cfp.english.upenn.edu

Boundaries of Publication: What Remains Unpublished, Unpublishable, Resisted, Rejected, Lost, Set Aside, Buried, Posthumously Considered, Unthought, Merely Mentioned, Called Up, Cited / Reviewed but Nonexistent, Elicited without Execution, Crossed-out, Under Erasure, Forgotten, Undone To-do List, Incomplete, An Undiscovered Sleeper, Interminably Incubating, Accidentally Deleted, Un-recovered Data, Etc.

A special issue of the journal Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging
Knowledge, co-edited by Richard Burt and Craig Saper.

Publication, one reasonably assumes, oscillates between the poles of acceptance--what comes to define an archive—and rejection—that which is
excluded from it, symbolized by the rejection letter. To be published then depends on a frame, and piece of the process, that exceeds the outcome, but which few have studied.

The editors of this special issue of Rhizomes wish to trouble the notion of a stable archive defined by the boundaries t draws between published and unpublished / unpublishable work. We
invite studies of rejected, lost, forgotten works, articles on the topic of (un)publishability, and theories of the boundaries of publication.

Deadlines: Completed Essays by May 7, 2010.

For more information contact: Profs. Burt or Saper at csaper@mail.ucf.edu or burt@ufl.edu

Points of departure for Articles mightinclude: 

* Pure Potentiality of Publication

* What is Called Publication?

And, what evades it?  How mightpublication evade reading of what the essay promises to read?

What remains in the boundaries and what mighthave been but never was published or was only posthumously published?

What calls the author into publication? Lettersof acceptance, rejection, and unrealized ideas.

*Evading Publication

* Left Unpublished

Other topics might include, uses of the “lost manuscript” convention (e.g. Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Kierkegaard’s Either/Or); posthumous publication against the author’s wishes (e.g. Mallarme’s “Le Livre); speculative criticism of fake publications (as in Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum, which consists of reviews of books that were never, in fact, written), or histories of various salons des refuses.