CFP: Writing Design: Pictographic Strategies in Literature (collection;
03/01/2006)

For the proposed volume, Writing Design, we are seeking essays which deal
with literary incorporations of the visual. Drawings, photographs, icons,
doodles, and "concrete" textual arrangements are just a few of the
pictographic strategies appearing with increasing frequency in literary
work. While contemporary texts will be the primary focus of the collection,
we also encourage submissions that explore the historical precedents of
pictographic/typographic literary techniques. Analyses of aesthetic,
cultural, theoretical and/or narratological implications of textual and
visual convergences are particularly welcome. What narrative effects are
achieved, for example, by supplementing language with illustration? How have
the formal qualities of new media (e.g. hypertext collage) influenced design
in print fiction? What can a graphic novel achieve that a uniformly
print-text work cannot? Essays may address literature that contains visual
elements as well as narratives in which printed language is used visually.

Possible essay topics include:

- paratextual devices such as footnotes, appendices, and glossaries in
fictional work by Mark Z. Danielewski, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace,
Vladimir Nabokov, Lawrence Sterne
- drawings in fiction by Kathy Acker, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut
- maps in novels by William Vollmann, Paul Auster, William Faulkner
- speech balloons and panel borders as narrative devices in graphic novels
- Tom Phillips's "Treated Victorian Novel," A Humament
- multimedia hypertext fiction such as Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden and
Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl
- email/sms expressions and icons such as ;-), lol, btw
- subject-specific prose applications of the visual (e.g. rendering 9/11
photographically in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close and typographically in Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World)
- epistolary illustration in the Griffin and Sabine series
- textual tapeworm in Irving Welsh's Filth; mouse tail in Lewis Carroll's
"The Mouse's Tale"
- concrete poetry; works by Armand Schwerner, Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound,
e.e. cummings

Please submit 400 word abstracts to Kiki Benzon and Liz Rosen by March 1,
2006 at cfptypography_at_yahoo.com.

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Received on Tue Nov 29 2005 - 16:27:06 EST