Call for Proposals

Mirrors, Shadows, Simulations, and Other Uncanny Doubles

Editors: Pamela Bedore and Anita Duneer

In our cultural moment, we are constantly faced with questions about the very nature of reality. How can we grapple with rapid developments in the power of AI to impersonate, simulate, and replicate personal identities and virtual images? How can we teach our students to identify originals from their copies and to create a sense of their own unique identities?

Literary history is full of doppelgänger figures that invite us to consider a wide range of questions about reality. From a classic Gothic short story like Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839) to a recent simulation-hypothesis novel like Hervé de Tellier’s The Anomaly (2020), we see writers exploring questions of reality—vis-à-vis egocentrism, madness, and new understandings of quantum physics—through the figure of the double. What happens to a literary character facing their double? What happens to all of us as we are increasingly likely to face doubles—reflected and refracted through the lenses of various algorithms—in our very near future?

We seek essays that will provide detailed literary/cultural analysis of texts that address questions of truth and veracity through the figure of the double. We welcome approaches from a variety of theoretical and cultural perspectives, including, but not limited to, digital humanities, ecocriticism, gender studies, genre studies, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and media studies. We welcome essays on literature and the visual/digital (including film, TV series, and other media). Topics may include:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Avatars
• Clones
• Copies & Facsimiles
• Cyborgs
• Detectives
• Divided selves
• Duplications
• Fakes & Knockoffs
• Imitations
• Impersonations & Imposters
• Mirrors
• Multiples
• Remakes & Remixes
• Shadows
• Simulations
• Tricksters
• Twins
• “The Other”
• “The Uncanny”

Essays should open new ways of thinking about doubleness, broadly conceived. They should be intriguing to scholars from a range of disciplines, as well as be accessible to undergraduate and graduate students. To enhance the volume’s teachability, we ask each contributor to submit five discussion questions along with their essay. The book will also include a glossary of terms and suggestions for further readings on doubles. Ultimately, the volume aims to give readers tools to better understand and evaluate the constellation of representational duplications they are likely to encounter in their real-world and virtual lives.

We invite essay proposals of a maximum of 500 words on any topic related to doubleness by the deadline of 15 April 2024. Please include a title, a maximum of five key words, and a brief biography. We aim to reply to respondents by 30 May 2024. Full drafts of essays (5000-6000 words) will be due 15 January 2025. Please send proposals to pamela.bedore@uconn.edu and aduneer@ric.edu.