Call for Papers - Linguaculture, vol. 15, no. 2, 2024

Posted on 2024-03-15

Deadline Extended to Aug. 20, 2024

Linguaculture Thematic issue: Pop Culture and Audience Reception in a Transnational Context

Of all modes of cultural exchange and diffusion in the last century, pop culture has been among the most dominant, lucrative, and influential in our daily lives. Films, television, music, video games, podcasts, comic books and graphic novels, genre fiction and other categories of pop culture production are constantly transferred and flow between countries and audiences.  At the same time, worldbuilding and storytelling increasingly extend across media platforms (transmedia), which draws in new international communities of users and audiences. But audience reception and the uses of a particular pop culture product can vary enormously across cultures.  We seek contributions that examine pop cultural phenomena within a transnational context, exploring the ways in which pop culture can be interpreted, used, marketed, and reworked differently across cultural boundaries or in the context of transmediality.  Possible examples include:

• The limits of American pop culture: how do specific European or other non-U.S. audiences receive and react critically to U.S.-created worlds and characters?
• The decline of the Western as a lucrative genre (outside of video games): what does it mean and what drives the turn away from Old West entertainments in the U.S. and other regions?
• The relationship between history and film in a comparative context (U.S./Europe, U.S./Asia), examining how imperialism, the Cold War, or world wars are represented.
• Transnational cultural analyses of horror films, video games, podcasts, and other media. How has the horror genre changed over time, altering as it spread across transmedia platforms?
• How do specific locations (e.g., New York City, the American South or Southwest, London, Paris, Tokyo) become global imaginaries in pop culture, and how are they created or interpreted inside and outside of the cultures where the locations actually exist?
• Japanese or U.S. video games as products that both reflect the culture of origin, and which are interpreted and used within modern global networks, creating communities of user interpretation.
• How is crime fiction (e.g., Nordic noir) produced and received across national boundaries? How are true crime incidents from outside the U.S. extensively produced and discussed by U.S. true crime media and entertainments (and vice-versa)?

The papers are expected to be in the fields of literary history and criticism, cultural studies and arts studies, aesthetics, history, marketing and audience reception, and fan studies, and it is hoped they will engender constructive dialogues between disciplines and generate relevant responses to contemporary dilemmas.

LINGUACULTURE accepts original contributions (5,000 to 7,000 words) which have not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions go through a double-blind peer-review process. 

Please use the Submissions (journal.linguaculture.ro/index.php/home/about/submissions) page to send us your contributions.

Please consult our Instructions for Authors page (journal.linguaculture.ro/index.php/home/instructions-authors) for further information about submissions and additional requirements. All manuscripts must have an abstract and 4-5 keywords.

Deadline for the submission of manuscripts: 15 July 2024

Review period: 15 July - 20 September 2024 

Deadline for the submission of revised manuscripts: 20 November 2024

Issue published online: 31 December 2024

Issue editors: Florina Nastase (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania) (fnastase60@yahoo.com), Nancy Reagin (Pace University, New York) (nreagin@pace.edu)