Call for Submissions
Traversing Geographies
Deadline for Submission: Monday, May 12
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?
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the following areas of inquiry:
- Intellectual and Artistic Utopias, Dystopias, and Heterotopias: the political imagination and the lettered city, the space of art: immanence vs. transcendence, the politics of aesthetics (romanticism and nationalism, the avant-garde, etc.), artistic communities and art as a community
- Inside/Outside National Space: national mappings of nature and the geographical space, state and the building of social space and identity, space of representation and the representation of space, immigrant history (arrivals/departures), voids in the nation and stateless subjectivities
- The Local and the Global: new configurations of space and identity, local/global art and market politics, transversal networking and alternative communities, cyberspace, tourism and space as commodity, ecocriticism and the global ecology
- Mapping the City: the city and its metaphors, metropolis/megalopolis, center/periphery, the underground city, urban visual culture (graffiti, advertising, etc.), urban heteroglossia
- Inscriptions of Time in Space: including mapping memory and history through architecture and monuments, sutures, testimonies and archives, art and literary emergences
- Spatial Gestures and their Inscriptions: the body, violence and desire, biopolitics (repression, centralization, control), space and perception, body as an extension of space or body as the measure of space, body wanderings, performance politics and space, desire and alternative spatial configurations (gender, sexuality, and queer mappings)
- Spaces of Intimacy and Everyday Life: topographies of experience, itineraries and journeys of identity (travel narratives, urban wanderings, etc.), (re)inscribing the public and the private
We welcome papers that address these issues through different cultural productions and from the perspectives of literature, cinema and media studies, performance studies, history, and architecture. Papers written in English and in any of the Romance Languages will be considered. Please review our guidelines and requirements before submitting your paper.
Note to GRA Conference Participants: All papers presented at the Graduate Romanic Association's 2008 conference will be eligible for consideration for publication in Working Papers.
Past Calls
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.
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.
Deadline for submission is January 15th. View our guidelines for submissions before sending us your paper. We welcome papers in English and in any of the Romance languages. We also invite submissions of digital art and multimedia representations that address this topic.