cfp.english.upenn.edu

The editors at Word Hoard, a new interdisciplinary journal at the University of Western Ontario, are pleased to announce our inaugural issue. We are seeking submissions of between 3000 and 5000 words related to the interwoven ideas of Community and Dissent. Topics may examine multiple historical periods of literature, cultural studies, philosophy, or theoretical thought. Submissions are due 5 March 2012, addressed to wordhoard.editors@gmail.com; include a brief biographical sketch and an abstract of 150 words, but don’t include your name on the submission itself. Please see the attached Call for Papers for further details.

Conceivable subjects could include the following:

Communitas: canon, coterie, salon, school, church, parliament. What makes a community? How do we know? Perhaps most importantly, how do we represent community spaces?

Individuality, individuation, individualism: how do we understand ourselves as identities working with or against others? Is self-expression dissent?

Social activism: just words, or critical articulation? What does it mean to be an activist or a public intellectual? Can we not be involved in society? Rebels without a cause?

Language, translation, diaspora: what does it mean to cross borders? Can we migrate between ideologies of science, culture, religion, business, the arts?

Exile and the imagined community: questions of national or familial boundaries. Can we feel like exiles in our own place of origin? Lost homes, ghost/Geist towns, war zones. How do we
represent groups formed from a basis in dissent?

Social realism and historical narrative: is the novel, the chronicle, the local history a community building force? Stories of hometown heroes and home-grown terrorists.

The place of speaking: where in society is the artist, the writer, the poet? Do our artists work to support and enrich our daily lives, or is the artist’s task one of challenge, conscience, dissent?

Bodies, inconvenient bodies: we can’t get rid of them. How do our embodied selves (sexually, sensually, grotesquely) function in the space of culture and the fabric of community?

Aesthetics and the public: From the well-wrought urn to the epic poem, how does a community bildungsroman, if such a thing exists, find worth in gathering around art objects?