UPDATE: Deadline for submissions extended to October 1, 2005. Polygraph
is also currently seeking book reviews for this or future issues, which
should be sent to William Knight and Eric Owens, our reviews editors, at
wpknight_at_duke.edu <mailto:wpknight_at_duke.edu>.

POLYGRAPH 18: Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality

CALL FOR PAPERS
Contemporary accounts of politics often coincide with strategies,
theories, and experiences of temporality, whether they be historical
periodizations, the experience of everyday life, or attempts to give
figural or concrete form to such experiences through narration. If we
understand narrative as the principal and necessary means through which
one is able to make sense of time and temporal experience (and therefore
also social change), we must recognize the centrality of narrative to
any attempt to think politically; if we reject this claim, we must
account for one's ability to make sense of lived experience in some
other way. Beyond this dilemma, however, we must acknowledge the
prevalence of narrative as a means for understanding life (everyday or
otherwise), causality, and political action, not only in the abstract,
but in relation to specific forms of narrative and the different
experiences of temporality they engender.

The next issue of Polygraph aims to explore the politics of life
today—provisionally defined as biopolitics—by examining the
constructions of temporality at these various levels. How might a notion
of the biopolitical take its form and mode of expression from differing
theories of narration, periodization, or everyday life in the present
age? How do different forms of narrative provide differing schema for
understanding the temporal experience of contemporary life, and to what
extent is a notion of everyday life itself contingent on specific modes
of temporal understanding? Moreover, what is the relation between
biopolitics and everyday life as we try to think the political or
epistemic effectivity of narrative today?

We hope to examine these questions by bringing together analyses of the
political with those of narrative and temporal experience in
contemporary cultural production: literature, theater or performance
art, cinema, television, and other contemporary or emergent media. How
do contemporary narratives and modes of narration coincide with, inform,
or make possible the experience of politics or temporality today? How
can we understand the relation(s) between historical questions of
periodization and social transformation and more empirical or cognitive
forms of temporality explored in the fields of science? Through these
juxtapositions, we hope to come to a more fully developed understanding
of the politics of social life in the contemporary age.

Deadline for submissions
October 1, 2005

POLYGRAPH submission guidelines

Papers should be submitted electronically via e-mail to the issue
editors: Rod Frey (rodger.frey_at_duke.edu <mailto:rodger.frey_at_duke.edu>)
and Alexander Ruch (alexander.ruch_at_duke.edu
<mailto:alexander.ruch_at_duke.edu>). Any editable file format is
acceptable, but Word or HTML formats are preferred.

Manuscripts should be prepared following Chicago Manual of Style
guidelines, using endnotes for bibliographic citations. Papers published
in the journal generally range in length from 5,000 to 15,000 words.

For more information about Polygraph (ISSN 1533-9793), please see our
web site at http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/index.html. We have
recently published articles by Jean-Luc Nancy, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj
Zizek, Rey Chow, Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdieu, and Brian Massumi,
among many others. Polygraph is indexed by the Modern Language
Association bibliography.

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Received on Sat Sep 10 2005 - 12:38:09 EDT