash was first published in 1991, nearly 30 years ago, and yet its message seems to resonate more clearly than ever. It highlighted the pervasive and prevalent reaction of patriarchy (defined broadly as a system of society based on male domination) to the advance of women’s rights. Faludi analysed glossy magazines, movies, TV programmes, the New Right’s war on women, and the neofeminist stance as well as “polished” political discourse and showed that whatever the medium/organ/channel, women from all walks of life were openly or insidiously coaxed and cajoled into fulfilling their so-called natural role as homemakers.
Since then, new technologies and their channels of dissemination have proven to be useful tools for women and feminists to spread their views. But these means of communication are also the vehicles for antifeminist propaganda which is damaging to women’s rights. The achievements of the past are under threat in a growing number of countries if they have not already been reversed. This includes the right to contraception, abortion, education, work, etc. “Freedom of” and “freedom to” remain never-ending battles for women all over the world.
This special issue asks what has happened in Europe between the publication of Faludi’s book and the present in terms of backlash.
Researchers from the different parts of Europe and all disciplines included in ESSE are invited to submit essay proposals. Some of the topics might include:

  • Identifying “true” feminist politics in contemporary society
  • Universal rights versus group rights
  • Accusations of cultural appropriation/state multiculturalism vs women’s rights
  • Untruths used and abused in the current social discourse
  • Visual discourse in advertisement
  • Anti-feminist governmental practices
  • Internet trolls

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 words), as well as a short biography (max. 100 words) should be sent to the editors by 30 November 2020: Florence Binard (fbinard@eila.univ-paris-diderot.fr) and Renate Haas (haas@anglistik.uni-kiel.de).

Potential contributors are reminded that EJES operates a two-stage review process. The first is based on the submission of detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) and results in invitations to submit full essays from which a final selection is then made. The deadline for essay proposals for this volume is 30 November 2020, with delivery of completed essays in the spring of 2021 and publication in Volume 26 (2022).
Procedure
EJES operates a two-stage review process.

  1. Contributors are invited to submit proposals for essays on the topic in question by 30 November 2020.
  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 2021 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 2021 for publication in 2022.

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

(posted 8 May 2020)


A Tribute to Derek Walcott
An edited book
Deadline for proposals: 15 December 2020

Helen Goethals and Eric Doumerc of the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès are putting together a Tribute to Derek Walcott, to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All forms of tribute —critical essays, memoirs, and creative work— are welcome, and on any aspect of Derek Walcott’s life and work. Contributions should be no longer than 6000 words. Previously published work may be used, but if this is the case, evidence must be provided that permission to be republish has been granted.

More information can be found:
at http://www.cambridgescholars.com/t/EditedCollectionsLiterature
and from helen.goethals@univ-tlse2.fr

Abstract
Coming some three years after the death of Nobel prize-winning poet, playwright, teacher and painter, this book is intended as a Tribute to Derek Walcott (1930-2017). The editors welcome all forms of tribute —critical essays, memoirs, and creative work— addressing any aspect of Derek Walcott’s life and work.

About the Editors
Helen Goethals is professor of Commonwealth Studies at the University of Toulouse. A member of the CAS research centre and an associate member of the Critical Geographies research team, she has written extensively on the relationship between poetry and politics. She edited the Caribbean section of the Special Double issue of Poetry International featuring English language poetry from around the world.
Eric Doumerc is Assistant Professor of Caribbean Studies at the University of Toulouse. His research interests include Caribbean poetry, music, and the Caribbean oral tradition.His recent publications include Celebrate Wha’: Ten Black British Poets from the Midlands (Middelesbrough : Smokestack Books, 2011), an anthology which he co-edited with the poet Roy McFarlane and  Dub Poets in Their Own Words (APS Publications, 2017), a collection of interviews with dub poets in England, Jamaica and the USA.

Keywords 
Derek Walcott; Caribbean; Poetry; Drama; Watercolour;  Essay; Memoir; Homage

(posted 29 May 2020)


Clothing as a Complex Sign in the Literature, Culture and Society of Medieval England
Études Médiévales Anglaises (ÉMA)
Deadline for proposals: 15 December 2020

Journal website: https://amaes.jimdofree.com/ema-en

In medieval culture, clothes could be construed as particularly complex symbols; symbols that often contradicted each other, depending on which interpreting method one favoured.

In the Christian world, clothes were from the start connected to one emotion in particular – modesty –; they were also the consequence of a desire for knowledge presented as sinful, one which led to the gradual appearance of all the technical skills required for the production of items of clothing that were either woven or made from animal skin or plants. It should then come to no surprise that, when John Ball asked his famous (rhetorical) question: “When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?”, he should have given the task of spinning wool to Eve. In the Middle Ages the skills involved in the production of fabric had become symbols of chastity and humility (Baert, Rudy, 2007). But the first clothes worn by Adam and Eve were not woven; they were made of animal skin, and given to them by God (Genesis 3,21), thus allowing for a completely different interpretation of clothing in the Bible as the manifestation of divine pity (Anne Lécu, 2016).Thus, the leather tunics God clothes the erring couple with in the Garden of Eden constitute a contradictory symbol from the start: they signal the original sin and the shame that overcame Adam and Eve, after they had eaten the forbidden fruit, as well as God’s compassion.

Clothing, whether medieval or modern, is therefore never purely utilitarian, so much so that a veritable “theology of clothing” is at work in the Bible, one that finds an equivalent in the secular, heavily hierarchised world of the Middle Ages, in which one’s standing, rather than one’s virtue, determines one’s fate. Any item of clothing is a visible marker of invisible values, defined by the choice in colours, fabrics, patterns and shapes, but also by the way it may cover a person’s body, or on the contrary reveal what is underneath. It can mediate between the physical and the spiritual planes, and, according to some theologians, even become one with the Christian man or woman, its fabric espousing the form of the faithful on the outside, just like the image of Christ informs them on the inside. (Cras, 2011). However, when opulent, it often serves to reveal the pride (as well as other mortal sins) of the person who is wearing it, thus confronting the prelates of the Catholic Church to a conundrum, as they have to choose between promoting the glory of the Church by every means, including clothing, and saving their souls. Religious garments are symbols of power, hierarchy and order, but as such they contradict the ideal of humility preached by Christ. That the former usually trumped the latter can be seen in the derogatory comments found in most of the religious texts written about hermits and other “fools-for-God”. The spiritual elites of the Middle Ages seem to have been as likely as their secular equivalents to make a show of themselves through their sartorial choices – and as vulnerable as them, if not more so, to satire!

While it is often difficult to assess where any medieval item of clothing that may have come down to us was situated on a spectrum going from the purely practical to the purely ornamental and/or symbolical, and whether it was used to cover someone’s nudity or reveal one’s body ((Koldeweij, 2006 ; Wirth, 2007), the task becomes even more complex when clothes are mentioned or play a decisive role in literature. In medieval romances, either chivalric or courtly, clothes are elements of choice in the deployment of a doxa, or even propaganda (Dimitrova, Goehring, 2015 ; Mérindol, 1989) which equates beauty with virtue in order to legitimate the supremacy of the ruling classes over the ill-dressed, ill-mannered plebs. In such a perspective, richly adorned clothes will reveal a person’s nobility (especially when his or her status is unknown) rather than his or her vanity. Conversely, nudity will not always be erotic; rather it will often be used as a signifier of folly, madness, wretchedness or coarseness, sometimes all at once as is the case with the character of the wild man. Sumptuary laws, which try to limit the access of a rising bourgeoisie to a higher status by preventing its members from imitating the sartorial codes of the aristocracy, are part of the same propaganda.

In literary works, clothes thus convey information that is coded and may at times distract the reader from the explicit message of a particular passage, or distort it, and even contradict it. It may signal hidden allegiances, illicit relationships, ostentatious behaviours. Conversely, the absence or paucity of any sartorial description is usually an ethical as well as an aesthetic choice, as is the case in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Hodges, 2014). In it, Chaucer creates what amounts to a costume rhetoric which, in a manner akin to heraldry, contributes to defining his characters. One may also mention here the particular use made of clothing during Carnival (or other carnivalesque celebrations); the court fool and his peculiar costume (which varies depending on his precise nature of his “folly”) may also come to mind (Tissier, 1988 ; Ueltschi, 2019, Ménard, 1989).

The complexity of the various functions played by clothing means that it should always be examined as the site of contradictions, some of which are particularly revealing of the tensions between its practical use and the way it may become part of the elaborate staging of one’s importance (real or imagined) (Crane 2002). Clothes may be revealing, in more ways than one. They may translate the discrepancy between a person’s sense of dress and what it really says; or between historically accurate clothing and its literary recreation (Burns, 2004). They may subvert expectations or prove controversial, as was the case with the adoption by many medieval women of the headdress called “hennin”, despite vocal opposition by moral authorities (Durantou 2019). They may even challenge order, as transvestites did.

Proposals in the various areas of study briefly delineated above (as well as others that might have been overlooked for brevity’s sake) will be welcome. We will also accept proposals in the field of medievalism, as one might examine the craze for all things medieval at the end of the 19th century as part of the Arts and Crafts movement that was ethical and political as well as esthetical, and aimed at denouncing some aspects of the Industrial Revolution while enjoying the technical advances it offered. Does the resurgence of medieval clothing in the 19th century express rebellion against conservatism (and capitalism) as opposed to previous times, during which clothes (and customs, for instance chivalric ones) evoking a long gone era were generally used to uphold order rather than subvert it ?

Proposals should be sent to Tatjana Silec (tatjana.silec@sorbonne-universite.fr) and Martine Yvernault (martine.yvernault@unilim.fr) before 15 December 2020. The accepted contributions should be sent before 15 February 2021.

Bibliography

 Alexandre-Bidon, D. La Dent et le corail ou la Parure prophylactique de l’enfance à la fin du Moyen Age. Nice, Université de Nice, 1987.
Baert, B., Rudy, K.M. Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing. Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages. Turnhout, Brepols, 2007.
Burns, E. (éd.). Medieval Fabrications : Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Certeau, M. de. L’invention du quotidien. I. Arts de faire. Paris, Gallimard, 1990.
Chambers, M.C., Owen-Crocker, G.R., Sylvester L.M. Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain : A Multilingual Sourcebook. Cambridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2014.
Crane, S. The Performance of Self. Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Cras, A. La Symbolique du vêtement dans la Bible. Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 2011.
Dimitrova, K. & Goehring M, (éds.). Dressing the Part. Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages. Turnhout, Brepols, 2015.
Durantou, A. Grandes cornes et hauts atours. Le hennin et la mode au Moyen Âge. Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, Grand Palais, 2019.
Harte, N.B., Ponting, K.G. Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe. Londres, Heinemann Educational Books, 1983.
Hodges, L.F. Chaucer and Array. Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Other Works. Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2014.
Klapisch-Zuber, C. (dir.) Histoire des femmes en Occident. II. Le Moyen Âge. Paris, Perrin, 2002.
Koldeweij, A.M. Foi et bonne fortune. Parure et dévotion en Flandre médiévale. Tr. Dice Vertalingen. Arnhem, Terra, 2006.
L’art en broderie au Moyen Âge – Autour des collections du musée de Cluny – Catalogue d’exposition. Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, Grand Palais, 2019.
Leyser, H. Medieval Women : A Social History of Women in England 450-1500. Londres, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995.
Lindquist, S. C.M. (éd.) The Meaning of Nudity in Medieval Art. Farnham, Ashgate, 2012.
Ménard, P. Les emblèmes de la folie dans la littérature et dans l’art (XIIe-XIIIe ss.). Caen, Centre de Publication de l’Université de Caen, 1989.
Mérindol, C. de. Signes de hiérarchie sociale à la fin du Moyen Âge d’après les vêtements. Paris, le Léopard d’Or, 1989.
Newton, S. M. Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: a Study of the Years 1340-1365.Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1980.
Rajade, A.« Fonction des ‘grosses perles de ceinture’, éléments de parure ou objets fonctionnels ». Revue archéologique de Picardie 1-2(1), 77-86.
Régnier-Bohler, D. « Le corps mis à nu. Perception et valeur symbolique de la nudité dans les récits du Moyen Âge ». Europe, n° 654 (Le Moyen Âge maintenant), octobre 1983, 31-62.
Ueltschi, K. Clochettes, sonnestes et campenelles : la parure de carnaval. Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019.
Pastoureau, M. Figures de l’héraldique. Paris, Gallimard, 1996.
___________. Figures et couleurs. Paris, Le Léopard d’Or. 1986.
___________. Jésus chez le teinturier: couleurs et teintures dans l’Occident médiéval. Paris, Le Léopard d’or, 1997.
___________. L’étoffe du diable: une histoire des rayures et des tissus rayés. Paris, Seuil, 1991.
Tissier, A. Le rôle du costume dans les farces médiévales. Actes du Vème Colloque international de la Société internationale pour l’étude du théâtre médieval (Perpignan, juillet 1986). Stuttgart, Akademischer Verlag, 1988.
Toussain-Samat, M. Histoire technique et morale du vêtement. Paris, Bordas, 1990.
Wirth, J. (éd.) Le corps et sa parure. Micrologus n°15. Tavarnuzze, Sismel- Ed. Del Galluzo, 2007.

(posted 27 October 2020)


Vulnerable. Representing Vulnerability in Literature and Film
An edited volume
Deadline for abstract submissions: 18 December 2020

Edited by Miriam Fernández Santiago and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

Deadline for abstract submissions: December 18, 2020
Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2021
Submission of full chapters: November 1, 2021

The term ?vulnerability?, consolidated in the 70s and 80s in poverty and development studies to address the impact of hazards and (natural) disasters in specific population segments, was adopted by Judith Butler in the aftermath of 9/11 to signify the undesirable exposure of nations and peoples to war-related acts of violence. In 2004, Butler interrogated the effects that a newly discovered vulnerability had on the exceptionalist basis of US national discourse and its instrumentalization to justify the implementation of repressive policies at home and acts of war abroad. Butler (2009) also questioned whose lives mattered at an international scale, as well as whose vulnerabilities remained invisible and uncontested as nationalist discourses strove to get over US own sense of fragility by increasing the vulnerability of peoples and nations whose lives not only did not matter, but were even a condition to make up for the US-perceived ontological damage.

At that time, Butler used the term ?precarity? to denote the helpless exposure of those disposable lives. Since then, the concept of ?precarity? has developed critically to explore the socioeconomic conditions endured by peoples living in the so-called Third World countries or emerging economies in the context of globalization. From this broader perspective, their vulnerabilities appeared as the background of a structural oppression (Craps 2013) intersecting with other life conditions marked by uncertainty such as poverty, migration, pollution and violence. Another finding of this approach showed that the ?precariat? (Standing 2011) as a global social class also extended to the First World interwoven with other components of vulnerability like race, gender, age, literacy, religious confession, cultural differences, and disability, among many others.

Butler?s initial theorization of vulnerability propounded that representing precarious lives would contribute to minimizing them by making them visible and, therefore, by making them matter. With a similar spirit, Jean-Michelle Ganteau (2015) has also claimed that what he calls ?vulnerable texts? or texts that present bodily frailty as the common denominator of humanity, have the capacity to develop and ethics of vulnerability that builds up on an ethics of care and political change. However, the exploitation of vulnerability as a sensational device (Garland-Thompson 1997; Mitchell and Snyder 2000) competing for attention in information-saturated global media often has the effect of blunting the audience?s capacity to empathize with forms of vulnerability so extreme that they can only recognize as either too alien or too fictional. The representation of vulnerability in literary and film forms is also affected by the neoliberal market?s demand for the spectacular, the reification and commoditization of a cathartic effect that ends up desensitizing a readership/audience who finds aesthetic pleasure in their temporary identification with, as well as immediate detachment from, representations of vulnerability.

We seek contributions that explore the ways in which representing vulnerability problematizes its visibilization in film and literature. Both theoretical and practical approaches as well as different critical stances are welcome. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, representations of vulnerability that involve, intersect and/or synergize with other concomitant areas, such as:

  • Poverty
  • Migration (including refugees, diasporas?)
  • Ecology (ecological disasters, pollution, speciesism ?)
  • Violence (war, crime?)
  • Spatial (literary) studies
  • Disability
  • Technology
  • Racial/ethnic difference
  • Gender
  • Age (children, old age?)
  • Literacy
  • Cultural difference
  • Religious confession

Prospective authors are invited to submit abstract proposals consisting of a tentative title, a 500-word summary, 5 keywords and a 200-word CV including author?s name, institutional affiliation, email address by December 18, 2020. Abstracts will be sent as Word files to graco.hum676@ugr.es under the subject “VULNERABLE SUBMISSION”.
Authors will be notified of their paper proposal acceptance by February 1, 2021.
Full chapters (between 5000-7000 words) will be expected by November 1, 2021. Both abstracts and full chapters must conform to the Chicago style (author-date system) and be sent as Word files to graco.hum676@ugr.es.

Selected essays will be compiled in a collective volume that will be published in 2022 by a prestigious international publisher still to determine.

Editors:
Miriam Fernández Santiago (University of Granada, mirfer@ugr.es)
Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández (University of Córdoba, cristina.gamez@uco.es)

(posted 6 August 2020)


Dissident self-narratives: radical and queer life writing
Special Issue of  Synthesis (14. 2021)
Deadline for proposals: 20 Decembe 2020

Guest editor: Aude Haffen

Synthesis: an anglophone journal of comparative literary studies: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/synthesis/index

Life writing is often considered to endorse a universalist liberal humanist ethics that encompasses a broad spectrum that goes from a neoliberal emphasis on self-sufficiency to theories of care that highlight our common vulnerability and interdependence. This universalist humanist ethics, even in its most progressive forms, may blunt life writing’s radical edge and even participate in the silencing and oppression of subaltern beings that fall outside its scope. Thus, diseased, displaced, dissenting, dis-integrated autobiographical voices and life-writing’s dissident potential and radical, queer promises need to be reassessed and reclaimed.

This special issue aims to examine critical and anti-normative explorations of the self as they become manifest in contemporary but also older forms of life writing that have challenged hegemonic discourses shaping human subjectivity, the sexual order and the political status quo. For instance, Marguerite Yourcenar’s ecological decentering of the human race and deconstruction of heteronormativity might outweigh the more traditional elements in her autobiographical triptych. In order to yield its full radical and oppositional possibilities, life writing often embraces public and private chaos and shuns the poise of hindsight. For instance, Louis MacNeice or Klaus Mann write their autobiographies during the Second World War, to foreground, rather than resolve, trauma, madness and the death-drive. Marginality, diseased bodies and ubiquitous death are pervading themes in the autobiographical works of Hervé Guibert, Derek Jarman, David B. Feinberg and Guillaume Dustan, whose writings stand on the threshold between testimony and political activism. As they try to survive AIDS, while also facing the social stigma associated with queer sexualities, they take to task liberal, compassionate readers, and construct a subaltern counter-public of queer alter egos.  Earlier, Claude Cahun’s fragmented Disavowals or René Crevel’s “inner panoramas” have wreaked havoc in “the old logical-realistic attic” and challenged not only the confessional tradition but also the binary structure of rational discourse. Another form of critical and anti-normative exploration of the self can be found in the way Roland Barthes keeps at bay psychological narratives of healing and mourning. More recently, in his account of his F to M transition through rogue self-medication, Paul B. Preciado bypasses psychology in order to foreground the biopolitical dimension of subjects shaped and invented by media images and pharmaceutical molecules, but also to map out possibilities of micro-resistance. In the different context of North-American structural racism, John Wideman’s “black rage” and multi-layered writing eschew a personal linear narrative of self-made success and integration.

While foregrounding certain writers standing at the margins of the current academic literary canon, this special issue also draws attention to the more highly profiled writers who can also be read as voices of dissent that oppose the tenets of liberal humanism. We invite submissions that examine life writing that disrupts canonical autobiographical paradigms that are informed by the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, which has often centered on a socially integrated narrator who looks back with retrospective wisdom, pride, regret or nostalgia, consolidating thereby an identity grounded in dominant conceptions of what a life, a self and a reading public should be like. We welcome contributions that discuss the ways by which life writing challenges hegemonic paradigms of self-knowledge, subjectivity and reader reception, by radically questioning gender, racial and class norms.

Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted to Aude Haffen at marie-aude.haffen@univ-montp3.fr and synthesisjournal2008@gmail.com by 20 December 2020.

Notification of acceptance will be delivered by 11 January 2021.

Accepted articles are to be submitted by 30 June 2021.

Final articles should be 6,000-9,000 words long and include an abstract of no more than 300 words.

All enquiries regarding this issue should be sent to the guest editor, Aude Haffen, at marie-aude.haffen@univ-montp3.fr.

(posted 6 October 2020)