cfp.english.upenn.edu

Call for Papers

 ELN 48.2, Fall/Winter 2010

 “Juris-Dictions”

 This special issue of ELN invites contributions on the interface between law, literature, and space, in an effort to redefine and revitalize the concept of a legal and literary inter-discipline. The assumption underlying this goal is that law, literature, and culture do far more than intersect at a place where they reflect each other or, conversely, long for the other’s essence, as when law is said to look to literature for its ostensibly greater moral compass and literature to law for its power. Under the rubric of jurisdiction—defined narrowly as the power and authority of courts to hear and determine judicial proceedings, but more broadly (and etymologically) as the speaking of the law or of the norms that constitute a bounded society—we find rather that the legal and the literary are mutually constitutive, that they share a crucial dependency on spatial, territorial, and geographic organization in order to define the world in which and of which they are trying to make meaning. The force of law emerges, as does the force of language, from the space it encompasses or designates as its own and from the contrasts between that space and what lies beyond it.

We welcome contributions on a broad range of issues and topics, including but not limited to:

-The formation of personal and communal identities through jurisdictional practices
-The relationships between certain spaces and genre or period designations, e.g. realism or the novel
-The relationship between identities of exclusion and inclusion e.g., strangers or criminals
-Migrations, asylums, homelessness
-Investigations of discrete historical periods in which the drawing of territorial and/or colonial boundaries were especially troubling
-The intersection of the written and the visual as spatial orders
-The difference between local and global jurisdictions
-Cyberspace or cyber jurisdictions
-The spaces of sovereignty and of multi-sited territories, e.g., the European Union
-Jurisdictions of the body
-Legal geographies

Position papers and essays of no longer than twenty manuscript pages are invited from scholars in all fields of literature, law, history, sociology, philosophy, art history, media studies, and the arts. Along with analytical, interpretive, and historical scholarship, we are also interested in work that moves traditional forms of literary analysis into new styles of critical and creative writing. The editors also encourage collaborative work, notes submitted together as topical clusters or debates, and review essays on relevant books.

Please send double-spaced, 12-point font contributions adhering to the Chicago-style endnote citation format in hard copy and on CD-ROM to the address below:

Special Issue Editor, “Juris-Dictions”

English Language Notes

University of Colorado at Boulder

226 UCB

Boulder, CO 80309-0226

Specific inquiries regarding issue 48.2 may be addressed to the issue editor, Nan Goodman at nan.goodman@coloroado.edu. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2010.