In recent decades, critical theory and scholarship have taken up the category of matter and the material in order to renew interrogations of categories such as the “self” and the “human.” But whereas mid-twentieth century scholarship’s Marxist-historicist turn focused on material circumstances of reading and its social and political effects, these more recent theoretical endeavors – loosely aggregated under the framework of “new materialism” – explore and expand the notion of matter itself: what, after all, is matter, and how does it affect society and its discursive practices? How does it have agency or force, and how does it relate to life, broadly understood?

CFP: The Sovereign Erotic

42nd American Indian Workshop in association with Transmotion journal

12-17 July 2021

Conference to take place online

Proposals are invited for the 41st annual AIW conference, organized by European University Cyprus in association with Transmotion journal, to be held from 12-17 July 2021. Papers are, as always, welcome on any topic in any discipline, though distinct priority will be given to papers that speak to the conference theme. Following the conference, a special issue of Transmotion will be dedicated to articles developed from papers presented at this event.

JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS
(Vol. 44, No. 1, Spring 2021) 

Untranslatability: Theory, Practice and Politics

This collection aims to celebrate the work and influence of Michael Bristol by producing new scholarship on Shakespeare, early modern theater, and their enduring and complicated legacy in our modern world. Bristol’s criticism has left a profound impact on the fields on Shakespeare and early modern studies, in particular as it relates to questions of dramatic agency, theory and philosophy, to matters pertaining to the carnivalesque body, as well as to ideas of cultural production.

I am pulling together an Edited Collection called The Metamorphoses of Historical Past: Memory, Representation and Facts and I would like to invite you to consider submitting one or more chapters.
The abstract/call for the Collection is here:
Historical facts are not objects. The ‘historical-real’ is constitutively representational because it is a process. The question of what is a given truth in history becomes the dilemma of creating a representative reconstruction of the process of (past) events that are close to the ‘real’ events as they are given in that specific time.

CFP: Edited Book on “Theatre-Fiction”

Abstracts: November 1, 2020

Seeking proposals for an edited book of chapters on “theatre-fiction”, i.e. novels and stories about theatre.

Published annually in June and December, Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures is seeking essays in critical theory, literature, culture, and translation theory. The submissions deadline is October 15 for the December issue, and April 15 for the June issue. The journal's website is: http://jflc.hunnu.edu.cn/. Submissions should use MLA style and be approximately 4,000-7,000 words. Inquiries are welcome to co-editor Lauri Scheyer at Lramey@calstatela.edu.

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Proposed Title of the Book

Disaster, Holocaust, and Dystopian Literature: Concepts and Perspectives

Sub- Themes

1. Understanding Disaster, Holocaust and Dystopian Literature

2. Theorizing Disaster, Holocaust and Dystopian Literature

3. Socio-cultural Perspectives

4. Psycho-political Perspectives

5. Historical Perspectives

6. Pandemic Fear and Literature

How have British and American institutions shaped Anglophone literatures across the 20th and into the 21st centuries? In the decades accompanying decolonization, London and New York remain literary capitals by dint of their concentration of literary capital: the infrastructure of publishers and periodicals, agencies and awards that—staffed by professional readers—support (and distort) the creative act. Centers of cultural gravity, they continue to set standards and bestow prestige, offering more reliable access to readers and remuneration, acting on the materials of writers and manuscripts drawn from around the world.

Confronted by the 2020 public health crisis one would remember as COVID-19, the notion of Orientalism as proposed by Edward Said in 1979 calls for continuous examinations. Said defines Orientalism as “not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable materials investment.” From the trade war and technology race between the U.S.

In 2015, the University of Edinburgh Press launched a multivolume series of scholarly, refereed anthologies entitled ReFocus. Edited by Gary D. Rhodes (University of Central Florida), Stefanie Van de Peer (University of Exeter), and Robert Singer (CUNY), each book focuses on a critically overlooked film director who worked in the studio system, independent cinema, mainstream cinema, experimental filmmaking, or the documentary tradition. Volumes published so far in this series include: Susanne Bier, Pablo Larrain, Paul Leni, Teuvo Tulio, Xavier Dolan, and Francis Veber, with many more in preparation

International Workshop 

A trio of anniversaries in 2021, the tenth of Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life, and Tom Perrotta’s novel, The Leftovers, and the twentieth of Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods, is a provocative occasion for a critical reexamination of these and related parables at the intersection of the secular and the supernatural, in their original formulations and as they have developed subsequently. 

Roundtable “participants give brief, informal presentations (5-10 minutes) and the session is open to conversation and debate between participants and the audience” (http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/sessions.html).

All approaches are welcome.

Call for Papers for volume 14, n° 1(27)/ 2021 

Future of Communications and Public Relations (PR). (Re)Imagining the Role, Function and Purpose of the Communication Profession

https://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/announcement

Guest editors:

Ana ADI, Professor of Public Relations/Corporate Communications

Quadriga University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, GERMANY

e-mail: ana.adi@quadriga.eu

Thomas STOECKLE, Lecturer