Call for Journal Submissions

RiLUNe - Review of Literatures of the European Union
RiLUnE (http://www.rilune.org) is a refereed bilingual journal publishing scholarly articles which examine the development of a European cultural and literary conscience.

For its 5th monographic issue, we are now calling for articles on the topic "Digital Literatures in Europe: State of the Art". Articles can be in any of the following languages of the European Union: French, German, English, Italian and Spanish.

Deadline for abstracts (500 words): March 31, 2006
Deadline for articles: June 15, 2006

Digital Literatures in Europe: State of the Art

According to the Electronic Literature Organization, digital literature refers to «works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer». The technical sophistication of digital literature is inevitably related to literary and artistic aesthetics which, like the European avant-gardes, come across experimentation on narrative and poetic forms. Digital works concern multiple procedures and involve poems and stories that are generated by computers, hypertext fiction and poetry, random exploration and reading, kinetic writing, interactivity, visualization, etc.

In Europe, authors like Philippe Bootz set the origin of digital literature around 1959, when the first experimental texts based on combination and variation were written. After 1980, Jean-Pierre Balpe created the first automatic generator. From that moment, the basis of digital literature or cyberliterature are developped thanks to works produced with automatic generators (i.e. Action Poétique n. 95, 1981 and ALAMO founded in 1981, together with animated poetry or e-poetry published on the review Alire). Literary hypertexts or hyperfictions will appear on the Web few years later. Today this kind of works are developping fast thanks to new software that allows both grafic design and animation to be associated with verbal, visual and sound aspects of texts, with the aim of creating dynamic and interactive narratives. Moreover, collaborative writing experiences like Websoap or MOOs (Multi-Users Dimensions Object-Oriented), have been developped on the Internet, anticipating the!
  Weblogs and becoming spaces for new literary and creative experiences.

Many of the studies on Digital Literature consider both the creative possibilities and innovations of this kind of narrative and the implications of the digital dimension on writing and reading. It is time, for us, to discuss and develop a general and dynamic perspective that will consider not only the evolution of the technical aspects but also the state of the art of those works, from a literary and thematic point of view. It should take into account the formal, technical and esthetic tendences that they are following and the evolution of their language, the collaboration among authors and the question of the hybridisation and transformations of traditional genres and geographical frontiers on the Web. In this fifth number of RiLUnE, we hope to consider all these questions in order to compare points of view on technology and literary and artistic creation within a European perspective.

For this number we will accept proposals for papers that will explore works by European authors (automatic generators, e-poetry, hyperfiction, weblogs, etc.) so to outline similarities and differences among creative experiences both on the level of expressive modalities and themes. Considering the inter-relation between writing, graphism and computer science and the status of images, sounds and animation in the texts, we will discuss objectives and values of digital literature.

Ana Pano

Submission guidelines:
Please submit a paper copy (together with a digital one, i.e. cd-rom or floppy-disk) or email your proposal to the Editorial Board. The texts shall be MS Word-compatible (in case a different word-processor is employed, the text shall be saved in a compatible format) and about 20.000 characters long (spaces and notes included).
Articles are accepted in any of the following languages of the European Union: French, German, English, Italian and Spanish. Every article shall be accompanied by two abstracts in English and French, each one not exceeding 750 characters (spaces included), together with the translation of the title in these two languages.
Four or five keywords shall be submitted to the Editorial Board together with every article.
A short resume of not more than 200 characters shall be attached to the article in either English, French or Italian. The affiliation which authors wishes to have under their names shall be indicated at the end of the article, in brackets, next to the name of the author (family name first).

Submit abstracts and papers to: ana.pano_at_unibo.it <mailto:ana.pano_at_unibo.it>

Address questions to the editorial board: <mailto:rilune_at_unibo.it> rilune_at_unibo.it <mailto:rilune_at_unibo.itFor>
For further information, visit: www.rilune.org

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Received on Mon Jan 16 2006 - 14:39:04 EST