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Schuylkill graduate journal is seeking submissions from all disciplines for our 9th volume of critical essays and book reviews to be published in Spring of 2011 (online and in print). We are seeking papers on the relationships between minds and bodies, 10-15 pages in length; double spaced; MLA format; no footnotes. Current graduate students should send their work to the Article Editors at skook@temple.edu by January 18, 2011. No simultaneous submissions please.

In a famous chapter-long digression in Samuel Beckett’s _Murphy_ (1938), the narrator pauses to justify the expression “Murphy’s mind:”

Thus Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap…He neither thought a kick because he felt one nor felt a kick because he thought one…Perhaps there was, outside space and time, a non-physical Kick from all eternity, dimly revealed to Murphy in its correlated modes of consciousness and extension, the kick in intellectu and the kick in re…But how much more pleasant was the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. So pleasant that pleasant was not the word.

Beckett’s self-conscious reflection parodies Cartesian mind-body dualism, the Victorian novel, metaphysics (the divine reduced to “Kick”) and post-Newtonian physics with astonishing efficiency, but does so while raising important questions about the relationship between mind and body. What exactly IS the nature of the “intercourse” between the two? How have new ideas and discoveries in neuroscience and other fields complicated our understanding of these “channels”? If Murphy records a productive tension between science, philosophy, and literature during the interwar years, where do we stand now?

The Schuylkill invites submissions from across the humanities and social sciences that somehow reflect on the relationships between minds and bodies. Papers may address these issues in any period and from the vantage point of any humanities discipline. Topics could include, but are not limited to, the following:

Memory
Emotions/Affect
Animal studies
Neuroscience
Psychology
Rhetoric of Science/Medicine/the Body
Spatial Relationships
Aesthetics and perception
Posthumanism
Standpoint Theory and/or Feminist Epistemology
Bare Life/ the Schism of Biological and Political Lives

The Schuylkill is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal founded, edited, and run by graduate students at Temple University in Philadelphia. We are looking to publish the scholarly work of graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences from around the globe. We are especially interested in work that, in presenting a rich and nuanced perspective on the topic of the relationships between minds and bodies, blurs the boundaries of the disciplines (literary theory; philosophy; history; political theory; religious studies; cinema studies; women’s studies; art history; etc.)