Civic Arts and Humanities - Due April 1, 2016

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Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory
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Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory

Topic: Civic Humanities

In 1845 Rudolphe Töpffer published an essay about the aesthetic, rhetorical, and philosophical foundations of literature in prints, and with a desire to make public (and accessible to a public audience) academic, intellectual, and scholarly works advocating for an ethic of collective action—mostly through critiques using parody and caricature. At the time, which Töpffer addresses, the most promising mode of composing such work was through figure drawing and the then-recent emergence of lithographic printing technologies. Similarly, 140 years later Gregory L. Ulmer started advocating for similar work with the emergence of the personal video camera, writing that contemporary electronic media provide "the very techniques for popularization, for communicating the knowledge of the cultural disciplines to a general public,
which the normal, so called humanist critics claim to desire" ("The Object of Post-Criticism").

Since the publication of this groundbreaking essay, Ulmer has gone on to have an illustrious career, publishing articles upon articles and more than 10 book-length works addressing the importance and significance of the transition from literate (print) culture to an electrate (digital) culture. In addition, Ulmer's work, much like Töpffer's work, is aimed at making theory practical—as evidenced by his second book's title, Applied Grammatology, in which he develops the initial methods of rhetorical invention in an electronically mediated world.

Most recently, Craig Saper and Victor Vitanza have edited a collection of Ulmer's essays, titled Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer's Textshop Experiments. As they write, "the work in this volume demonstrates how the false opposition (or at least distinction) between art, as conceived as an academic discipline, and theory prevents theory from incorporating vanguard problem-solving strategies and art from experimenting with conceptual issues" (xiv). As such, for the Spring 2016 issues of the Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory, this call for papers seeks submissions that seek to make theory (cultural, religious, and other genres of theory) public via vanguard methods that acknowledge the contemporary milieu of networked environments, electronic or otherwise.

In addition to traditional arguments/essays, this issue is especially interested in post-critical (to use an Ulmerian term) works perform a theory of public art and humanities work, including the use of print (Drucker; Gitelman), electronic (e.g., Hayles; Haraway; Sommer; Ulmer), and material (Bennett; Latour; Rickert; Situationists International) media. Analyses art and media practice aimed at informing "experimental art strategies" for exploring contemporary theoretical questions (Ulmer, Electracy 103)—that is, methods, case studies, and creative works applying such theories—are also welcomed.

Full articles are due by April 1, 2016. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by May 1, 2016.

Questions and articles should be directed to Sergio C. Figueiredo
(revfigueiredo@gmail.com).