International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Call for Papers and Proposals
42nd Meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies
CPF Deadline: July 15, 2017

Conference Theme: Utopian Gracelands, Dystopian Blues, and the City on the Bluff

When: Nov 9-12, 2017
Where: Doubletree By Hilton Memphis Downtown, 185 Union Avenue, Memphis, TN

The Society for Utopian Studies is pleased to be meeting once again in Memphis, Tennessee, and invites you to submit papers and proposals on the theme, “Utopian Gracelands, Dystopian Blues, and the City on the Bluff.” As an interdisciplinary society from its founding, we encourage scholars and practitioners from any academic field to join and participate, as well as architects, city planners, artists, musicians—anyone whose work relates to utopian thought and possibility, and dystopian realities and visions. Members of intentional communities are also welcome to attend and/or to present.

Abstracts and proposals of up to 250 words are due by 15 July 2017 for the following:

· a 15-20 minute individual paper;
· a full panel of up to four speakers, or an informal roundtable of 3-6 presenters (encouraged!);
· a performance of a creative work or presentation of an artwork or artifact;
· a visual/audio presentation in the form of a poster and/or demo.

As we do every year, the Society invites papers on any topic related to the literature, history and theory of utopia in literature and practice. This broad umbrella covers dystopia, science fiction, speculative fiction, communal experiments and failures, film representations of any of the above.

However, we especially welcome proposals related to our place-based conference theme: Utopian Gracelands, Dystopian Blues, and the City on the Bluff. The City of Memphis is famous for many things: its role in “King Cotton” and the slave trade; its role in the Civil Rights Movement; its music of blues, soul, and jazz; its barbecue and catfish; and, of course, its river. Within walking distance of the Doubletree Downtown, you can visit iconic sites representing each of these: The National Civil Rights Museum; Beale Street, Sun Studios, and (a short drive from downtown) Elvis Presley’s home, Graceland; the Rendezvous for barbecue; and you can’t really miss the “mighty” Mississippi River.

Less well known is the history of indigenous peoples from the Quapaw and Chickasaw Nations, who inhabited the area now known as Memphis on the Mississippi River bluffs, and forced to leave during the Indian Removals of the 1800s. Burial mounds are still visible within the city limits. (Other Tennessee tribes include the Shawnee, Yuchi, Cherokee, and Koasati).

Memphis also claims its fame as the home of FedEx, and of America’s first supermarket chain, Piggly Wiggly. Memphis history thus provides a wide variety of possible approaches and topics related to utopian and dystopian thought and practice. We particularly invite papers related to any aspect of the following:

· Civil Rights and Utopian Political Movements: the history of utopian politics and political movement in Memphis and the South; “the Promised Land”
· Indigenous Communities: Utopia and Dystopia, Before and After the European Arrival
· Global Memphis: from riverboats to vapor trails; transnational exchanges (of cotton, slaves, culture, and packages)
· The Mississippi River in Song and Literature
· The Memphis Sound and the History of Contemporary Music
· African American Literatures and Histories
· Southern Intentional Communities
· Indigenous Literatures and Histories
· Graceland: Elvis Presley and/or his famous home; but also the concept of grace, and its relation to utopian thinking or thematics. Another possible related topic: Celebrity
· Supermarkets and Consumer Utopias

As noted above, non-theme related papers are always accepted! Recent themes of interest at our meetings have included:

· Science/Speculative Fictions from around the world
· Digital Humanities—given the longevity of Utopia and its many imitators, what forms of technology showcase this texts or other imagined or real-world utopias?
· Teaching—pedagogical issues in teaching Utopia and similar works of utopian fiction, teaching dystopian works, theories of teaching speculative fiction
· Artwork—presentations or displays of art and/or analyses of utopian themes in the works of Memphis or Southern artists

**DEADLINE: 15 July 2017 for 250-word abstracts and proposals**

Please use our online forms for submissions by clicking on Submit A Proposal on our conference website, http://utopian-studies.org/conference2017.

For information about registration, travel or accommodations, please contact Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor at jaw55@psu.edu; for information about panel topics, assistance finding co-panelists, and other questions about the conference program, please contact Andrew Byers or Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers at SUS2017Conference@gmail.com. Those looking for co-panelists are reminded that H-Utopia (https://networks.h-net.org/h-utopia) offers a platform for sending out panel CFPs.

And for information on restaurants, local maps, transportation, and other information about the Memphis area, visit http://www.memphistravel.com/.

AND DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE SOCIETY’S AWARDS. Nominate yourself, or someone else, as appropriate!

Arthur O. Lewis Award – for younger scholars, revision of SUS conference paper. Deadline approaching: February 28, 2017

Eugenio Battisti Award – for the best article in Utopian Studies (journal) during 2016

Kenneth M. Roemer Innovative Course Design Award – for creative course modules or syllabi. Deadline: Sept 15, 2017

Larry E. Hough Distinguished Service Award – for service to the Society

Lyman Tower Sargent Award for Distinguished Scholarship – for lifetime achievement in the field of Utopian Studies

Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies Issue #16

deadline for submissions:
March 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies

contact email:
irishjournalgothichorror@gmail.com

The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (ISSN 2009-0374) is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, open-access, electronic publication, affiliated with the Irish Network for Gothic Studies, and dedicated to the study of gothic and horror literature, film, new media, and television.

We are currently seeking submissions of articles and reviews that deal with any aspect of gothic and horror studies, including (but not limited to) literature, film, television, theatre, art and architecture, music, and new media. Please note that we cannot include pictures or sound files with articles or reviews.

We will consider articles between 5000-7000 words. Articles should follow the MHRA style sheet, which is available in full here: http://www.mhra.org.uk/series/MSG.

Article deadline: 1st March 2017.

Reviews should be no more than 1000 words (though we may consider longer essay-type reviews), and should include full publication/release/transmission dates and details of the subject discussed. Please note, reviews of contemporary and classic horror films should focus on those that have been released or revived theatrically or on DVD within the last year.

Reviews deadline: 1st May 2017.

We are happy to consider submissions prior to these deadlines. However, decisions regarding publication may not be made until after the Call for Submissions has closed.

Articles and reviews can be submitted for consideration to Dr Dara Downey and Dr Niall Gillespie at irishjournalgothichorror@gmail.com.

The Gibson Critics Don’t See:
Omissions, Lacunae, and Absences

There are few science fiction writers whose critical coverage can rival that of William Gibson, the pope of cyberpunk, whose Neuromancer (1984) stormed postmodern syllabi and majorly contributed to opening the academy to science fiction. Nevertheless, the critical attention to Gibson has been running mostly in several intensely interesting, albeit selective, grooves, leaving many aspects of his work unexplored.

This project aims to reexamine and reassess William Gibson’s literary oeuvre in the early decades of the 21st century. While the writer’s technological prescience, his obsession with brands, and his reflections on the nature of cognition have been investigated by numerous scholars, there are other dimensions of his work that warrant more critical attention. To address this lacuna, Polish Journal for American Studies (PJAS) seeks articles for a special issue devoted to the neglected, forgotten, and bypassed aspects of the Canadian master’s fiction. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

· the poetic and stylistic quality of Gibson’s fiction
· the author’s generic maneuvers at the intersection of science fiction, noir, crime, and spy genres
· the increasing realism of his later novels and his relationship with science fiction
· the representation of the post-Cold War world order
· the artistic, literary, and pop-cultural influences and references
· the preoccupation with cultural memory, retroism, hauntology, and spectrality
· the politics of Gibson’s fiction
· the apparent un-adaptability of Gibson’s fiction in the age of transmedia and cultural franchises
· the critical and popular reception of Gibson’s fiction in various countries and territories

Abstracts of 500 words should be submitted by March 31, 2017 to Paweł Frelik, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin (pawel.frelik@gmail.com) and Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska, University of Warmia and Mazury, Olsztyn (alphabase17@gmail.com). Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by April 28, 2017. Full drafts (5,000 to 7,000 words) will be due by September 30, 2017. The issue is provisionally scheduled for the second half of 2018. For more information about the journal, please visit our website: http://www.paas.org.pl/pjas/.

“Imagining Alternatives” – CFP for a Special Issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

deadline for submissions:
June 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

contact email:
megancondis@gmail.com

CFP for a Special Issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities

“Imagining Alternatives”

From Afrofuturism to dystopian, apocalyptic fiction to alternate history to ecofeminism and cli-fi, authors of speculative fictions have been interrogating alternative worlds in literature, film, television, comic books, and video games. These visions give us access to alien planets as well as alternative perspectives on our own pasts, presents, and possible futures. They reflect our hopes and fears; they offer new narratives of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality; they suggest the magic and the horror embedded in our own realities.

This special issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities invites authors to interrogate imagined alternatives to existing systems of knowledge and distributions of power. We are interested in submissions engaging with a wide variety of subjects, genres, mediums, time periods, and national origins: from cyberpunk to steampunk, and from Gothic fiction to fan fiction. We also want to encourage authors to imagine alternative formats for their own work. In addition to traditional essays, we will also consider roundtables, interviews, photo essays, web comics, YouTube videos, Flash animations, web-based games, and other creative works.

To be considered for inclusion in the special issue, submit your work via the Resilience website (http://www.resiliencejournal.org/publishing-in-resilience/submission-form/) by June 1, 2017 for publication in the fall of 2017. Be certain to indicate in the abstract that you are submitting a piece for the “Imagining Alternatives” special issue.

Please direct any questions about the special issue to Megan Condis via email at megancondis.gmail.com or on Twitter @MeganCondis.

GFF 2017: Realities and World Building
University of Vienna, September 20th-23rd 2017

The creation and experience of “new” worlds is a central appeal of the fantastic. From Middle Earth to variations of the Final Frontier, the fantastic provides a seemingly infinite number of fantastic “worlds” and world concepts. It develops and varies social and cultural systems, ideologies, biological and climatic conditions, cosmologies and different time periods. Its potential and self-conception between the possible and the impossible offer perspectives to nearly every field of research.

The plurality and concurrent existence of different, even contradictory concepts of reality is an established topos in cultural and social sciences. In a similar fashion, scientific narratives can simultaneously coexist with fantastic ones within the cultural network of meaning – without creating an existential antagonism between them. The reason for that is not that one of these narratives is true while the other is not, but – following Hayden White, who assumed that scientific and literary narratives have more in common than not – because both of them are fictional. If a fantastic narrative is internally consistent, it is in a Wittgensteinian sense as true as Newton’s laws. This poses an existential problem for the fantastic: if it applies to every consistent narrative, what is the defining difference between fantastic and other narratives?

In our everyday practice, however, we seem to easily distinguish the fantastic from other aspects of reality. How is that possible? How can fantastic worlds emerge within and besides other multiple world-conceptions? What are the functions of fantastic worlds in the construction of reality? In designating texts as fantastic, we explicitly assert their fictitious character. Which practices do we employ to facilitate this designation?

We call narratives fantastic that violate our common reality consensus, thus establishing their own counter-reality consensus – in other words, a different world. This is done in different ways, thereby defining fantastic genres: for example, science fiction uses key motives like objects and cultural practices (interstellar travels, wormhole-generators, etc.) for world-building that belong to a realm of conceivable future possibility. While the modern scientific reality consensus does not categorically preclude beaming, it does deny the very possibility of a demon summoning.

In order to serve as a foil to the real, the fantastic has to play an ambiguous role: key motives of its multiple worlds have to be recognizable as imaginary, but at the same time at least some of these elements have to be linked with common reality consensus. A typical strategy for achieving this ambiguity is the incorporation of cultural practices that remind us of established perceptions of history, most prominently perhaps the European Middle Ages. Thus, a perceptible distance between the narrative and the recipient’s common reality consensus gets established, while using parts of this very consensus to render the narrative comprehensible.

Wolfgang Iser considers the “fictive” to be an intentional act, and the “imaginary” the recipient’s conception of the fictionalization’s effects. World Building is part of every narrative, but as a result of variable cultural contexts, every narrative is involved in different modes of production and perception. The conference aims to emphasize and reflect these very acts of fictionalization used to build fantastic worlds – in different media, and on theoretical as well as methodological levels.

Accepted Keynotes:
Stefan Ekman (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
Farah Mendlesohn (University of Stafford, UK)

Possible Topics:
· Intermedia (and media-specific) features and indicators of fantastic worlds in film, TV, literature, (digital) games, etc.
· How does the extradiegetic constitute fantastic worlds and vice versa? Social and cultural systems, ideologies, biological and climatic conditions, cosmologies, etc.
· World-building methods and practices: reflections on economic and technical resources; transparent world-building (Making-ofs, exhibitions, interviews, etc.)
· Construction plans: sourcebooks, world editors, Table-Tops, miniatures, dioramas, LARPs
· We are of course open to further suggestions. The conference will also feature an “Open Track” for presentations beyond the scope of this CFP.

The GFF awards two stipends to students to help finance traveling costs (250 Euro each). Please indicate if you would like to be considered.

CALL HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO February 28th 2017: please send short bio & abstracts (500 words max.) to thomas.walach@univie.ac.at

Please take a look at this CFP for the 2018 MLA convention and consider circulating it among colleagues. A shareable link to the CFP can be found here: https://seanguynes.com/2017/01/12/cfp-mla-2018/.

MLA 2018 CFP
4-7 January 2018
New York City, NY

Institutions, Markets, Speculations:
Creative Economies of Science Fiction

This panel builds on recent interest in literary institutions, as evidenced for example in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard UP, 2009), and dovetails with older investments in the literary marketplace with which literary institutions are necessarily imbricated, to question the place of science fiction (SF) in literary history by looking at its relationship with literary institutions and markets.

This panel for the 2018 MLA convention asks how, in other words, literary institutions—publishers, magazines, book series, anthologies, awards, conventions, writing groups, bookstores, archives, academic and popular critical venues, and so on—impacted the development of SF and how the relationship between literary institutions and SF was mediated by the social, political, and economic forces of cultural production? This panel finally asks what is the shape of SF’s creative economies and what are its positions within the large formations of the literary and cultural marketplace?

To draw further on McGurl for an example, panelists might ask whether the postwar expansion of creative writing programs and the growth of a cohort of professionally trained creative writers led to the interest in “literary” genre fiction, such as slipstream SF, and how in response the literary market has come to categorize such fiction as “literature” as opposed to “science fiction.” Alternatively, panelists might explore the role that awards like the Nebula and Hugo, or “Best of…” anthologies, played in crafting an SF canon.

Papers submitted for consideration to the panel should ultimately be interested in asking the framing question: What is the place of literary institutions and literary markets in the history of SF? Competitive papers will also demonstrate the ways in which studying SF (or popular genre fiction more generally) might be useful to expanding work on literary institutions and markets.

Science fiction should be broadly understood for the purpose of this panel as moving across media, language, nation, market, brow, etc.

To respond to the session CFP please follow the MLA’s guidelines, available here: https://apps.mla.org/callsforpapers.

The official CFP for “Institutions, Markets, Speculations: Creative Economies of Science Fiction” on the MLA website is available here: https://apps.mla.org/cfp_detail_10014.

Please send 200-300 words abstracts, as well as a brief professional bio, to Sean A. Guynes at guynesse@msu.edu.

Abstracts and bios are due by March 10, 2016. Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
All the best,
—
Sean A. Guynes
Editorial Assistant, The Journal of Popular Culture
Ph.D. Student, Department of English, Michigan State University
guynesse@msu.edu
www.seanguynes.com

Final Call for Contributors (2/1/17 Abstracts; 8/1/17 Essays)

Horror by the Book: Monstrous Manuscripts, Sacred Scrolls, and Illuminated Evil on Screen

Nothing, seemingly, could be more innocuous—less threatening—than a book, but those steeped in the world of horror films know better.  Dusty tomes can harbor the souls of the dead, steal the souls of the living, or call forth the undead to walk the Earth. Spell books, passed down through generations of witches and warlocks, give those who read from them the power to bend the fabric of reality itself.  The lost scriptures of ancient religions drive non-believers mad, and unleash powerful demons or long-banished elder gods onto an unsuspecting world. Even in stories told on screens in moving images, the book remains a cornerstone of horror.

This collection focuses on genre horror films in which books—manuscripts, diaries, scrolls, sacred texts, chronicles, books of spells, etc. — play an active, material role in the story. The volume will explore the ways in which these texts shape and drive the horror of their narratives, asking new, incisive questions about the ways in which books function as warnings, guides, portals, prisons, and manifestations of the monstrous, as well as the ways in which those texts further the idea of the book as a timeless container of horrors, mysteries, hidden histories, and knowledge beyond human comprehension.

We seek proposals for intelligent, accessible chapters–rigorous scholarship and innovative ideas expressed in clear, vigorous, jargon-free prose—that examine and critically analyze the book as it is portrayed in the horror genre across a range of films and eras.  Proposals for both topical essays and close readings of a single text are welcome. Proposals on films produced outside the US are very welcome. Previously unpublished work only, please.

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

* Books of the Dead
* Books of spells as witches’ and warlocks’ tools
* Books as containers for evil entities
* Books as portals to other worlds
* Cursed or enchanted books
* Holy Books of “elder gods”
* Books that summon demons
* Characters entrapped in books
* Books of lost (or hidden) wisdom
* Bibles and anti-Bibles

Work on topics focused on authors or the writing process, rather than their texts (such as The Shining, 1408, or Sinister), or in which the horror is only tangentially related to the book or its contents (such as Misery) fall outside the scope of this project.

Please send your 500-word abstract to both co-editors, Cindy Miller (cynthia_miller@emerson.edu) and Bow Van Riper (abvanriper@gmail.com).

Publication Timetable:

Abstracts – Feb. 1, 2017
First Drafts – Aug. 1, 2017
Revisions – Nov. 15, 2017
Submission – Jan. 15, 2018

Acceptance will be contingent upon the contributors’ ability to meet these deadlines, and to deliver professional-quality work.  Contributors who, without prior arrangement, do not submit their initial draft by the deadline will, regrettably, be dropped from the project.