[UPDATE] Religion, Memory and Transmediality in Contemporary Cultural Practices (extension to November 22)
Edited Volume
Extended Abstract Deadline: November 22, 2015.
Recent challenges to what it means to be human around the turn of the third millennium have often gone hand in hand with reconsiderations of the meanings of religion. The spiritual has been radically redefined, previously established foundation narratives have been retold and some of the received values and discourses related to traditional religious narratives, practices and beliefs in people's cultural memory have been revised. Such inscriptions have sometimes been associated with repressive mentalities promoted by traditional churches backing up political regimes, as in the case of Franco's Spain, with resistance (though reinventions of religious) against atheist left-wing totalitarian governments or with the trauma of dislocation and the failure to integrate in situations of exile.
But, as Mads Rosendahl Thomsen maintains in his book The New Human in Literature (2013), the aspiration for human enhancement is not a recent phenomenon. It characterizes a rich range of works associated with the pursuit of progress and its implications, from Mary Shelley to modernists such as Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline to postmodernists such as Don DeLillo or Michel Houellebecq. Revisions of the spiritual associated with human enhancement are equally common, so that, with hindsight, a whole series of traditional narratives preserved by cultural memory can be relevant to the transhumanist project. In the wake of the postmodern questioning of "the future of religion" (Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty) and Derridean deconstruction – itself based on a complex rereading of religious traditions, as John Caputo shows – revisions of the spiritual go further than mere changes of perspective on traditional religions such as, most commonly, rewritings of and challenges brought to the Christic story that have been practised for quite some time now (Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ – 1953, José Saramago´s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ – 1991, Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary – 2012 or even, more radically, J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus – 2014). Christian allegories, with influences from other world religions, such as The Matrix, and even invitations to play with the various implications of sacrifice and dedication to the common cause (The LEGO Movie) have been pushed to their limits, leading to stories where some basic structural elements may be preserved, but the foundation narrative is completely rewritten (Battlestar Galactica or Cloud Atlas).
We situate our planned volume at the crossroads of cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art, a particularly fruitful space for inquiry into the nature of contemporary religious and spiritual praxis. We are interested in furthering research within what has often been called the dynamic turn in cultural memory studies – the growing, contemporary interest in problems of encoding, transmission, and reception, in "the specifically medial processes through which memories come into the public arena and become collective" (Astrid Erll). We intend to explore the ways in which rewritings, remediations or repurposings of older religious narratives and artworks contribute to their lasting impact in contemporary cultural memory. To this end, we adopt an understanding of the media products we study as being "both monuments and agents" (Ann Rigney), both the products of cultural memory and producers in their own right. We do so in order to underscore the fluid and dynamic nature of collective remembrance and to open up a space of conversation with compatible theories and perspectives coming from transmedial narratology. In a media environment dominated by unprecedented media convergence (Henry Jenkins), adaptations, sequels, reboots, and remakes have become the norm and their popularity and cross-cultural appeal rests largely on their familiarity to global audiences, on their ability to become and remain memorable. This volume is thus particularly interested in exploring concepts such as "transmedial storytelling" (Marie-Laure Ryan) and "transmedial worlds" (Lisbeth Klastrup & Susana Tosca) and their relevance to contemporary narratives and artworks that engage with religion and spirituality.
We invite contributions engaging with (but not necessarily limited to) one or several of the following topics:
- adaptations and remediations of religious narratives;
- representations of religion and spirituality in transmedial narratives and storyworlds;
- reconsiderations of religious discourses and the their impact on national identity and ethnic/nationalist values in the recent years;
- posthumanist religious practices in literature, film, and popular culture;
- exacerbated reinventions of religious traditions as cultural support in situation of exilic relocation;
- cultural and political resistance through religion;
- reinventing human identity across the human/posthuman/postsecular boundaries;
- rewritings of cultural memory in light of transhumanist reconsiderations of the spiritual;
- interactions between gender, the transhuman, and the postsecular.
Please send 300-word abstracts and 200-word bios to both Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru (sabina.draga.alexandru@lls.unibuc.ro) and Dragoș Manea (dragos.manea@lls.unibuc.ro) by November 22, 2015. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by December 1.
Full 7000-word chapters based on the accepted abstracts will be due by February 15, 2016.