International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Announces its 7th annual Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for a critical essay on the fantastic written in a language other than English. The IAFA defines the fantastic to include science fiction, folklore, and related genres in literature, drama, film, art and graphic design, and related disciplines. Essays should be of high scholarly quality, as for publication in an academic journal. For more information on the award and on past winners, please see http://fantastic-arts.org/awards/jamie-bishop-memorial-award/ (please note the updated submission criteria, below).

Submission criteria:

• We consider essays from 3,000-10,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography).
• Essays may be unpublished scholarship submitted by the author, or already published work nominated either by the author or another scholar (in which case the author’s permission should be obtained before submission).
• Essays must have been written and (when applicable) published in the original language within the last three years prior to submission.
• An abstract in English must accompany all submissions; an English translation of the title of the essay should also be included.
• Only one essay per person may be submitted each year.
• Submissions must be made electronically in Word or RTF format.

Deadline for submissions: September 1st

Prize: $250 U.S. and one year’s free membership in the IAFA to be awarded at the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts held each March. Winning essays may be posted on the IAFA website in the original language and/or considered for publication in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (http://www.fantastic-arts.org/jfa/) should they be translated into English.

Please direct all inquiries and submissions to:
Rachel Haywood Ferreira
Department of World Languages and Cultures
3102 Pearson Hall
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011 USA
Email: rachelhf@iastate.edu

• Mainstream Hollywood vs. Global SF Cinema
• SF Comics and Manga
• SF Anime and Animation
• SF on the Internet and the World Wide Web
• Multimedia “dispersed” SF narratives
• Fandom, Cosplay, Mashups, and Remixing
• Broadcast and Cable SF Television
• SF Videogames
• World’s Fairs, Theme Parks, and other “Material” SF Media
• Short-form SF film
• Afrofuturism
• SF and/in Music
• SF Idiom and Imagery in Advertising
• Webisodes and TV Games
• SF Art and Illustration

The conference will also feature the fourth Science Fiction Studies Symposium on the topic of “SF Media(tions),” with speakers Mark Bould, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., and Vivian Sobchack. Keynote speakers and special guests will be announced as they are confirmed; see the conference website at <http://eaton.ucr.edu> for periodic updates.

Conference sessions will be held at the newly remodeled and centrally located Riverside Marriott Hotel, with rooms at a reduced conference rate ($109). For more about the hotel, see their website at <http://www.marriott.com/hotels/ hotel-information/travel/ralmc-riverside-marriott>. A block of rooms will also be available at a discount ($139) at the historic Mission Inn Hotel and Spa two blocks from the Marriott: <http://missioninn.com>. Rooms in both hotels are limited and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Abstracts of 500 words (for papers of 20-minutes in length) should be submitted by September 14, 2012. We also welcome panel proposals gathering three papers on a cohesive topic. Send electronic submissions to conference co-chair Melissa Conway at <Melissa.Conway@ucr.edu> with the subject heading: EATON/SFRA CONFERENCE PROPOSAL. Please include a brief bio with your abstract and indicate whether your presentation would require A/V. Participants will be informed by December 1 if their proposals have been accepted.

Gothic Technologies/Gothic Techniques

Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association, 2013 August 5 – 8, 2013: University of Surrey, United Kingdom

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck College, University of London), Professor Fred Botting (Kingston University), other Keynotes TBA

Recent Gothic studies have foregrounded a plethora of technologies associated with Gothic literary and cultural production. Its presence is witnessed in how techno-science has contributed to the proliferation of the Gothic: the publishing and print culture disseminating Gothic texts, eighteenth-century architectural innovations, the on-line gaming and virtual Goth communities, the special effects of Gothic-horror cinema.

One question raised by these new developments concerns the extent to which they generate new Gothic techniques. How does technology generate a new Gothic aesthetic? We are particularly interested in addressing how Gothic technologies have, in a general sense, produced and perpetuated ideologies and influenced the politics of cultural practice. However, we also want to reconsider the whole idea of what we mean by a Gothic ‘technique’ which arguably underpins these new formations of the Gothic. To that end we invite papers that question not only what we might constitute a Gothic aesthetic from the eighteenth century to the present day, but how that is witnessed in various forms such as the Female Gothic, models of the sublime, sensation fiction, cyberpunk as well as the various non-text based media that the Gothic has infiltrated. We also invite proposals which address how various critical theories help us to evaluate either these new technological trends or critically transform our understanding of the intellectual space occupied by earlier Gothic forms. Papers which explore the place of science, writing, and the subject are thus very welcome.

We thus seek to explore how Gothic technologies/Gothic techniques textualize identities and construct communities within a complex network of power relations in local, national, transnational and global contexts.

Papers exploring any aspect of Gothic technologies/Gothic techniques in writing, film and other media are welcome. Topics could include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Gothic Architecture and Technology
• Printing, Publishing and Gothic Disseminations
• Terror, Terrorism, Technology
• The techniques of philosophy – the sublime
• Colonizing Technology and Postcolonial Gothics
• Technology of Monsters
• Gothic Art
• Enlightenment Gothic and Science
• War, Violence, Technology
• (Neo)Victorian Gothic
• Gothic poetry
• Gothic Bodies: Modifications, Mutations, Transformations
• Weird Science, Mad Scientists
• Staging the Gothic
• B-movies, Laughter and Comic Gothic
• Demonic Technologies / Demonizing Technology
• Theorising the Gothic
• Gothic Geography – mapping the Gothic
• Cloning, Duplicating, Doubling
• Hybrids, Cyborgs and Transgression
• Digital Gothics and Uncanny Media

Abstracts (350 words max.) for 20 minute papers may be submitted to IGA2013@surrey.ac.uk<mailto:IGA2013@surrey.ac.uk> . The submission deadline is February 1, 2013. We also welcome submissions for panels (consisting of three papers) that address specific topics.

The Maester’s Chain:  Essays on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire

Edited by: Dr. Susan Johnston, Associate Professor of English, University of Regina

Dr. Jes Battis, Assistant Professor of English, University of Regina

“A master forges his chain with study, he told me.  The different metals are each a different kind of learning, gold for the study of money and accounts, silver for healing, iron for warcraft.  And he said there were other meanings as well.”

George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire (1991-), has produced a constellation of intertext:  fan fiction, merchandise, artwork, graphic novels, and an acclaimed HBO television program.  Many would argue that the series diverges from traditional epic fantasy, in its preoccupation with the grim realities of a medieval world.  Martin’s ambiguous treatment of the supernatural, and his interest in the radical failure of chivalry, has made A Song of Ice and Fire unique among fantasy texts.  The success of HBO’s Game of Thrones has created new fan communities, possibly reinvigorating the genre as a subject of critical inquiry, although there are significant differences between the source-text and its recent adaptation.  Game of Thrones has also received as much criticism as acclaim, largely due to its presentation of sexuality and violence.

We aim to collect a diversity of essays on the world of Westeros and its characters.  Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Adaptation
• Animals (dire wolves, shape-shifting, animal consciousness)
• Artwork
• Childhood
• Chivalry, monarchy, and other power structures
• Disability and/or monstrosity
• Fan communities and texts
• Food and cultures of consumption
• History and national myth-making
• Knowledge networks (maesters, ravens, print culture)
• Languages (Old Valyrian, Dothraki, Braavosi, and others)
• Literary antecedents (fantasy traditions, classical and medieval influences)
• Magic and the supernatural
• Race and ethnicity
• Religions (monotheism, polytheism, other treatments of the sacred)
• Sexualities (reproduction, queerness, eunuchism, prostitution, incest)
• Songs and mummery

The submission deadline is December 15, 2012.  Abstracts (500 – 1000 words, in .doc or .docx format) should be emailed to:

susan.johnston@uregina.ca
jes.battis@uregina.ca

Completed chapters (20-25 pages, double-spaced) are due April 15, 2013.

Call for Papers

For a special issue on “Science Fictions” Studies in the Novel seeks critical responses to the genres of SF.  Essays would consider debates within SF’s various communities of genre and affiliation, as well as across these communities, with an emphasis on the SF novel or writings of any kind by noted SF novelists. Submission deadline is September 1, 2014; all questions and submissions should be directed to studiesinthenovel@unt.edu.

Guest Editor:  Farah Mendlesohn, Professor and Chair of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, author of Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan 2008), and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003).