Detailed proposals (500-1,000 words) for articles of c. 5,000 words, as well as any inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent by e-mail to the guest editors: Ton Hoenselaars <Ton.Hoenselaars@let.uu.nl> and Joep Leerssen <Leerssen@Uva.Nl>. The deadline for proposals is 31 December 2007, with delivery of completed essays by 30 November 2008. The issue will appear in Winter 2009.

(posted 29 Oct '06)

(posted 21 Nov '06)

(posted 27 Oct '07)

Call for contributions to a collection of essays on Shakespeare's Language
Shakespeare had a lifelong interest in the various problematics inherent to language per se and his own innovative uses of language still baffle us, modern-day readers of his texts. Following our seminar in London in 2006 at the international conference of The European Society for the Study of English, we are currently looking for contributions in English to a collection of essays on Shakespeare's Language, to be published in 2008.
Papers are welcome on various techniques of textual investigation developed in such fields as stylistic close reading, corpus linguistics, cognitive, authorship studies, lexicography, stylometry, etc.
Papers will be refereed by an international committee.

If you plan to submit a manuscript, please let us know as soon as possible. We will only take into consideration papers which have not been published yet.

(posted 26 Nov '07)

Literary Education and Digital Learning: Methods and Technologies for Humanities Studies, a book edited by Willie van Peer, University of Munich, Germany; Sonia Zyngier, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Vander Viana, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

We live at a time of enormous realignments in the use of media. Each day more information can be retrieved from the Internet. The world is not one of knowing how to access and manage information rather than storing and processing it. In the area of literature, ever more information on literary production is being disseminated and retrieved in electronic form. This has considerable consequences for the form and use of such information. It also has consequences for learning and research environments at educational institutions. Today's popularization of modern technologies has allowed scholars in the Humanities, including literature specialists, to access an array of novel opportunities in the digital medium, which have brought about an equal number of challenges and questions. In spite of the vast amount of information now at hand, very little has been provided for the advance of literary education.
Objective

This volume aims at providing a deep probe into the most relevant issues in literary education and digital learning. The chapters will be organized into two categories: research and education. The first group will collect studies investigating the impact of technologies in literary research. Its main aim is to understand how computers and other new technologies may help scholars investigate literary works in novel ways, thus bringing new perspectives to the area. The second group will look into the potential of applying distance learning methods/concepts/environments to the field of literature. In other words, it will collect contributions on how these resources may be used by scholars and students either inside or outside regular classrooms, provided that these classroom applications are not accounts of experience but based on research.  In sum, the volume will offer a survey of how digital literary education has developed, where it stands now, how research in this area has progressed, and what the prospects are for the future.
Target audience

This volume will be of interest to those interested in digital learning/teaching and/or literature, especially in the university context.  This book will also interest literature professionals who would like to see how digital learning works in practice. In addition, the book will be highly valuable to those researchers in the field interested in keeping abreast with current developments in the confluence of their fields of expertise and technological settings.

The topics to be covered in Parts I (Research) and II (Education) should encompass literature and one of the following aspects (the list below is not comprehensive, other topics may be welcomed, and especially those in which authors are considered specialists):

*Applications in Distance Learning
*Authoring Tools
*Collaborative Learning
*Corpus-based Research
*Empirical Research on Digital Learning/Teaching
*Future Challenges
*Learning Technologies
*Methods in Distance Education Teaching
*Online Education Tools and Technologies
*Online Learning
*Shortcomings of Distance Learning Applications and Technologies
*Web-Based Course Authoring Tools

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before May 30, 2008, a 2-4 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by July 31, 2008 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by October 31, 2008. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the "Information Science Reference" (formerly Idea Group Reference) and "Medical Information Science Reference" imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit http://www.igi-global.com.

(posted 2 Apr '08)

GRETA Journal, Revista para Profesores de Inglés (ISSN 1133-0909), is preparing the publication of its 15th and 16th volumes. GRETA Journal publishes manuscripts on English Language Teaching Methodology. Its objective of the journal is to bridge the gap between the field of Applied Linguistics and class praxis. Other fundamental goals include providing up-dated information about the latest trends, techniques, materials, and methodologies employed in EFL teaching and to exchange experiences and publications between research teams both on a national and international level.

In keeping with its continuous concern for state-of-the-art issues, the Journal makes a call for contributions related to two topics which are affecting and transforming English language teaching at a regional, national, and international level: Bilingual Education (Volume 15) and the European Higher Education Area (Volume 16).

Theory Behind the Practice
Classroom Techniques
In the Primary Classroom
In the Secondary Classroom
At University
Teaching English for Specific Purposes
Internet site and CALL

Contributions can be in English or Spanish and should adhere to the publication guidelines of the Journal, available at http://www.gretajournal.com

Ana María Ortega Cebreros <amortega@ujaen.es>
María Luisa Pérez Cañado <mlperez@ujaen.es>.

(posted 6 May '08)

Le Simplegadi n.6 - International online refereed journal on modern languages and literature is open to innovative contributions, as compared to dominant cultural hegemony, which can promote 'ugualitarian' and collaborative principles and practices towards individuals, societies, literatures and cultures from a multiplicity of points of view ('hybridisation' of languages and literatures, migrant writing, intercultural and transcultural identities and subjectivities, post-colonial studies and subaltern studies, etc). The main aim is to foster critical resistance towards hegemonic and hierarchical models of culture, and positively promote, as viable alternatives, discourse practices of partnership and mutuality.

Articles should have an abstract both in Italian and in English.

All submissions should be accompanied by a cover message that includes a brief biographical statement (max. 100 words), a full mailing address, a telephone number and an email address.

(posted 29 Apr '08)

Issue n. 8 of RiLUnE.

(Fenollosa/Pound 1920)

Some possible lines of analysis within the reception of the ideogram are:
- The effects of the "re-discovery" of the ideogram in poetic language. The need for a concrete and primal relationship with things and the rediscovery of the "fossil poetry" in language.
- The creative misunderstanding of the ideogrammatic basis of the Chinese characters and its developments: whether and how the Indo-European linguistic perspective may interfere with and isolate/emphasize/distort particular features of the language, between exoticism and cult of the foreigner as an aesthetic possibility.
- The influence of the ideogram on the spatiality of poetic writing: directionality and dynamism ("internal" in the signs of the ideogram and "external" in alphabetical languages); horizontal signs versus vertical signs, a new form of energy within the language.
- The syntactic implications of an «ideogrammic method» applied to poetry: a form of writing by juxtaposition and accumulation, «free» from syntactical constraints and linked to the "natural order of things", i.e. transitivity. Incidentally, the method is paralleled in cinema by Sergei Eisenstein who, in a 1929 essay, celebrated the ideogram as a principle of cinematographic montage.

- Visual poetics: from Imagism to visual poetry, the search for a language of overtones "vibrating against the eye" (Fenollosa). The ideogram as a means of visual synthesis"between painting and writing, and its integration in the poetic text, in dialogue with alphabetical writing. The search for a form of artistic writing (i.e. calligrammatic) as an expression of the «synthetic» ideal of avant-garde poetry.
- The ideogrammatic roots of visual poetry. From Mallarmé's «Coup de dès» to Apollinaire's Calligrammes, from Italian futurism (Marinetti and Govoni) to the Spanish Vanguardia (Vicente Huidobro): the ideogram as a tool to dissolve the free verse into the plastic forms of visual poetry. Note also the evolution of visual poetry from representative to conceptual, from calligrammes to analogia disegnata (Francesco Meriano exhorted to represent "the flight, not the aeroplane" in 1916).
- The metaphorical quality of the ideogram, especially in compound ideograms, where two things or ideas are combined and juxtaposed to conjure up new meanings. Claudel speaks of a metaphorical logic for ideogrammatic languages and Fenollosa remarked how such a language "bears its metaphor on its face".
- The fascination for etymology as a prerogative of poetry and the license of poetic etymologies possibly encouraged by the "tymorhetoric" (Jin 2002) tradition of classical Chinese poetry (see, among others, Claudel, Fenollosa and Michaux).
- The reception of the ideogram as a realization of Roland Barthes's dream of "knowing a language without understanding it: the descent to the "untranslatable" as a poetic experience, leading to the dissolution of meaning in Michaux's and Dotremont's picto-poetic experimentations.

Articles may be written in one of the following languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian and German. Two abstracts in English and French (200 words each) should accompany each submission.
Address your inquiries and submissions to Enrico Monti <emonti@lingue.unibo.it> identifying 'Rilune' in the subject line.

(posted 9 May '08)

How are reading habits and preferences formed? Do we read what we discover in education, or read what is recommended to us? Or do we build on random encounters with authors and texts? Increasingly, book clubs and their recommendations, like Richard & Judy's teatime TV reading selections, advise the general public not only about what to read, but also, that they should be reading something in the first place. In response to this, almost every text recommended by the Richard & Judy Book Club becomes a bestseller. But what impact does this have on reading in general, on textual production, and on the way that we categorise and analyse literature? And what textual properties are required in order for a text to be admitted to the Richard & Judy Book Club list, if there are any common characteristics at all?

Section 1: Reading with the Richard & Judy Book Club

This section will explore the very recent change in attitude towards reading in the UK, which has seen it develop into a popular rather than a niche pastime. The Richard & Judy Book Club is part of this, and now determines bestseller lists, whether the book club produced the upsurge in reading or was formed in response to it.

Essays in this section will examine the categorisation and contextualisation of texts chosen by The Richard and Judy Book Club in terms of how the books are promoted and sold to the public.

This section interrogates the specific texts included in the Richard and Judy Book Club lists. The essays might take a single book to explore, or consider several from the Richard and Judy Book Club lists; they might also explore the role of TV and film adaptations.

Please send short CVs and 500-word abstracts indicating the category that your essay addresses by July 31st 2008, to both Helen Cousins <h.cousins@newman.ac.uk> and Jenni Ramone <j.ramone@newman.ac.uk>.

Trialogues as an online journal is setting out to deal with contemporary literature by entering into dialogic relations with writers, critics and fans to produce a constant roving barrage of arguments about the meaning of Literature.

Trialogues is concerned with thought experiment; with the testing of written modes to redraw our interior maps of the literary and theoretical landscapes.

Trialogues is fundamentally about peer debate and the critique of judgement drawn from the fast and furious argument of the fanbase.

Our interest is chiefly in cult writing and contemporary literatures; with the immediate and the ignored, the overlooked and the undervalued.  Notions we will constantly examine and interrogate are those of "mainstream" versus "underground" writing and the "fringes" and "margins" of culture.

Our critical approaches will vary: We will be deliberately political on occasion, and proclaim so loudly, with a mind to interrogating contemporary wisdom; deliberately out of step on occasion, with the hope that this will allow us to cover the ground that others have stepped over.
To this end we invite contributions from those with passionate interest in contemporary writing. Our inaugural issue will be on the subject of canonicity and the relative problems this notion raises: 'The Canon versus Anti-Canons: Assault on Cultural Values or the Value of Cultural Assault?'
Possible topics include but are not limited to: 'The Value(s) of "Cult" Writing'; 'Who Writes The Canon?'; 'Immediacy in Literature'; 'Textual surface and textual audiences'; 'Writing for "the masses"'; 'Tradition/Counter-Tradition'. 
Contributions to be between 2000 and 4000 words in length.

Postcolonial Text is an open access, electronic journal, which is both internationally peer-reviewed and accessible to a global readership. The editors now seek submissions for a specially-themed volume on the topic "Literature and Culture in East Africa." This guest issue on contemporary East African literature will be devoted to the political crises in Africa, and an in-depth analysis of narratives fromdifferently challenged communities and individuals. Of particular concern are texts from the past decade and a half which have been composed at the time multiparty elections were taking place in Kenya and Tanzania, in the early 1990s, and during power-sharing negotiations for Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Kenya being held in hotels in East Africa. All these political events have led to an emerging ethos of democratic rule among citizens of  Eastern Africa as an African region. Despite the changes that are clearly visible in the social mobility, migrations, access to jobs, training in the I C T, the globalization which favours America and Western countries, yet to be seen are credible institutional reforms to accommodate intra-ethnic coexistence and the nature of the extant identities.
This Guest Issue will examine ethnic identities and accruing modes of communication. Despite the fact that African countries seek to define themselves as nations, creative writers do not adequately tackle the vice of ethnic discrimination and social and political inequalities that are engendered by ethnic biases. They have been led by statesmen. They have parliaments, judiciaries, centres of excellence in culture and education. But tensions of ethnic suspicions and rivalries still persist. The post-election violence in Kenya, after the disputed presidential elections of December 2007 shows that there are residual issues in East African political culture which are yet to be addressed. The concern about the stability and the economic future and the democracies of East African countries is real.
The challenge is being made in this edition of Postcolonial Text is to delineate the issues of aesthetics and negotiations of the political and social space articulated in the literatures of East Africa over the last fifteen years. Completely oblivious of the implications, the elite in East Africa and their ethnic groups look for alternatives to cohesive nationhood. They celebrate cultural differences along ethnic lines and bring out negative cultural practices that go against inter-ethnic marriage.
The call here is for papers which analyse political party affiliations based on regional strengths and ethnic loyalties. I welcome essays not only on identity crisis in East Africa, Ethnic Identity, but also on the growth of the various genres of literature in the region. Essays that will enhance theoretical pathways and debates which political and cultural identity crises have engendered. In addition to articles, I invite book reviews, narratives and gnomic forms of oral literature translated into English from East African languages, poems, short stories, and contemporary skits on negative ethnicity. The issue will highlight the new dynamics in East African culture and art in respect of language and other modes of communication and show how theatre practitioners, film makers, and media workers are experimenting with
artistic forms in order to communicate with their audience.
Deadline for all submissions is September 30, 2008.
Here is how to submit your contributions:
For other queries, please contact:

This collection aims to investigate European re-imaginings of Indigenous American peoples and cultures in the last century (including Native American, First Nations, Native Hawai'ian, Inuit, and South American tribal peoples). We invite abstracts of 250-350 words on any such re-imagining, including (but by no means restricted to):

Depictions of tribal/indigenous culture and/or religion in European literature, art and film
"American Indian hobbyist" movements
Use of tribal/indigenous imagery in political movements
The influence of tribal/indigenous design on European fashion
Native American cartoons
Native Americans as symbol of American hegemony
Native Americans as symbol of resistance to American hegemony
Images of the Native in 20th century philosophy
The New Age industry
Tribal rhythms in popular music
The Ostern / Red Western

The history of European appropriation of Indigenous lands and cultures in the Americas is long and frequently bloody. In the twentieth century, however, as European countries ceased to have formal colonial interests in the Americas, so direct contact between Native and European largely ceased. But the image of the Native American, as much a product of the colonial imagination as any deep understanding of the disparate indigenous cultures of the Americas, has proved enduring.

We welcome contributions from all European countries and would be particularly interested in transnational or trans-European articles.

(posted 6 May '08)

The Editorial Board of Études Irlandaises is seeking submissions for the Spring 2009 volume of the journal.

Scientific project of the review : Études Irlandaises is a peer-reviewed journal publishing articles in English and French which explore all aspects of Irish literature, history, culture and arts from ancient times to the present. Etudes Irlandaises publishes twice a year on a wide range of interdisciplinary subjects including: poetry / fiction / drama / film / music / politics / economy / social studies, etc.

Études Irlandaises is aimed at scholars, postgraduate students, institutions specializing in Irish studies as well as people who have an informed interest in the subject. Each number has a comprehensive section devoted to recently published material on Ireland.

(posted 30 Apr '08, updated 6 May '08)

Crime is common to all cultures but is simultaneously culturally specific: narratives of crime, then, cross cultures while articulating cultural difference. Crime is personal and political; forms of deviance and transgression are not a-historical and ready made but represent a continuous negotiation between social and cultural forces, between the individual and the collective.

Crime narratives can also act as a kind of connective tissue across disciplinary boundaries, forging links yet questioning the relations between fact and fiction, literature and law, history, philosophy, psychology, languages, social science, media studies, medicine. Crime is not confined to or contained in a single form: its narratives appear in print, on celluloid, canvas, in stone. There are written narratives and oral accounts, witness statements and pop songs, photographs and films. Crime narratives are a nexus and offer a place of commonality from which cultures and cultural relations can be re-read and disciplinary boundaries and relationships reconsidered.

The editors invite submissions on crime narratives from specialists across the disciplines of English Studies. Questions that you may wish to consider include, but are by no means restricted to:

Papers exploring crime narratives from the perspective of literary studies, cultural studies, linguistics, anthropology, history, law, or other disciplines connected to the study of English are welcome.

 Detailed proposals (500-1,000 words) for articles of c. 5,000 words, as well as any inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent by e-mail to both the guest editors: Maurizio Ascari at <maurizio.ascari@unibo.it> and Heather Worthington at <WorthingtonHJ@Cardiff.ac.uk>.
The deadline for proposals is 15 October 2008, with delivery of completed essays by 31 March 2009. The issue will appear in Summer 2010.
For futher information regarding EJES more generally, go to the Taylor & Francis website.

(posted 24 Mar '08)