Below are a couple of CFPs passed on to me by David
Willingham, who asked me to post them. The second is more
peripherally related. If you need more information, mail
info@paradoxa.com
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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Call for Papers: "Fifties Fictions"
Deadline: December 1, 2000
Paradoxa is seeking high-quality critical essays on non-canonical American prose works from the Fifties: crime fiction, juvenile delinquency stories, Westerns, science fiction, comics, neglected literary fiction, gay and lesbian romances, and studies defining the psychosocial paradigms in and of the era (such as the works of David Riesman, William H. Whyte, Erving Goffman), as well as the influence of editors, reviewers, publishers, and anthologists (such as Arnold Hano, Judith Merrill, and Anthony Boucher). We welcome studies of single authors and single works, as well as comparative studies. We are looking for pieces that address the cultural features, norms, and expectations of 1950s America, including gender inequality, race relations, containment culture, and fear of nuclear war.
Our interests include but are not limited to: Charlotte Armstrong, Carl Barks, Alfred Bester, Robert Bloch, Vance Bourjaily, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Fredric Brown, Howard Browne, William Burroughs, R.V. Cassill, Alice Childress, Richard Condon, Donald Cory, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, William Demby, Philip Dick (SF and mainstream), Harlan Ellison, writers and artists of E.C. Comics, William Campbell Gault, David Goodis, Cameron Hawley, Chester Himes, Dolores Hitchens, Edward Hoagland, Dorothy Belle Hughes, Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), Shirley Jackson, Jack Kerouac, John O. Killens, Cyril Kornbluth, Elmore Leonard (Westerns), Thomas McGrath, Richard Matheson, Judith Merrill, Margaret Millar, Vin Packer (Ann Aldrich), Ann Petry, Frederik Pohl, Peter Rabe, Craig Rice, Irwin Shaw, Mickey Spillane, Theodore Sturgeon, Jim Thompson, Nedra Tyre, Alex Raymond, Jack Vance.
In an enterprise of this sort, it's important that potential contributors realize what we are not looking for as well. Writers simply too canonical for our project include: James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Gore Vidal.
Guest Editors for the special issue are Samuel R. Delany (SUNY Buffalo), and Josh Lukin <jblukin@acsu.buffalo.edu> (SUNY Buffalo).
Deadline for submissions is December 1, 2000. Please consult submission guidelines on the inside back cover of the journal, or follow MLA guidelines in terms of general format, citation reference, footnotes, headings, etc. Send three copies, each with an abstract of not more than 300 words on a separate page, to Managing Editor David Willingham, c/o Paradoxa, PO Box 2237, Vashon Island, WA 98070 (USA). For more information regarding this project, or past or future projects, or subscriptions to the journal, send queries to Info@Paradoxa.com, or see the Paradoxa website at www.Paradoxa.com.
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Call for Papers: "Horror"
Deadline for Submissions: February 1, 2001
Paradoxa is seeking submisions for a special issue on Horror. Horror, like other genres, embraces a large body of texts, scattered over a variety of different media, ranging from novels and short-stories, to film and television, comic books and trading cards. It means a vast inventory of tropes, themes, figures, and motifs, which constantly transform themselves with the changing socio-historical context and yet remain recognizable as characteristic features of their genre. Horror also means the critical discourse geared toward the explication of these characteristic features, from professionals, academics and authors, and from fans. It means a variety of social practices--official ones like membership in professional organizations, and unofficial ones like membership in an audience or in a group defined by shared tastes or assumptions.
Recent trends in horror, literary and cinematic, have created corresponding trends in criticism. Certain topics are fashionable, partly because they lend themselves to the elaboration of a fashionable critical agenda, partly because they account for the current production of texts. For example, the work of writers like Anne Rice or S.P. Somtow has been the occasion for a re-examination of the vampire in the work of Nina Auerbach or Ken Gelder. David Cronenberg's films have fueled a cottage industry of film criticism and cultural studies on the body, in its abject and posthuman variations. Wes Craven's Scream films and Kevin Williamson's scriptwriting are at the basis of a new critical interest in the teen slasher film and its postmodern ironic deconstruction. The extraordinary commercial success of television programs like The X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer has made critics wonder about the social dynamics of audience, about target-group marketing, and about horror as a kind of cultural collective unconscious.
Though these broader critical trends constitute valid and important contributions to the study of horror, and are therefore not off limits to contributors to this issue, they tend to overemphasize certain areas of the genre and, consequently, draw attention away from others. This issue of Paradoxa will attempt to redress this imbalance. Regarding topics that are currently fashionable, we invite only fresh approaches that either concentrate on neglected aspects of the primary texts, approach them from a rarely considered critical vantage point, or read them in a new context. On every other topic, we encourage submissions that broaden the critical debate on horror.
With this agenda in mind, we also invite submissions on neglected authors like the Flemish writers Jean Ray and Thomas Owen or the Lovecraft disciple Clark Ashton Smith; on writers operating across genre lines - Jonathan Carroll, Angela Carter, Michael Blumlein, M. John Harrison, or Graham Joyce; on female writers in the horror field - Lucy Taylor, Kathe Koja, Melanie Tem, Lisa Tuttle, etc.; on ethnicity and race in horror - writers like Owl Goingback or Tananarive Due; on themes like horror and war, either from within the genre, like Peter Straub's Koko, or from outside, like Tim O'Brien's work; themes like horror and post-/colonialism, like Dan Simmons' Song of Kali; on scriptwriters for films like Andrew Kevin Walker; on Arkham House, on the pulp tradition, on magazines like Fangoria; on splatterpunk; on horror awards like the Bram Stoker Award, or on organizations like the Horror Writers of America; on horror tropes in games like Quake or Resident Evil; on influential horror anthologies - Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces, McGrath's and Morrow's The New Gothic, or Dennis Etchison's Metahorror, on collaborative writers - Straub/King, Skipp/Spector; on horror criticism between academia and mainstream - Davis Skal's or James B. Twitchell's histories of horror, S.T. Joshi's controversial Lovecraft biography, Kim Newman's criticism, etc.; on groundbreaking critical studies of horror - Carol Clover, Robin Wood, Barbara Creed, or Christopher Sharrett; on horror in the literary mainstream, from Kafka and Celine to Joyce Carol Oates and Bret Easton Ellis; on horror pastiche - Patrick McGrath, Thomas Ligotti, William Browning Spencer, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow; horror and genre crossovers - horror/SF, horror/historical romance; on horror serials, from McDowell's Blackwater Series to King's Green Mile, etc.
We also invite submissions on specific aspects of horror: the use and function of sound or special effects in horror film; on the creative participation of audiences in horror fan culture; on the adoption of horror tropes in youth culture; on the changing conceptions of monstrosity and abjection; on the marginalization of horror as subliterary, from the Gothic romance to the pulps; on the intertextual use of imagery in horror texts and the genesis and consolidation of genre identity; on the mobilization of the viewer's body through horror film; on the ideology of horror criticism, etc.
Guest editor for this special issue is Steffen Hantke (steffenhantke@hotmail.com), Regis University, Denver.
Deadline for submissions is February 1, 2001. Please consult submission guidelines on the inside back cover of the journal, or follow MLA guidelines in terms of general format, citation reference, footnotes, headings, etc. Send three copies, each with an abstract of not more than 300 words on a separate page, to Managing Editor David Willingham, c/o Paradoxa PO Box 2237, Vashon Island, WA 98070 (USA). For more information regarding this project, or past or future projects, or subscriptions to the journal, send queries to Info@Paradoxa.com or see the Paradoxa website at: www.Paradoxa.com.
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