Call for papers for Special Issue of English Language Notes

 Personhood, Spirit, and the Afterlife

62.2 (October 2024)

Nan Goodman, Editor in Chief
Ruth Ellen Kocher and KP Kaszubowski, Guest Editors

University of Colorado Boulder and Duke University Press

SCOPE:

English Language Notes invites submissions for a special issue (October 2024) that will explore the dynamic nature of personhood as it relates to various notions of spirit and the afterlife. This interdisciplinary issue seeks to encourage discussions on empirical functionalism and ontological personalism of a person’s individuation, and the textural and palpable expressions of individuality. The editors are interested in how the construction of personhood considers the interaction of the material and immaterial, and how it is informed by the realm outside of the material in its ability to describe itself.

The issue aims to examine posthumous legacies through acts of archival and rhetorical deconstruction in all ways it may reverberate in society, culture, counter-culture, economics, politics, spirituality, and more. The editors also consider how the individual is shaped by cultural nostalgia, religious mythos, competing secular belief systems, and occult practices.

As scholars of rhetoric, the editors are interested in how language plays a part in developing the intersectional contexts of race, class, gender, and citizenship around spiritual, moral, and ethical foundations as it relates to the construction of personhood in spirit and body. This issue seeks to publish a wide variety of perspectives from various points of critical inquiry including scholarly and creative work / practice that expands our notions of the academic West. The issue also aims to explore the construction of personhood as both cultural precept and narrative surveillance in popular culture, media, film, art, and global literatures. We welcome contributions that discuss how artistic practice mirrors spiritual practice in the formation of personhood in times of cultural upheaval, and how personhood functions as civic, historical, and cultural afterlife.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

We invite scholarly and creative contributions from writers in all fields who engage the subject of personhood as a transdisciplinary trope through which we may consider questions such as:

• How does the individual access the spiritual or immaterial realm for personal or creative development?

• How does the concept of Afterlife shift in relation to the contemporary political, social, cultural, and private constructs? How do the prevailing concepts of Afterlife shape the individual?

• How does the immaterial or spiritual inform medical or bodily care practices, and how do scientific and medical studies interact with the spiritual in generartive ways?

• How does the construction of personhood function as both cultural precept and narrative surveillance in popular culture, media, film, art, and global literatures? In what ways does artistic practice mirror spiritual practice in the formation of personhood in times of cultural upheaval? How does personhood function as civic, historical, and cultural afterlife. 

• In what capacity can humanist discourse accommodate notions of pre-life personhood and identity as antecedent to the body despite naturalist and cognitive definitions of personhood which privilege consciousness and cognition?

• How might digital personhood, biotechnology, and the expansion of nonhuman and posthuman agency reshape both spiritual and secular understandings of longevity and afterlife?

SUBMISSION: 

Submissions may include essays, scholarly-adjacent critical essays, lyric essays, poetry, and genre-fluid texts that take an innovative approach to developing the creative artifacts. Interested authors should feel free to contact the guest editors: Ruth Ellen Kocher at ruthellen.kocher@colorado.edu and KP Kaszubowski at kpkaszu@gmail.com.

Potential contributors may submit abstracts by September 1, 2023 or submit a completed article, essay, or creative piece by September 21, 2023. While the editors invite standard-length, single-author academic articles, we are open to other methods of critical inquiry and creative expression related to the issue’s theme: position papers, clusters, roundtable discussions, interviews, dialogues, and so on.

Essays will undergo peer review. All submissions should adhere to Chicago-style citations, notes and bibliography system. Work should be uploaded to our submission portal here: https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-eln

IMPORTANT DATES:

Submission Deadline: September 21, 2023

Notification: November 30, 2023

Publication Date: October 2024

About English Language Notes: A respected forum of criticism and scholarship in literary and cultural studies since 1962, English Language Notes (ELN) is dedicated to pushing the edge of scholarship in literature and related fields in new directions. Broadening its reach geographically and trans-historically, ELN opens new lines of inquiry and widens emerging fields. Each ELN issue advances topics of current scholarly concern, providing theoretical speculation as well as interdisciplinary recalibrations through practical usage. Offering semiannual, topically themed issues, ELN also includes “Of Note,” an ongoing section featuring related topics, review essays or roundtables of cutting-edge scholarship, and emergent concerns. ELN is a wide-ranging journal that combines theoretical rigor with innovative interdisciplinary collaboration.