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 “Rewriting and Resisting Response” (RRR)

April 2024

Call for Papers

Rewriting is as old as writing and literature. It is the reproduction and transformation of texts through the means of imitation, adaptation, parody, pastiche, paraphrase, commentary, plagiarism, and critical reading. Over the past century, the phenomenon seems to have taken a new direction by incorporating political, social, cultural, hermeneutical, and sexual attitudes that allowed texts to transcend their geographic, national and, above all, literary boundaries. (Rich, 32).  If one accepts the validity of Adrienne Rich’s assumption that every text has two aspects, depending on considerations of its production and reception, it follows that the writing is on the production side while reading and criticism, and hence re-writing, are on the other side.  

In a conference on Rewriting(s) organized by the Modern Humanities Research Association at the Senate House, London, October 2015, Professor Martin McLaughlin demonstrated in his key-note lecture how in any text we read, each sentence […] may contain ten other texts beneath it [1]. McLaughlin is here, perhaps, echoing the English novelist George Orwell, who already predicted in Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) that by 2050, or even earlier, probably- “the world will have been destroyed” (30) as a consequence of subsequent interpretations and / or rewritings that may ensue. “Figures like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and others”, claims Orwell, “will exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be” (30). It is, therefore, possible to argue that the recent developments in literary theory and critical studies in the 1950s and1960s have brought to the fore the claim on the involvement of the literary and non-literary in the social, historical and most of all political aspects of people’s everyday lives. This renders the text liable to change through rewriting and interpretation, and hence, always in a state of becoming.

Generally defined as the process of writing something again in a different manner, usually in order to improve (or to change) it, the phenomenon of rewriting, albeit ancient, seems to emerge as a recent practice textually and contextually bound to the postmodern and postcolonial condition. In fact, many factors intersect to explain the relationship between the process of rewriting and the afore-mentioned condition.

First, the major project of postmodernism which is “the deconstruction of the centralized, logocentric master narratives of Western culture” [2] overlaps that of postcolonialism which is “to dismantle the center margin binarism of the imperialist discourse” [3]. Second, postmodern theorists, according to Hannah Berry, realize, as do postcolonialists, that the past must be revised and refashioned into the structure of the present. Hence, the phenomenon of rewriting seems well-suited to subvert from within the old methods of classification, categorization and instrumentalization typical of classical, conservative and “scientific” studies of texts from the past. 

Rewritings are, moreover, inherently “violent” (Cohn, 43) in that they attempt to break into history and rework texts whose cultural centrality and historical persistence have been influential in defining representation and proliferating its paradigms.

The purpose of this CFP is to bring together researchers from various orientations to debate the phenomenon of rewriting and to focus on its revisionary and reactionary aspects towards points of source. Theories on rewriting define the phenomenon “as an act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new and critical direction” (Rich, 82) [4]. Rewriting is also approached in terms of the critical difference and distance a new text takes from an old one for a political purpose.

The concept of rewriting is, by and large, such a broad one that it is difficult to cover all its aspects in the limited scope a limited manuscript. Thus, narrowing it down to the idea of resisting response is worth considering.

Notes

[1] Martin McLaughlin ‘ Poliziano’s Stanze per la giostra:  Postmodern Poetics in a Proto-Renaissance poem’, in Italy in Crisis: 1494, ed by Jane Everson and Diego Zancani ( London: Legenda, 2000), pp. 129-51.

[2] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Tiffin Helen, The Empire Writes Back to the Center, pp. 9

[3] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Tiffin Helen, The Empire Writes Back to the Center, pp. 9

[4] Adrienne Rich “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision”, p. 22

Contributors are encouraged to focus their papers on the following research axes:

-         Rewriting as revision.

-         Re-writing as Resistance.

-         Rewriting and Re-righting.

-         Rewriting as Re-reading.

-         Rewriting and Representation.

-         Rewriting: Challenging boundaries.

-         Rewriting: discourse and counter-discourse.

-         Rewriting and multimodal communication.

-         Rewriting the world Constitutions.

-         Extracurricular Writing/ Rewriting.

-         Rewriting Pedagogy.

-         Rewriting and Cultural Psychology/ Ethnic Roots.

-         Rewriting and Cultural memory.

-         Rewriting cultural identities.

-         Re/writing selfhood and otherness.

-         Rewriting in/of the digital.

Paper Submission and Deadlines:

* Participants are kindly requested to submit their full papers for publication as a book chapter in a manuscript entitled Rewriting and Resisting Response (RRR) to the following email address: lotfisalhi123@gmail.com. The Submission of abstracts is due on July the 1st, 2024. Submission of full papers for peer review: August the 8th, 2024. (Contributors who need extra time to finalize their papers by this date have to send us a notification).

 Note that prestigious articles will be considered for publication by either Palgrave Macmillan/ Palgrave Communications.