CALL FOR PAPERS: Fake News: THE ONION, THE DAILY SHOW, and Parody News
Edited by David Lavery and Richard Campbell

David Lavery and Richard Campbell seek your proposals for an
in-development collection of essays to be entitled Fake News: THE
ONION, THE DAILY SHOW, and Parody News.

Over forty years ago novelist Philip Roth observed (in "Writing
American Fiction" [1960]) that "American reality" "stupefies , . . .
sickens, . . . infuriates, . . . and finally . . . is even a kind of
embarrassment to one?s meager imagination. The actuality is continually
outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily
that are the envy of any novelist," Even the "daily newspapers," he
writes, "fill us with wonder and awe (is it possible, is it
happening?), also with sickness and despair." One of the "real" figures
Roth thought to be the envy of any fiction writer was Richard Nixon,
about whom he would later write the wickedly funny satire Our Gang
(1971).

Now, in the 21st Century, postmodern American unreality has inspired
the proliferation of "fake news," parody journalism. In venues like the
online journal The Onion and Comedy Central's The Daily Show, fake news
has become an important component in our cultural discourse.

FAKE NEWS will be aimed at an educated but not highly-specialized
audience. The essays chosen for the volume will be scholarly but not
obscure, knowledgeable but not erudite. A publisher will be sought
among both mainstream and university presses.

The following list of topics is meant only to be suggestive and not
exclusionary.

* Steven Colbert
* covering 9/11
* covering the Impeachment of President Clinton
* covering President Bush
* covering the 2000 election
* covering the California Recall Election
* covering Gulf War II
* fake news and democratic discourse
* fake news and the legitimacy of journalism in the wake of the Jayson
Blair scandal
* fake news and political critique
* history of news parody
* Bill Maher
* New Journalism and news parody
* news parody and the history of parody
* news parody and postmodernism
* news parody and real news
* The Onion
* parodying the anchor
* parodying the correspondent
* parodying news genres, conventions, and forms
* parodying print journalism
* parodying the pundit
* Politically Incorrect
* Saturday Night Live and the presidents
* Saturday Night Live and Gulf War I
* Jon Stewart
* unintentional news parody
* Wait, Wait, Don?t Tell Me (NPR News Quiz)
* ?Weekend Update? on Saturday Night Live

ASAP, but by no later than the end of November, please send either your
completed essay or a 500-750 word account of the essay you would like
to contribute as an e-mail attachment (in Word or as a Rich Text File)
to both dlavery_at_mtsu.edu and rcampbel_at_mtsu.edu. Be sure to include with
your proposal a brief bio of yourself. If your essay is chosen for
final consideration, you will have until the end of February to
complete it.

A website for this project will be maintained at:
http://www.middleenglish.org/Teleparody/fakenews.htm

Dr. DAVID LAVERY is professor of English at Middle Tennessee State
University, where he teaches courses on American literature, science
fiction, modern poetry, popular culture, and film. He is the author,
editor, or co-editor of Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space
Age (1992), Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (1994),
"Deny All Knowledge": Reading The X-Files (1996), Fighting the Forces:
What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002), Teleparody:
Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of Tomorrow (2002), and This
Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (2002).

DR. RICHARD CAMPBELL is professor and former director of the School of
Journalism at Middle Tennessee State University. In addition to
authoring the textbook Media and Culture (Bedford/St. Martin's), he has
written 60 Minutes and the News: A Mythology for Middle America (1991)
and (with Jimmie Reeves) Cracked Coverage: Television News, the
Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (1994).

---------------------------------------
Dr. David Lavery
English Department, Box 70
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
Homepage: http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/
Co-Convenor, The Slayage Conference on
BTVS: slayage.tv/conference

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Received on Sun Sep 07 2003 - 23:50:24 EDT