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LYING, CHEATING, AND DISSIMULATION: THEORIZING DECEIT

The Inaugural Issue of Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought

Published by the Graduate Program in English at York University

York University’s Graduate Program in English is pleased to announce the inaugural issue of Pivot, a newly established online scholarly journal dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary work in the humanities. Pivot is a biannual, peer-reviewed publication committed to publishing outstanding work by emerging as well as established academics. Each issue will cohere around a particular topic or theme, illuminating the intersections and divergences of different disciplinary and methodological approaches to a given object of study.

The title of the first issue is Lying, Cheating, and Dissimulation: Theorizing Deceit and we are currently accepting papers that engage with any aspect of this highly mobile field of inquiry. A more detailed CFP is attached below. Submissions are due by November 1, 2009. They should be no longer than 15 double-spaced pages and follow MLA format. To submit a paper, or for further information, email theorizingdeceit@gmail.com. Please include a 200-300 word abstract with your submission.

Call for Papers

"Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself – in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity – is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them." — Friedrich Nietzsche

We live in the misinformation age, one might suggest, but the history of lying and the history of language are impossible to consider independently. For as long as truth has stood as a moral and metaphysical ideal, so too has its constituent other: falsehood in all its myriad guises. Indeed, the incomprehensible "drive for truth" so aptly characterized by Nietzsche could just as easily be conceived of as an impossible movement away from lying. But as contemporary political discourse trades truthiness for transparency, and the pluralism of online culture continues to democratize dissemination on a global scale, the ethics and aesthetics of deceit appear readier than ever for theoretical reconsideration.

With this in mind, Pivot invites participants from across disciplinary borders to submit papers on any aspect of what we consider to be an expansive field of inquiry: lying and its many analogues. Possible topics could be inspired by, but should not be limited to, the following thematic concerns:
• Necessary Fictions: The Ethics of Dishonesty
• Perjury and False Witness: Lying and the Law
• The Decay of Lying: Aestheticism and Artifice
• False Consciousness: Capitalism and Confabulation
• The Camera Never Lies: Documentary and Dissimulation
• Impostors and Impersonation
• Frauds, Counterfeiters, and Confidence Men
• The History of Lying, or, History as Lying
• Psychologies of Self–Deception
• Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
• Literature and Lying, from Plato to Present
• Realism, Anti–Realism, Unrealism
• Unreliable Narration and Misrepresentation
• Equivocation, Sarcasm, and Socratic Irony
• Insincerity, Inauthenticity, and Inscrutability

Submissions are due by November 1, 2009. They should be no longer than 15 double-spaced pages and follow MLA format. To submit a paper, or for further information, please email theorizingdeceit@gmail.com. Please include a 200-300 word abstract with your submission.