Call for Papers: Book 2.0

Special Issue: ‘The Author’

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/book-20#call-for-papers

Authors mean different things at different times and in different contexts. For example, the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary conceives it as ‘[a] writer, and senses relating to literature’ and ‘[a] creator, cause, or source’. In 2004, Andrew Bennett suggested that ‘questioning the nature of authorship’ can be a hallmark of crises and turning points in literature.

Nearly sixty years after Roland Barthes declared ‘The Death of the Author’, conversations about AI dominate a range of discourses, and it can be increasingly challenging to determine what constitutes authorship and who or what we might consider an author and how. Can one, for example, co-write with ChatGPT? Can a natural language processing tool, with its changing methodologies and unfixed ethical frameworks, be an author? Who has a claim over the resultant intellectual property? How have fiction and poetry responded (or not) to these dynamics?

As critics, we might quickly single out discontinuities between the good old ‘then’ and the bad new ‘now’, but are there continuities between how earlier and how contemporary writers understand ‘The Author’? Can a single author ‘do’ different voices? If so, how? How do these debates speak to the ongoing crises in the humanities?

In celebration of fifteen years of Book 2.0 (Intellect Books) and dedicated to this peer-reviewed journal’s esteemed founding editor, Mick Gowar, Volume 15 Issue 1 will examine this construct and more. Articles and creative works of 4–5,000 words (prose) or 1–2,000 words (poetry) might address:

• Property

• Claims

• Litigation

• Gender

• Performance

• Class

• Authority

• Artificial intelligence

• Co-authorship

• Group authorship

• Anonymity

• Theft

• Coteries

• Writing circles

• Speech acts

• Resistance

• Tradition and revolution

Please submit your manuscript, with a 300-word abstract and eight keywords, to the new Co-Editors of Book 2.0: Drs Tom Ue (Cape Breton University) at ue_tom@hotmail.com AND J.C. Bernthal (University of Suffolk) at jamie@jcbernthal.com by 15 October 2024.

We welcome reviews of 1,500–2,500 words on related topics. Please contact the Editors before beginning a review to avoid overlaps and for more information about the journal’s review scope.

A link to Intellect’s style guide can be found here:

https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/2160/house-style-guide-6th-ed.-i.pdf.

All correspondence should be directed to BOTH Drs Ue AND Bernthal.