EMBODYING FANTASTIKA

A Special issue of Fantastika Journal

Article Deadline: 1st August 2020

‘Fantastika’ is an umbrella term that embraces the genres of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror but can also include Alternate History, Gothic, Steampunk or any other radically imaginative narrative space.

Introducing Whatever

Introducing Whatever

Scholars working in queer studies, both in and out of academia, are still often marginalized; one of the aspects of this marginalization is the lack of publishing venues, which discourages potentially original and creative researchers from pursuing their interest in queer studies, and from contributing to the development of the field. This has a negative impact on both the queer studies community, and on scholarly, social, and political discourse in general.

Love Among the Poets: The Victorian Poetics of Intimacy

Proposed volume of essays, edited by
            Pearl Chaozon Bauer (Notre Dame de Namur University)
            Erik Gray (Columbia University)

CFA: Applications due September 8 for BSA's 2021 New Scholars Program; info session June 26

The Bibliographical Society of America’s New Scholars Program seeks to promote the work of scholars who are new to the field of bibliography, broadly defined to include any research that deals with the creation, production, publication, distribution, reception, transmission, and subsequent history of all textual artifacts (manuscript, print, digital, from clay and stone to laptops and iPads). 

NeMLA 2021: Philadelphia, PA. March 11-14, 2021

As we move forward in this new normal, there is an urgent need, at both national and global levels, for critical investigations into the humanistic, scientific, and social scientific impacts of the coronavirus, both societally and in academia. It’s possible, likely even, that your current research and teaching focuses are not directly related to epidemiology. Regardless, your research and/or teaching has undoubtedly been affected by the pandemic. Now is a key moment to lean into the many robust opportunities for teaching developments and enhancements.

Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster on Whiteness

Contacts:  Jennifer Nesbitt (jpn12@psu.edu) and Sonita Sarker (sarker@macalester.edu)

 Timeline:

This panel will consider the cases of writers who have used their platforms to create fictions of self—to misrepresent, self-justify, even blatantly lie about their own lives and realities. The panel is open to considering any act of writing sociopathy, from memoir (e.g., M.E. Thomas’s 2013 Confessions of a Sociopath or Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal) to fictional works that inhabit the minds of sociopaths (e.g., A Clockwork Orange, Gone Girl) to literary fakers (e.g., James Frey, Danny Santiago, JT LeRoy, Caroline Calloway). Is writing in itself an act of misrepresentation bordering on psychopathy?

In the 1930s and ‘40s, crime fiction was often published on cheap paper made of wood pulp, and this reputation as faintly disreputable has stayed with it, pursuing it into creative writing classes in which “genre-writing” has traditionally been discouraged. This panel invites creative writers as well as literary scholars to consider crime writing—true crime, mystery and detective fiction, suspense fiction, and film or television drama—in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Is crime writing inherently disreputable? Does this genre have a place in the creative writing classroom?

While it is too soon to fully assess the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic will stand as a watershed in global human life, creative writers as canaries in the cultural coalmine will be among the first to try to render it comprehensible and are already responding to the seismic shifts. The unexpected changes the pandemic has created have altered all of the processes that sustain human life, the social practices and interactions that are the mainstay of poetry, fiction, and drama, perhaps permanently. Enforced social isolation has caused people from all strata of society to contemplate what it means to be engaged in human culture while at the same time facing the possibility of sudden and random mortality, even mass extinction.

In an age of Twitter rants, allegations of fake news, and increasingly bitter partisan divides, what happens to the novel or poem? Does literary material have to engage with the political? And if it doesn’t, must the political be read between its lines? What are the possibilities for creative work in an era that is increasingly in a state of emergency? This panel asks creative writers to consider the question of political and literary engagement in our political age. Writers of all modalities and genres are encouraged to explore these questions in the context of their own work. This panel asks creative writers to consider the question of a political literary engagement in our political age. Writers of all modalities and genres are welcome.

The convergence of critical masculinity studies with postcolonial theory aims, at its core, to interrogate discourses that created hegemonic and binary categories that in turn became eventual grounds for the historical racialization of gender and sexuality, as well as the gendering and sexualization of race. Taking the image of “palimpsest” as its semantic inspiration, this session seeks to problematize the layerings and shifting stratigraphies of power that obscure, erase, or overwrite the specific historical, cultural, and political experiences that underpin notions of Asian masculinity and male identity as represented in various forms of literature and media.

Research articles are being invited for a peer reviewed edited book to be published by a reputed publisher tentatively in 2020.    

Pandemics, Theatre and Performance: Perspectives and Possibilities

Call For Papers

Several Romantic artists and, in particular, writers focused on historical events that brought the Americas on the forefront of the European imagination. Certainly, many Italian writers looked at what then still was the New World with a prismatic approach, either because they were writing on historical events that occurred in North America (especially the formation of the United States) or because they were looking at the independence wars fought in South America; either because the Americas offered shelter to the exiles, or because they provided new ground for thinking about the relationship between nature and culture.