CfP: Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature
Call for Papers
Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature
Issue 3.2 (Summer 2013) ‘Neither Here Nor There: The (Non-)Geographical Futures of Comparative Literature’
This is a Joint Special Issue between Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Peking University Journal of Comparative Literature, and Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature.
In this special issue, Inquire invites article submissions that consider the relationship between geography and the study of literature. As always, Inquire encourages intellectual discussions that approach the text from inside and outside, considering the movement of literary artifacts across geographical spaces as well as the significance of geographical movement within literature.
This special issue also encourages a disciplinary focus. Recent understandings of world literature have moved away from a focus on delineating canons of geographically-distributed great works, and towards describing a complex process of influence and reaction between increasingly-porous national and linguistic boundaries. As the discipline that most clearly claims responsibility for understanding literature beyond such boundaries, does Comparative Literature need to follow in the tracks of its object of study and somehow deterritorialize itself? What would such a project mean, in terms of new methodologies, objects of study, disciplinary self-conceptions, development of linguistic and literary competencies, and interdepartmental or international research collaborations?
The following lines of inquiry are of particular interest:
1) Consequences for literature and theory: the ongoing construction of “world literature”; the future of postcolonialism; geographical boundaries and genre boundaries; the relationship of post-national and pre-national patterns of cultural exchange; &c.
2) Border crossing books: the spatiality of minority and exilic literatures; the post-spatial and the post-human; transnational transgender; the online persistence of virtual cultural geographies; literary dissemination and book migration; cultural diaspora; &c.
3) Liminality and the discipline: national Comparative Literature departments and intra-national research projects; the unequal institutional distribution of given discourses between departments or between nations; impacts for the discipline, its researchers and its students; academia in flux; Comparative Literature in flux; &c.
4) Precipices of methodology: theory and practice; linguistic limits to the “return of the aesthetic”; detteritorializing the comparative method; new frontiers of trans-disciplinary methodologies; comparing without borders; &c.
5) Literary representations of geography: city, space and the nation in literature (e.g., post-9/11 reactionary literature, WW1 or WW11 literature, propaganda materials, etc.); racial and ethnic experiences of space; writing in exile; power relations in different geographical scales; gender politics of space; the body as political and cultural space; geography in postcolonial and diasporic literatures; space and place; urban and rural spaces in modern literature; &c.
Submission deadline: March 15, 2013
Any graduate student of Peking University or University of Alberta who presented at the colloquium, held at the University of Alberta in April 2012, on the subject of how the discipline of comparative literature can continue to reorient itself in a world where the nature of human relationships to geography are in constant reconfiguration, is eligible to submit expanded versions of their presentation to this special issue. All articles must meet the guidelines for submission (see below).
Submission Guidelines
Inquire accepts article submissions by graduate students relevant to the current call for papers. All submissions must meet the following guidelines: original work not submitted elsewhere, complete articles in English, 5,000-7,000 words (including works cited list and endnotes), MLA formatting, 12-pt Times New Roman, double-spaced, justified. Please include a separate cover sheet with name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a short biography (max 60 words). Send inquiries and submissions to inquire@ualberta.ca. Please check our website for updates and information: http://inquire.streetmag.org/
