Futures Near and Far: Utopia, Dystopia, and Futurity

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Phillip Wegner, University of Florida Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO SEPTEMBER 7TH

2016 marks the 500^th anniversary of Thomas More’s philosophical treatise Utopia. More’s book posed fundamental questions about governance, ethics, economics, and globalization at a volatile moment in European history, between the onset of European exploration and colonization of the New World and the beginnings of a radical intellectual revolution known as the Enlightenment. Utopia established a genre of philosophical inquiry and a realm of literary studies that thrives in contemporary intellectual discourse. In the spirit of More’s inquiries into the social and the political, scholars and artists have since taken up the task of rehearsing possible Utopian futures and, inversely, considering frightening dystopias.

In the spirit of More, the University of Florida English Graduate Organization invites abstracts for its 16^th annual conference Futures Near and Far: Utopia, Dystopia, and Futurity, to be held October 20th – 22nd, 2016. EGO wishes to address the lasting impact and influence of More’s Utopia across various fields and discourses. Papers and creative work need not deal with More’s work itself; we encourage any and all explorations of utopia, dystopia, and futurity.

Our conference takes up that last concept, “futurity”, as the ever-arriving moment in which visions of utopia and dystopia come to determine the far off as they affect the near and now.  We likewise then seek work that analyzes new technologies and cultural turns that bring the future to the present as they question how our present will deviate into potential futures. We hope to pay particular attention to the ways in which these phenomenons both have presently realized utopian and dystopian pasts as well as investigate future utopian and dystopian possibilities.

This interdisciplinary conference welcomes individual and panel submissions from varying fields, including, but not limited to: literary studies, film and media studies, rhetoric and composition, creative writing, narratology, cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, critical theory, comics and visual rhetoric, and philosophy.

Possible presentation topics include, but are certainly not limited to:

– More and Utopia

– Utopian studies

– Contemporary utopias

– Utopia revisions/rewritings

– Science fiction/future history

– Historical fiction/historiography

– Marxist literary criticism

– Feminist literary criticism

– Psychoanalytic criticism

– Eco-criticism

– Dystopia

– Dystopian YA

– Queer futurity

– Latinx-futurism

– Afro-futurism

– Cyberpunk

– Post-humanism

– Animal dystopias/futurity

– Obsolescence

– Apocalyptic fiction

– Speculative fiction

– Narrative and poetry

– Race and ethnicity

– Gender and sexuality

– Film and digital media

– Science and technology

– Disability studies

– Area studies

Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words for a 20-minute presentation to ufl.ego@gmail.com by September 7th. Along with your submission, please include your contact information, university affiliation (if applicable), and 3-5 keywords that describe your presentation topic. For panel proposals, please submit panelist abstracts along with a panel rationale and description. Lastly, please indicate any audio/visual requirements you may have. Authors of accepted papers will be notified the week of September 12th.

For questions concerning the conference, please contact the University of Florida’s English Graduate Organization at ufl.ego@gmail.com.

There is a metaphysical gravity that pulls consciousness towards the incomprehensible darkness of ‘dread,’ like the impulse to willingly dive into the abyss, as into something utterly unknown – an analogy made famous by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread. But what is dread, exactly, and what are the cultural, philosophical and physical significances of a genre that uses dread as its primary structure of feeling? Is ‘horror’ even a genre? Can it be encompassing of dread, terror, angst or revulsion? Contributions are invited for an edited anthology titled Something Stirs in the Shadows: Textualising Horror and Theorizing the Indian, which will focus on horror – body, dispositional, supernatural, cultural or cosmic – as the silence of philosophy, a (non)genre hard to pin down.

This volume will have two primary focii: horror as a (non) genre, and the Indian Horror Experience. The first concerns itself with the (in)validity of horror as the nihil negativum(negative nothingness), and will consist of theoretical attempts to come to grips with horror as a genre, while the second will consider the Indian Horror Experience as a canon which confirms/negates/problematizes the postulations of Part I. The anthology will therefore be open to horror narratives (literary, cinematic, musical, performative, et al) across time periods and spaces that engage with the Indian experience, as well as broader theorizations on the status of horror as a signifying narrative category.

The anthology attempts to fill the critical gaps that exist both with respect to the study of popular genres in India as well as more holistic theorisations on horror. It is targeted primarily at an academic audience and should act as a companion for the study of national and international genre narratives. It will, however, attempt to find new forms of engaging with horror as well – the interview, the graphic essay and other nontraditional ways of academic writing – and should, therefore, also be of interest to a non-academic audience concerned with a seemingly straightforward ‘consumption’ of horror. It will be published with a leading academic press. Written articles should be around 3000-7000 words (including notes and bibliography) and in English. Graphic essays and contributions in other non-traditional forms may be wordless or follow other narrative patterns. Contributions for Part 1 should have a strong theoretical underpinning and should engage with horror as whole or specific aspects of horror, while those for Part 2 should delve into significant issues of the Indian Horror Experience in whatever ways seem fit.

Possible topics for Part 1, on horror as a genre, include, but are not limited to:

What constitutes horror? Is it a genre or a mood/sentiment/structure of feeling? Is anything that engenders the emotion of “art-horror” (Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or the Paradoxes of the Heart) generically “horror”?
Do the narrative delights of horror stem from form and/or content, its syntactical and semantic elements, or is it open to historical vagaries and reader response?
Horror as a philosophy- Is it binding, in Lovecraft’s words, “…to leave our humanities and terrestrialism at the threshold,” to appreciate the credo of horror? Is horror anti-humanistic?
Horror as space of theorizing – Julia Kristeva, for instance, takes horror as the manifestation of the resistive semiotic elements in classic literary texts in Louis Ferdinand Celine
The transnationality of horror
Genre deviations – comic horror, giallo, video games, etc.
The economics of horror
Postmodernity and horror

Possible topics for Part 2, on the Indian Horror Experience, include, but are not limited to:

Genre deviations in India
Cinema and the evolution of horror
Horror in vernacular/Indian-English literatures
Horror and folk narratives
Histories of the horror genre in India
Colonial/Post-colonial approaches to horror
Indian society, politics and horror
Psychoanalysis and Indian horror
Religion and horror

Abstracts of no more than 500 words are invited by October 15, 2016, to horrorindianbook@gmail.com.

Please attach a current CV with institutional affiliation along with your abstract.

Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by October 29, 2016. The deadline for completed articles is April 1, 2017.

Editors: Dibyakusum Ray (NIT, Silchar) and Sudipto Sanyal (Techno India University)

Contact Info:
Dibyakusum Ray (Assistant Professor, English, NIT Silchar, Assam, India)

Sudipto Sanyal (Assistant Professor, English, Techno India University, Kolkata, India)

Contact Email:
horrorindianbook@gmail.com

Submissions open for a Superhero Anthology

Behind the Mask is Meerkat Press’ next themed anthology and it’s all about superheroes! But not how they saved the world this time. We’re more interested in the ordinary day-to-day challenges facing these extraordinary individuals: growing up, growing old, relationships, career struggles, parenting. How they cope with that age-old desire to fit in when, let’s face it, they don’t.

We want superhero stories with originality, diversity, and strong character development that celebrate the genre but manage to push its boundaries as well. Fun, quirky, serious, happy, sad: any tone will do, and we plan to have a nice variety. But bring us something fresh and relevant to this crazy world we live in today.

So without further ado, here are the details!

Short Fiction (3K to 6K words) for Behind the Mask: A Superhero Anthology

We are currently seeking short stories for our next short fiction superhero themed anthology, Behind the Mask.

Submission Deadline 9/15/16

Submission Guidelines:
Include a cover email containing genre, word count, brief bio, and contact information
Please confirm that your story has not been published before
Attach your complete story using Proper Short Story Manuscript Format (Meerkat exceptions: Times New Roman preferred, one space after period, italics are okay, em dashes are okay)

We accept .doc, .docx, .txt and .rtf files.

We do not accept reprints.

We do accept simultaneous submissions for short stories (but ask that you contact us immediately if your story is accepted elsewhere).

Send to Submissions@MeerkatPress.com with subject line: Superhero – Genre – Title – Author

Payment: We pay .02 to .08 per word for short fiction.

Final selections will be made in October-November 2016.

Behind the Mask Final Lineup Announced!

Uses of Fantasy in Changing Media Landscape

October 20–21, 2016, University of Jyväskylä

Jyväskylä, Finland

In recent years, fantasy fiction has gained popularity in different mediums. For instance, in television fantastic or speculative themes are more visible than ever before, and – as television scholar J. P. Telotte has noted – they are even invading the so called reality television. The Uses of Fantasy seminar focuses on the uses and users of fantasy in contemporary culture and contemporary representation of fantasy in different cultural mediums. In other words, the seminar concentrates on the reception, representation and meaning of fantasy in a changing media landscape. The seminar is organised by the project Uses of Fantasy – The World Hobbit Project in Finland in cooperation with the University of Jyväskylä and The Research Centre for Contemporary Culture.

We invite presentations and panels on the uses and users of fantasy as well as on the contemporary representations of fantasy on different mediums, such as literature, television, film, comics and graphic novels, games and new media. These may include but are not limited to:

– Audience responses and the meanings of fantasy; affective attachments to fantasy; fantasy fandom and other participatory user practices

– Adaptation and transmedia; representing fantasy via different mediums

– The cultural meanings of fantasy; representations of cultural phenomena through fantasy; the politics of fantasy (e.g. in relation to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, class, disability etc.)

– Fantasy and narration; fantastic characters; fantastic genres (science fiction, horror etc.)

Proposals for scholarly papers from any academic discipline that seek to examine, interrogate, and expand research related to any aspect of uses of fantasy, in any medium are welcome. Papers will be allowed a maximum presentation time of 20 minutes.

Our keynote speakers will be:

Associate Professor Susana Tosca from the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Professor Emerita Liisa Rantalaiho from the University of Tampere, Finland

Professor Emeritus Martin Barker from Aberystwyth University, UK

Please submit a 500-word proposal describing the content of your proposed paper, and few words about yourself and your research (including your current affiliation) to  hobbitprojectfinland(at)gmail.com. The deadline for the proposals is September 5, 2016.

If you have any questions about the seminar, please contact hobbitprojectfinland(at)gmail.com.

For more information, see https://theworldhobbitprojectfinland.com/seminar/

Graduate Journal aspeers Calls for Papers on “American Monsters”

Date:
October 23, 2016

Subject Fields:
American History / Studies, Cultural History / Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Literature, Graduate Studies

“The monster notoriously appears at times of crisis,” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen states in his Monster Theory. At first glance, Cohen’s assertion conveniently seems to fit the headlines by various venues–liberal and conservative–that all express a presumed crisis of the US Republican Party by referring to their 2016 presidential nominee as a “monster.” However, Cohen has a different kind of crisis, and different kinds of monsters, in mind, and a broader analytical trajectory to follow: For him, American culture as such can be read “from the monsters [it] engenders.”

Understood as a spectacular anomaly, a cultural shorthand that points at deeper turmoils, American culture has its fair share of monsters indeed. Whether we think of race, a social problem declared ‘dead’ by the post-race discourse, as a zombie roaming the land as deadly as ever, or whether we think of Barbara Creed’s seminal work on the perception and portrayal of femininity as ‘monstrous,’ categories of difference tend to express themselves with recourse to the figure of the monster and the logic of monstrosity. In fact, as Michael Rogin points out, monsters are “a continuing feature of American politics.” As such they are worthy of critical attention.

For its tenth issue, aspeers thus dedicates its topical section to “American Monsters” and invites European graduate students to critically and analytically explore American literature, (popular) culture, society, history, and politics through the monsters they beget. With a host of disciplines–ranging from economy and political science to history, media studies, literary and cultural studies, and beyond–engaging such monstrosity in various forms, we welcome papers from all the fields, methodologies, and approaches that comprise American studies as well as inter- and transdisciplinary submissions. Potential paper topics could cover (but are not limited to):

The literary figure of the fantastic monster, the zombie, the vampire, the alien, the cyborg, or the ghost, as tropes that do cultural work.

The forms of (racialized, gendered, etc.) othering involved in portraying social or cultural outsiders as monstrous.

Political rhetoric demonizing and dehumanizing the opponent.

The trope of the monster in various nonfictional discourses, such as law enforcement, medicine and psychology, and many others.

The pleasures and anxieties negotiated through representations of monsters, in genres such as horror, fantasy, science fiction, dystopia, (post)apocalypse, etc., and in media like novels, films, TV, graphic novels, or video games.

aspeers, the first and currently only graduate-level peer-reviewed journal of European American studies, encourages fellow MA students from all fields to reflect on the diverse meanings of monsters for American culture. Please note that the contributions we are looking for might address or go beyond the topical parameters outlined above. We welcome term papers, excerpts from theses, or papers specifically written for the tenth issue of aspeers by 23 October 2016. If you are seeking to publish work beyond this topic, please refer to our general Call for Papers. Please consult our submission guidelines and find some additional tips at www.aspeers.com/2017.

Contact Info:
aspeers: emerging voices in american studies

ISSN: 1865-8768
American Studies Leipzig
Beethovenstr. 15
04107 Leipzig, Germany

Contact Email:
info@aspeers.com
URL:
http://www.aspeers.com/2017