Call for Submissions
2 open calls for submissions
Secretions: Social/ Literary/ Planetary Bodies and their By-Products
This issue of Working Papers, the Graduate Journal of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Romance Languages, will be devoted to the relationship between art, culture, human life, and waste.
In many ways, the issue of waste – like the issue of sustenance – is the place where our thoughts about our bodies (sexuality, sanitation, aesthetics, infection, comfort, privacy) and our thoughts about our world (toxicity, sustainability, beauty, danger, conflict) collide.
Correspondences
This issue devotes itself to correspondences of all kinds, be they historical, fictional, poetic, or symbolic. From real-life correspondences that constitute oeuvres in themselves, to epistolary novels, to poetic epistles, to lettere amorose, to electronic communication, letters have long had a crucial place in our cultural heritage. But correspondences occur on a metaphorical as well as on a formal level; Baudelaire's celebrated “Correspondances,” for instance, are emblematic of the multilayered connections among things in the world.
Past Calls for Submissions
Traversing Geographies
Our Fall 2008 issue aims to establish a transdisciplinary dialogue to reflect upon the productions, representations, and inscriptions of space, and the various ways in which these processes configure a series of complex maps or cartographies, whether spatial, social, artistic, or epistemological. Some of the questions to be considered are: How has space been imagined in different historical moments and from different subjectivities? What is the relationship between the material and the conceptual spheres of space? How are categories such as identity, subjectivity, and sovereignty inscribed in the distribution of space? What are the intersections between time, space, and the body? Learn more »
The Underground
The Spring 2008 issue of Working Papers will be devoted to the underground: a topos that operates both below the Earth’s surface and on the margins of public consciousness. With such diverse associations as the London subway and graphic novels, the underground functions as a potential intersection of location, ideology, and art. We encourage graduate students to consider the implications of the subterranean in cultural production. Within a narrative context, the underground can be the site of a physical or allegorical journey, as in Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth or Dante’s Inferno. The term also carries an aesthetic dimension associated with experimentation and the avant garde. Moreover, it is historically synonymous with subversive political struggle, as in Resistance publishing during World War II. We invite graduate students from all universities and disciplines to submit articles that examine the underground and out-of-sight in French, Francophone, Spanish, Latin American, Portuguese, and Italian literature, film, art, and popular culture from the Middle Ages to the present day. Learn more »
Heroes, Gods, and Myths:
The Myths That We Create and How They Create Us
Annual Graduate Romanic Association Conference
University of Pennsylvania
Our Fall issue consists of the Selected Proceedings of the Annual Graduate Romanic Association Conference at the University of Pennsylvania. The theme of this year’s conference, ‘Heroes, Gods, and Myths,’ encourages a diversity of methodological and thematic approaches to exploring myths of all kinds in the Romance languages, literatures, and cinema. Papers may examine such topics as the cultural, psychological, ideological and political implications of myth, taking into account its modes of existence, circulation, appropriation, and relevance to writing and artistic practices.
Papers accepted to the conference are eligible for submission to the Fall issue of Working Papers. The deadline for submission is June 15. All conference papers submitted to Working Papers will be subject to our double-blind, peer-review evaluation policy. Please review our guidelines and requirements before submitting your paper.
Representations of Violence / Violence of Representation.
Our Spring issue will be devoted to exploring the chiasmic relationship between representation and violence. We encourage graduate students to attend to the ways that cultural products such as art, literature, and film both manifest and perpetuate violence. Whether glorifying heroic violence as in La Chanson de Roland, sparking it as in Hugo's Hernani, or condemning it as does Picasso's Guernica, art is imbued with the violent zeitgeist of its period of creation. Additionally, there are ways in which the very act of creation effects violence. As Russian formalist Roman Jakobson put it, literature is "organized violence committed on ordinary speech." We invite graduate students from all universities and disciplines to submit articles that examine the intersections between representation and violence in French, Francophone, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American, and Italian literature, film, art, and popular culture from the Middle Ages to the present day.