The editorial board of Études irlandaises, a peer-reviewed journal, is seeking contributions for a special issue on "representations of the intellectual in Ireland", co-edited by Pr. Carle Bonafous-Murat and Pr. Maurice Goldring, to be published next Fall.

Despite Liam O'Dowd's ground-breaking study, On Intellectuals and Intellectual Life in Ireland: International, Comparative and Historical Context (1996), intellectuals are still considered by many to be absent figures from public debate or recent academic research. Some even argue that the "intellectuel" is a sociological category more or less specific to France, and that its transposition into the field of Irish studies raises issues which have to be addressed seriously, including the vexed question of how to translate the word properly.

Accordingly, one might begin to wonder if the supposed invisibility of intellectuals in Ireland is not yet another example of the "absence theory" discussed by Stephan Collini in his 2006 book, Absent Minds -- Intellectuals in Britain, about the place of intellectuals in the English-speaking world as compared with their role in the rest of Europe.

However, when dealing more specifically with Ireland, where the divide between the private and the public spheres does not seem as marked as in many other European societies, one might also wish to discuss the appositeness of a notion such as that of the intellectual. Irish writers, for instance, do not always occupy that position of exteriority which seems to characterize European intellectuals at large, and are more easily regarded as mediators of public opinion. In that respect, some of the most prominent figures of the Irish literary world since the 18th century might be used as exemplary cases reflecting some of the assumptions that this issue of Etudes irlandaises wishes to examine -- Swift and his alleged role as mouthpiece of the Irish people in The Drapier’s Letters, or Yeats orchestrating a press campaign of great magnitude during the Hugh Lane affair. More recently, Seamus Heaney’s ambivalent response to those who, in the 1970s, wanted him to take sides unquestioningly, might be reevaluated through the prism of irony, an oft-used weapon of intellectuals under duress.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
Professor Carle Bonafous-Murat, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, Institut du Monde Anglophone:
<carle.bonafous-murat@paris3.fr>
For more information on style-sheet requirements: http://etudes-irlandaises.septentrion.com

Following on from the success of the international  conference held on Mansfield in 2008, based on the centenary of Katherine Mansfield's arrival in London, the first issue of the peer-reviewed journal of the recently created Katherine Mansfield Society, Katherine Mansfield Studies,  is now calling for submissions for its special issue 'Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe'.

- On the theme of the special issue 'Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe'
- Creative pieces -- poetry and prose on Katherine Mansfield
- Book reviews of recently published books on Katherine Mansfield.

Mansfield travelled extensively in continental Europe during her lifetime. Nearly four years of her short adult life were spent there -- in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium. Many of her stories were written abroad, many have continental themes and/or European settings. As a writer, she has also received huge critical acclaim in many European countries – far more than in her homeland of New Zealand or her adopted adult homeland, England.

For any queries please contact:
In addition, further submissions for the first issue of the journal are being sought:
Further information, as well as a a style guide for submissions, is available on the journal's website:
http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/the-katherine-mansfield-studies-journal/

Impressions strives to present work of high quality in English Literature, linguistics and cultural studies from the multi disciplinary and multi cultural perspective. The aim of the journal is to publish substantial scholarly and critical interventions on emerging trends in literature in English and works in translation.

We are always keen to receive submissions from scholars in the form of research papers, articles, poems, short stories, and creative non-fiction. Submissions are accepted and read year-round. Manuscripts should be of unpublished work and not have been submitted elsewhere for publication. Manuscripts should be

· Up to ten double spaced pages (A-4 size).
· Type written
· Having a brief profile of the author with phone number. The articles/papers must conform to the latest MLA Handbook in all respects.

Submissions can be sent by e-mail: <impressionsonline@gmail.com>. They should be accompanied by an indication of format in which the file is created i.e. MS Word, Text File, etc. Authors may note that unaccepted material will not be returned.

- Malti Agarwal, 18, Murari Puram, Garh Road, Meerut, 250002(UP), India M-09412628158
- Abha Shukla Kaushik, 10-C, Royal, Shipra Suncity, Indrapuram, Ghaziabad, 201014 (UP) India M-09818612421

(posted 10 Mar '09)

If in the nineteenth century Realism began as a movement initiating a progressive and drastic shift away from Romanticism, aiming to discover radical ways of linking the imaginative with the real, in the twentieth century, conversely, Realism was vilified, deemed unashamedly conservative and passé; its ideology was viewed as flawed and its experiments were deliberately forgotten or undervalued. The more reality was conceived as an ideological artifact, the more realism was reduced to a mere oxymoron, a term that defies itself, a conceptual impasse. In the years of high postmodernism, Realism has been unfairly used, in the words of Bruce Robbins, as a "scapegoat term that a given author, text, period, or genre can be shown to rise sophisticatedly and self-consciously above." And yet Realism strikes back: its self-reflexive moments have been recently reread as ambitious studies of the act of representation, and its linear plots, supposedly straightforward characters, and omniscient narrators destabilized and rescued from facile and scornful labeling, while the tension between literality and fictionality, which Realism allegedly sought to conceal, has been brought to the forefront. More surprisingly even, new poststructuralist approaches have gone as far as unearthing and highlighting the “proto-postmodern” elements of nineteenth-century realistic texts. Rather than seen as the unfortunate moment in the history of narrative, sandwiched between Romanticism and Modernism, Realism becomes the focus of attention, and its efforts, achievements, and conscious limitations are reexamined on theoretic, thematic, and stylistic levels.

In line with current attempts to complicate and expand our understanding of Realism, in terms of its ideology and cultural and formal pursuits, the third issue of Synthesis will participate in the debate aimed at exploring the multiformity of the term and reformulating our thinking as regards its endeavours. Our purpose is to examine Realism as an inconclusive, open-ended term, involved in a dialectic relationship with the "-isms" that precede it and those that follow it. In what ways does realism fight against its reduction to a literary technique that indulges in a naïvely "objective" reproduction of material reality? And by what means does it resist an uncritical endorsement of socio-cultural hegemonic practices? Can Realism be re-viewed as the avant-garde gesture that it was initially perceived as? And in this respect, is it, perhaps, time to rethink the chronological and formal boundaries of Realism, which until now conveniently served to include or exclude works from its canon? How is the Realist agenda appropriated and used to ends that operate against mimesis? Can the study of Realism, which is at work across disciplines and in all types of narratives, offer new possibilities of approaching all kinds of texts? And what, in that case, would the limitations of realism be?

•    The illusionistic nature of Realistic representation
•    Formal experimentations of Realism
•    The reactionary/progressive politics of Realism
•    Gender and/or class construction in Realism
•    Science, technology, and Realism
•    Art, the visual, and the invisible in Realism
•    Ethics and morality in Realist texts
•    Transition, flux, alienation in Realism
•    Space and mobility in Realist texts
•    Reconfigurations of the Real in Realism
•    Negotiating Realism through contemporary film
•    Contemporary Realisms in late twentieth-century fiction

Detailed proposals (800-1000 words) for (6-7000 word) articles as well as any inquiries regarding this issue should be sent by email to both Issue Editors: Anna Despotopoulou <adespoto@enl.uoa.gr> and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou <katkit@enl.auth.gr>. Please send a short bio together with your proposal.

(posted 14 Apr '09)

The Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Catholic University in Slovakia, is issuing a call for papers for a proposed volume of scholarly essays on J.R.R.Tolkien’s fictional works for a British publisher.

Papers should be between 5 to 10 thousand words, note key words, and include a 250 word abstract.

- The deadline for submission of papers is 15 September 2009.
- Decisions will be announced by 1 November 2009.

- Prof. Kathleen Dubs <kedubs@axelero.hu>
- Dr. Janka Kaščáková <kascakova@ff.ku.sk>.

(posted 13 Mar '09)

In celebration of Edgar Allan Poe' bicentennial year, the academic journal Meridian critic prepares a special section for its second 2009 issue: Poe's Modernity and Postmodernity. We invite submission of papers exploring any aspect that may throw new light on Poe's stature and legitimacy as a cultural myth, on the indebtedness of Western literature, art, and culture to his genius, or on his reception in the various European and transatlantic literary and critical traditions.

•    Poe and the dawns of the modernist sensibility;
•    Poe and the European avant-garde;
•    The inventor of genres and the manipulator of conventions;
•    The cryptographic imagination;
•    Horror and humour;
•    The fascination of the borderline -- the rational and irrational in Poe's art;
•    The beautiful and the sublime -- Poe’s aesthetic and textual philosophy;
•    Poe's literary and critical histrionics --(self-)parody, irony, satire, banter, hoax; dissimulation, mystification, the mask and the double as motifs and textual/narrative strategies;
•    Deconstructive and deconstructed Poe -- his centrality in poststructuralist debates on textuality and meaning;
•    Psychoanalytic Poe -- the unconscious in/of the text;
•    (De)constructions of masculinity and femininity in Poe's work;
•    Poe between the canon and popular culture;
•    Poe's afterlife in postmodern popular culture.

(posted 26 May '09)

CLR Journal (Culture, Language and Representation), ISSN: 1697-7750, seeks contributions for its forthcoming volume to be published, May 2010, on the topic of: The Popular in Global Times.

Articles are welcomed that engage with the role of popular culture and the politics of everyday life in shaping new and/or alternative life-styles and cultural spaces in the age of globalization.

-    The phenomenon of narrativization as a powerful device in the establishing and development of the popular.
-    Popular strategies of contention, appropriation and subversion regarding globalization.
-    The current status of popular culture in relation to emerging digital cultures.
-    The popular and youth cultures.
-    The popular in the Media, Arts, education, literature, film, linguistics.

Both theoretical and case studies that explore the interface of popular culture and globalization are welcomed.

Jose R. Prado (editor)
Dept. Estudis Anglesos
Campus Riu Sec
12071 Castellon
Spain

For any enquires regarding this Call for Papers, or related issues about the Journal, you may contact the Editors at

(posted 29 Apr '09)

The Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (RCEI) is now accepting original submissions of essays for publication in the 2010 April issue. The deadline is 30th October 2009.

As guest editor of this RCEI special issue on "(Re)Defining Contemporary British Poetry", I would welcome contributions from scholars around the world, and any others who have a stake in the understanding of this field.

- Should poets only be concerned with poetry when writing today?
- To whom do poets write nowadays?
- Is there any current mainstream of contemporary British Poetry?
- The Role of Humour in British Poetry Today.
- The impact of the new technologies in the writing/reading of present British Poetry.
- How indebted to the past is the contemporary British poet? Why?
- Are we witnessing any special turn in British poetry nowadays?

The Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is a peer-reviewed academic journal financially supported by the University of La Laguna (Spain) focusing on English studies.

(posted 13 Mar '09)

      The publication of Rushdie's Midnight's Children in 1981 assertively changed the fate of Indian English fiction. It has now become a force to count with. New explorations in the narrative technique in addition to a great variety of themes have made it sure that this creativity has left its indelible impression on the world literary map. The novelists since Midnight's Children have struck diverse notes in their novels. There is a greater deciphering of the individual’s alienated soul in the world. Marooned colonized/feminine/weak/Dalit/queer individual struggling against the colonial/patriarchal/powerful/Brahmin/white/orthodox market forces is the favourite subject of the fiction-writers. The masters of Post-1981 Indian English fiction have exerted themselves to present the inner emotional ripples of their characters. It is not that the earlier novelists' voice was mute to the interior struggles of the individual. Nevertheless, contemporary voices are more vocal in expressing the inner torments of the marginalized and their murmurings are taken more seriously the world over. The novel has moved from homogeneity of themes and techniques to heterogeneity of subjects and methodology. There is an evolution from the simple to the complex.

The present anthology of critical research papers which will be entitled Children of Midnight: Indian English Novelists of 1981 and After seeks to explore the works of major Indian English fiction writers published since 1981. Previously unpublished research papers on the subject are invited. Please follow the latest edition of the MLA stylesheet for citation purposes, with references given in parenthetical form in the text and a Works cited at the end. Papers should be marked by a sharp critical acumen and analyze the novels in the light of contemporary critical thought.

Papers together with a brief bioprofile should be sent to:
before 31 October 2009.

(posted 8 Apr '09)

Cultural materialism has been adding much to our knowledge and understanding of the ways in which culture is informed by and conformed to and with matter, and so have the numerous analyses and histories of material culture from fields as varied as sociology, anthropology, museum studies, consumer studies, and so forth.

On a different plane, matter has recently been the focus, among others, of Bill Brown's 'thing theory', according to which 'things' come into being when and where ordinary, narrative, or aesthetic objects stop functioning properly and thus become visible and obtrusive. Meanwhile, considerations of material and corporeal remainders of different kinds, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, have also emerged into the cultural landscape of our late modernity.

We encourage contributions from scholars working in this wide arena of cultural, literary and scientific discourses, and who are engaging with, developing, or, at times, challenging a 'material turn' or 'turn to matter' in their various fields of research. We invite papers that explore the discursive construction of matter, the circulation of objects and the 'social life' of things (cf. Appadurai), but also, from a different angle, things and the Thing(s) which may help us read matter beyond the paradigms of empiricism. We are interested in re-opening the question of the ‘matter’ of materialism.

The fertile interplay and mutual interpellation between materiality as ineradicable opacity and the 'spectral dimension' which can be seen (most notably in Derrida) as affecting matter could, in our view, be a fruitful site for a cultural debate open to specialists in the study of Anglophone literature, language, media and culture. Contributions are invited on a range of topics concerning matter and material culture, which might include, but are not restricted to:

•    the 'materiality' of material culture
•    the materialism of consumer culture
•    systems, collections, and the display of material culture
•    the poetics of the material fragment
•    thing theory and its applications/applicability
•    transience and durability
•    waste/land(s), garbage, residues
•    ecocriticism
•    ghostly matters/bodies that matter
•    objects and abjection

Detailed proposals (500-1,000 words) for articles of c. 5-6,000 words, as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both guest editors: Maurizio Calbi at <mcalbi@unisa.it> and Marilena Parlati at <m.parlati@unical.it>.

The deadline for proposals is 13 November 2009, with delivery of completed essays by 31 March 2010. The issue will appear in 2011.

(posted 4 Apr '09)

Ever since the Middle Ages was invented in the Renaissance it has served specific cultural purposes, most importantly: to function as the temporal Other against which Modernity could define itself. All too often, the Middle Ages was simply cast as the opposite of everything that Modernity liked about itself – or else: disliked about itself. The alterity of the Middle Ages was thus erased in favour of a simplistic binary dependent on the idea of a revolutionary break that divided the Renaissance, and even more so Modernity, from its medieval Other. Locked in an ineluctable space of temporal Otherness the Middle Ages was declared to be irrelevant to the concerns of the modern world. Unfortunately, medievalists frequently colluded in this process of marginalisation, claiming for their period an alterity so complete as to preclude dialogue and exchange.

Both medievalists and non-medievalists have increasingly come to realise how detrimental this approach is not only to an understanding of the Middle Ages but also to that of Modernity. Thus they have begun to embark on a variety of different projects. For instance, they turn their attention to the cultural mechanisms that have helped to establish the binary between the medieval and the modern. They seek to untangle the dense jungle of concepts of the medieval -- Umberto Eco identifies ten different versions of the Middle Ages -- and thus to learn more about Modernity’s desire for a radical construct of a different past. Others trace the forms in which the Middle Ages has been used to resist this simple binary and is employed for the purpose of establishing a more complex relationship to the past. In the course of investigations such as these, scholars devote a lot of energy to describing and analysing the cultural forms and political uses that the engagement with the Middle Ages has assumed over the last five centuries or so. Topics range from Wagnerian opera to Fantasy literature, from the Gothic novel to computer games, and from historical romance to real-life enactments of 'medieval' life and history. The subject this line of scholarship investigates is now generally known under the term of ‘medievalism’ and generates an ever-increasing field of research.

Detailed proposals (500-1,000 words) for articles of c. 5-6,000 words, as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both guest editors: Andrew James Johnson at <ajjohnst@zedat.fu-berlin.de> and Ute Berns at <Ute.Berns@anglistik.uni-giessen.de>.

The deadline for proposals is 13 November 2009, with delivery of completed essays by 31 March 2010. The issue will appear in 2011.

(posted 4 Apr '09)

Although the rise of Modernism and the avantgarde proclaimed a break with the past, in many decisive aspects the past continued to inscribe itself in the heart of what at the same time seemed so new and unprecedented. One of the powerful resources present behind and within many modernist gestures was what nowadays is called 'the Western esoteric tradition(s)', some¬times also conceived of as 'the occult'. Suffice it to mention its more or less acknowledged traces in the hermetic art of such leading Modernists as Marcel Duchamp and Wassily Kandinsky, the automatic writing of the Surrealists, and the poetics and poetry of W. B. Yeats (in collaboration with Georgie Hyde-Lees), Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

While this interest in the esoteric/occult reached back to Hellenistic Antiquity and to the magi of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, so central to Modernity, has in truth always been accompanied by a counterculture which, in different periods with different motivations, has nurtured a holistic search for the unification of the human, the natural and the divine. Thus, as the upsurge in Spiritualism in Anglo-American culture towards the end of the nineteenth century drew on 'the Ancient Theology' and on Eastern mysticism imported via the cultural transmitters of the Victorian Empire, parallel with this the new physical sciences -- electricity, magnetism, radioactivity -- and the emerging social sciences such as anthropology (Edward B. Tylor, Sir George Frazer) and psychology (William James, William McDougall, Carl Jung) provided discursive and conceptual resources for a symbiosis of a craving for belief and a desire for scientific verification. This was most notably the case with the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 but soon to become an international network of scientists, philosophers, psychologists and artists. Recent research by Axel Owen and Marina Warner has shown how intricately both the fascination with the 'primitive' and 'exotic' and this high-minded scholarship connected with popular trends in late Victorian culture, from mass spiritist séances and 'freak shows' to the mystical and sensationalist aspects of new media of photography and the cinema.

The lure of the esoteric/occult has remained alive through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century and has gained new impetus from the 'new Traditionalism' (René Guénon, Julius Evola) and the New Age movement of the 1970s, since when it has continued to increase. As Marina Warner remarks: 'The return of religious thinking -- and intense conflict -- has been one of the strongest surprises of the twenty-first century, and it has brought with it a return to supernatural writings.' It seems that a number of British artists have been affected by resurgent interest in the esoteric/occult, or at least have been playing with the uncanny features of this trend. For example, the novels of Malcolm Lowry, John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, and Marina Warner herself; the paintings and films of Kenneth Anger and Derek Jarman; and a range of phenomena in popular culture: apocalyptic films, vampire narratives, ghost romances and tales of voodoo in various media, occult computer games, esoteric therapeutics, sexual magic, and so on.

This issue of the European Journal of English Studies is dedicated to an examination of the relations between Western esoteric traditions and cultural innovations at the two last fins-de-siècles, between occult phenomena regarded as timeless and the drives of modernism and postmodernism. Contributions are welcome in relation to any aspect of the cultures and discourses of the esoteric/occult in modernism and/or postmodernism.

Detailed proposals (500-1,000 words) for articles of c. 5-6,000 words, as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both guest editors: Pia Brînzeu at <piabrinzeu@yahoo.com> and György E. Szönyi at <geszonyi@lit.u-szeged.hu>.

The deadline for proposals is 13 November 2009, with delivery of completed essays by 31 March 2010. The issue will appear in 2011.

(posted 4 Apr '09)

Within the global environment of late modernity, concepts of the "mass" are taking on new meanings. Views of the mass as "the Beast / With many heads" (Coriolanus IVi1), as a contagious, irrational force (Le Bon) that overthrows inhibitions and social restrictions (Freud), are still widespread, particularly in popular media representations of crowd behavior. However, new formulations of collective identity - by political philosophers, social psychologists, psychoanalysts and media theorists, among others - argue that groups often stimulate productive cooperation among members, or may form a necessary site for resistance to power, for political struggle and social change. Identity politics and the valorization of difference or heterogeneity, cornerstones of postmodern cultural studies, are increasingly in need of reassessment in light of new media technologies, which, in conjunction with the globalization of economic and cultural production, have inevitably impacted on social bonds and created new communities and subjectivities, both "real" and virtual, as well as new tensions between the local and the global. This volume aims to explore the cultural and political implications of theories of individual and collective identity, past and present, with particular emphasis placed on the changing nature of social bonds in the mass-mediated, globalised world of late capitalism. It also aims to examine media, literary and filmic representations of the above problematics.    

•    individual and collective subjectivities
•    topographies of the private and the public
•    agency and structure
•    group or crowd psychology
•    spontaneous crowds vs. insitutionalized crowds
•    the future of class and/or identity politics
•    gendering or racialising the “mass”
•    gender dynamics of/in groups
•    the globalised subject
•    the global vs. the local
•    populism
•    homogeneity, heterogeneity, hegemony
•    mass media(tions)
•    cultural representations of groups and/or collectivity

Papers should not exceed the length of 7,000 words (including footnotes and bibliography) and should be double-spaced. They should adhere to the latest MLA style of documentation and should be submitted electronically in the form of a Word document to the editor of the issue, Nicola Rehling, at the following email address:

(posted 7 Mar '09)

What does “Elsewhere” mean? It refers to an ambivalent form of space. It can hold out the promise of another life, of an escape to "The Azure", of an invitation to the voyage when the routine drudgery of life is dull, drab or even unbearable. But it can also be synonymous with want, wandering, loss and exile, or with a form of menacing emptiness and bring out the fear of the unknown. Be it read in a positive or in a negative way (it will be worth wondering if the multiple forms of Elsewhere may allow the notion to escape this polarity), it is always a physical or spatiotemporal projection towards the unfamiliar. Hence the following questions: can Elsewhere be located anywhere? Is it a utopia (or a dystopia)? Is it a fantasy, an illusion, a delusion? Can it be mapped or is it to remain uncharted? How can it be represented? How can it be staged?

- Elsewhere and the distancing, travelling, discovering, conquering and territorialising process, that is to say, to use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's terms, the dynamics of the smooth space to be subjugated; Elsewhere as the promise of new worlds and new spaces; Elsewhere as a form of encounter with another territory, but also with the Other, which is reminiscent of the dialectics described as follows by Richard Marienstras: "Moving away from what is near, moving close to what is far off, inverts the usual relationship of man with his social and natural environment" (Richard Marienstras, Le proche et le lointain).
- Elsewhere in its relation to exile and banishment, to what is "outside", to unmappable territories -- "ces contrées d’en dehors des cartes" (Yves Bonnefoy) --, in a deterritorialising process; and, more radically, Elsewhere as "the undiscovered country" of Death, a country that cannot be imagined or represented. Which means Elsewhere as the space of exclusion, exclusion from society and the natural order (Richard Marienstras).
- Elsewhere as a form of dream, as an escape to imaginary buildings and landscapes. Elsewhere as part of theatrical illusion, as a place for ephemeral creation and, more broadly speaking, as artistic space. Papers may focus for instance on perspective as a passage to another space, just like the stage described by Serlio, which becomes a place of wonder: "within a small space could be seen palaces aligned in perspective, with great temples and divers houses near and far, fine, spacious open places decorated with many buildings, long straight streets, crossed by side streets, triumphal arches, marvellous high columns, pyramids, obelisks and a thousand other singular artefacts" (Sebastiano Serlio).
- Elsewhere as a reflection of Bonnefoy's Hinterland. Elsewhere as opposed to here and now, as a mental place, a place for quest, a "country of higher essence" (Yves Bonnefoy) where projection and reminiscence interact; the "unlocatable elsewhere" as opposed to the "perishable here" (Yves Bonnefoy). How can they be linked? How can they be reconciled?
- Elsewhere as a form of withdrawal (which can also be a form of opening) into inner spaces, which may result in switching off through madness, melancholy, meditation or prayer. Hence the following question: how is it possible to avoid autism or schizophrenia? How is it possible to reconcile inner and outer space, reality and imagination?

Completed contributions, either in French or in English, with note on contributors (200 words) and abstract (200 words), should be sent by attached file (.doc or .rtf) to <pascale.drouet@neuf.fr> and <muriel.cunin1@libertysurf.fr> before 30th April 2010.