Call for Submissions

2 open calls for submissions: Secretions and Correspondences

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.

Possible approaches may include, but are not limited to the following:

  • The poetics of the epistle, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to the present day
  • Colonial communiqués, such as the Diaries of Columbus, or the Brevísima relación of Bartolomé de las Casas, among others
  • The dynamics of the epistolary novel; intercalated letters within hybrid texts (e.g. Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir Dit or the novels of the Argentine Manuel Puig, such as Boquitas Pintadas).
  • Novels written as letters to real people, eg. Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela.
  • Dispatches from distant places, such as the poems written about the Spanish Civil War by Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo; letters written by writers as personal chronicles, for example Ruben Darío’s accounts of Europe.
  • Letters from prison or exile, such as Gramsci’s Lettere dal Carcere
  • Letters as voiceover in film, such as in Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre and Hable con ella, or Truffaut’s Les Deux Anglaises et le continent
  • Stories that take the form of a letter, eg. Cortázar’s “Carta a una señorita en Paris.”
  • Postcards, telegrams, pneumatiques, e-mails, text messages, Twitterature, and the evolution of the epistolary form in literature, film and the arts. Recent works that include transcriptions of telephone calls or online chats, for example in the novels of Daniel López and Alberto Fuguet.
  • Books written or conceived as installments, e.g. Sarmientos’s Facundo.
  • “Open letters” on subjects of historical interest, such as Martí’s Nuestra américa, Simón Bolívar’s “Carta de Jamaica,” or Jean Paulhan’s “Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance”
  • Authors’ correspondences – as paratext (Genette), as oeuvre, as autobiography… or as conclusion or introduction (e.g. Martín Fierro)
  • Poison-pen letters in literature and film (as in, for instance, Clouzot’s Le Corbeau)
  • Pedagogical letters (e.g. Boileau’s Epîtres, Vargas-Llosa’s Cartas a un joven novelista)
  • Musical correspondences (e.g. Monteverdi’s Lettera Amorosa, Henri Dutilleux’s Correspondances)
  • The letter and psychoanalysis (Lacan’s reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter, Derrida’s Carte Postale)
  • Travel, journeys & “correspondances” (e.g. Jacques Réda’s poems devoted to the Paris métro)
  • Letters as primary sources: For example, in José Donoso’s Personal History of the "Boom"

We invite graduate students from all universities and disciplines to submit articles analyzing these notions and relationships in French, Francophone, Spanish, Latin American, and Italian literature, film, art, and popular culture from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Deadline for submission is Tuesday, Junel 15th. Read our submission guidelines.

We welcome papers in English and in any of the Romance languages.

Nota bene: Papers written in a language other than English should have as their primary focus literary and artistic works produced in that language. (We do not accept, for example, a paper in French written primarily about Spanish novels.)