CFP Monsters & the Monstrous (Open-Topic) (6/30/20 NEPCA; virtual 10/23-24/20)

Third revised call for papers:

Call for Papers on Monsters & the Monstrous (Open-Topic)

The Northeast Alliance for Scholarship on the Fantastic and the Monsters & the Monstrous Area invite paper proposals for the 2020 conference of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA) to convene at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire, from Friday, 23 October, to Saturday, October 24.

The new revised deadline for proposals is June 30, 2020.


Please note: This year’s conference will be entirely virtual.





Monsters & the Monstrous Area:

Area Chair: Michael A. Torregrossa (Independent Scholar) (Popular.Preternaturaliana@gmail.com)

This area welcomes proposals that investigate any of the things, whether mundane or marvelous, that scare us. Through our sessions, we hope to pioneer fresh explorations into the darker sides of the intermedia traditions of the fantastic (including, but not restricted to, aspects of fairy tale, fantasy, gothic, horror, legend, mythology, and science fiction) by illuminating how creative artists have both formed and transformed our notions of monsters within these sub-traditions in texts from various countries, time periods, and media and for audiences at all levels. Our primary goal is to foster a better understating of monsters in general and to examine their impact on those that receive their stories as well as on the world at large. However, as a component of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association, the Monsters and the Monstrous Area is also especially interested in celebrating both the New England Gothic tradition and the life, works, and legacy of H.P. Lovecraft, a leading proponent of Weird Fiction and an immense influence on contemporary popular culture. (Further information on the area at https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/.)


Please submit your proposal for the area via the online form at https://forms.gle/TTbp6EVTkYJqcGgM6.


Membership in NEPCA is required to present; further details on the can be found at https://nepca.blog/.


Northeast Alliance for Scholarship on the Fantastic: https://northeastfantastic.blogspot.com/.

CFP Weird Sciences and the Sciences of the Weird (Spec Issue of Pulse 6/30/20)

Apologies for the delay in posting this:

WEIRD SCIENCES AND THE SCIENCES OF THE WEIRD
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/03/10/weird-sciences-and-the-sciences-of-the-weird

deadline for submissions:
June 30, 2020


full name / name of organization:
PULSE - THE JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND CULTURE


contact email:
mbregovi@gmail.com


Recent scientific discoveries in climatology, animal cognition and microbiology have radically altered our conceptions of ourselves and the environment we live in, both on micro and macroscales. Zooming in on the human microbiome and out to the planetary ecosystem, or even further into infinite cosmic spaces, the sciences are revealing strange dynamics of human-nonhuman interconnectedness, doing away with the established anthropocentrism and the idea of human exceptionalism. Current theoretical discussions revolving around the human-environment relation have shifted their interests from discourse to matter, shedding new light on strange bodily assemblages composed of anaerobic bacteria which live in symbiotic relationships with the human body (Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo), other types of cognition and intelligent life apart from our own (Steven Shaviro) and, especially, the mechanisms by which human action, no matter how abstract or invisible, contributes to the global ecological transformations (Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton). The ultimate effect of these conceptual transformations is a certain sense of estrangement that is often, but not necessarily, tied to feelings of unease, horror and/or fascination. This specific affect is commonly referred to as the weird because it operates through disrupting our ordinary perception and experience, creating confusion and a sense of disorientation.

Strange modes of human-nonhuman interactions are steadily pervading contemporary theoretical thought which analyzes the weird as a specific form of affect, effect and aesthetics signaled by a sense of wrongness (Mark Fisher). In conjunction with an increasing awareness of these estranged environments, a growing tendency towards the aesthetics of the weird is visible in popular culture and contemporary art production. As a continuation of H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tradition, “the weird” is now bringing together some of the most exciting contemporary writers and filmmakers: China Miéville, Elvia Wilk, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Jeff VanderMeer, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Yorgos Lanthimos, to name just the most significant ones. Similar tendencies are also evident in TV shows such as True Detective (inspired by Thomas Ligotti’s nihilistic weird fiction), Stranger Things and the Twin Peaks revival (echoing Lovecraftian cosmic horror). The aesthetics of weird is also embraced by musicians such as Björk, Gazelle Twin, FKA Twigs and inscribed in particular new media art practices, especially bioart.

In this issue of Pulse, we aim to investigate the aesthetics, politics and ethics of the weird from various theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, particularly those within the framework of environmental humanities: ecocriticism, geocriticism, animal studies, critical plant studies, posthumanism, new materialism, actor-network theory, queer theory, xenofeminism etc. How do the sciences estrange our conceptions of the world and how is this articulated in artistic practices? Starting from the confluence of art and science, our aim is to map diverse territories of the weird in literature, film, music, television, video games, visual arts, comic books, dance, theatre and other media.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

— theory of the weird: posthumanism, speculative realism, object oriented ontology, new materialism

— cognitive and affective aspects of the weird

— the weird, supernatural and unheimlich

— New Weird and the Other

— speculative fiction, science fiction, horror and weird fiction

— intersections of the weird and grotesque, fantasy, magical realism, etc.

— Anthropocene, deep time and the weird

— animal and plant life and the weird

— multispecies ecologies, human-nonhuman entanglements

— anomalies, mutations and hybrids

— inorganic matter in arts and literature

— eerie landscapes and extinction

— weird bodies: trans-corporeality, queer, transhumanism


References:

Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016, Repeater Books, London.

Julius Greve and Florian Zappe (eds.), Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities, 2019, Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Donna Haraway, 2016, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke Univ. Press

Steven Shaviro, Discognition, 2016, Repeater Books, London.



SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 30 June 2020

We welcome the submission of FULL ARTICLES (5000-6000 words) on these and related themes. We also publish BOOK REVIEWS(800-1000 words); please get in touch if there is a book you would like to review.

All articles should be prepared for blind review including the removal of authorship from the document file information. Submissions should include a cover sheet in a separately attached document containing: the paper title and short abstract (ca. 250 words) author’s name, affiliation, word count (including footnotes & references), and contact information. Article and cover sheet should be submitted in a .doc, .docx, or .odt (or similar open-source) file format. PDF submissions are also accepted but previously stated file formats are preferred where possible. References should be formatted according to Chicago style (Footnotes and Bibliography).

All articles and related material should be submitted to: submissions.pulse@gmail.com

For any inquires please feel free to contact us at pulse.scistudies@gmail.com. Please do not submit articles to this email address. For general information and to access previous issues of Pulse you can visit:

​Central and Eastern Europe Online Library: https://www.ceeol.com/search/journal-detail?id=2187

​Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/pulse.scistudies

​


Last updated March 13, 2020

This CFP has been viewed 723 times.

CFP Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Video Game (8/31/2020)

This came across the Comix-Scholars listerv last week.


The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Video Game

Ed. Max José Dreysse Passos de Cavalho & Tim Lanzendörfer

We are seeking essays dealing with medial adaptations of the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Amidst the recent Lovecraft renaissance, the adaptation of Lovecraft’s stories, but also of “Lovecraftian” themes and motifs, into various kinds of audiovisual narratives has proliferated and become vastly successful in a number of guises. Critical discussions of this phenomenon, however, have often been restricted to the identification of Lovecraft’s themes, adaptation’s fidelity to Lovecraft’s texts, and the influence of Lovecraft on contemporary horror and weird fiction more generally. The proposed collection will expand the discussion of Lovecraft adaptation by interrelating strongly on the concrete formal and medial choices of adaptations with the specific demands (if there are any) of Lovecraft(ian) fiction. Departing from a theoretical discussion that has seen Lovecraft as either congenial to adaptation or entirely resistant to it, it aims to understand Lovecraftian adaptation as a means of negotiating different ways of representing the unrepresentable, and to question the notion of the unrepresentable itself. Lovecraftian adaptation goes beyond its own relation to Lovecraft’s fiction, and helps us understand the respective affordances of written fiction versus audio visual media, permitting us not just to see the peculiarities of Lovecraft better, but also to ask fundamental media-theoretical questions.

We are looking for essays that address the question of Lovecraft adaptation in visual, aural, and mixed media: professional and amateur films, TV series, podcasts, (video) games, comics, and other media. Media of interest may be “direct” adaptations of Lovecraft’s source material or those called “Lovecraftian,” and we encourage discussion of this latter term especially with regards to the question of what, if anything, gets “adapted” in so encompassing a term. Among the texts we are interested in are, for instance, the films produced by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, the German Die Farbe, or The Color Out of Space (2020), but also older adaptations; radio plays and podcasts such as British Radio 4’s The Whisperer in Darkness (2019-2020), but also things like Tanis (2015-) or The White Vault (2017-); video games such as the Dead Space Series (2008-2013), Alan Wake (2010), Bloodborne (2015), At the Mountains of Madness (2016, still in early access), The Call of Cthulhu (2018), or Moons of Madness (2019), as well as older games such as Alone in the Dark (1992); the large number of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian comics, such as Alan Moore’s Providence series or Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key (2008-2013). All of these are very much inter alia; we are looking for a wide variety of source texts.

Among the topics we are interested in are media-philosophical discussions of the problem of Lovecraft(ian) adaptation; interpretative readings of Lovecraft(ian) fiction; the affordances of medial forms (including their capacity to be both expansive and limited in their relationship to Lovecraft); the relationship between Lovecraft’s medial afterlives and the market; the question of Lovecraft and contemporary philosophy as reflected in the media texts; what Lovecraft adaptation can tell us about adaptation more generally; what is named by “Lovecraftian” in these texts; and a variety of other topics that address the complex of questions sketched above, ideally interrelating several of these issues. Especially when you aim to propose a “Lovecraftian” text, we would appreciate a rationale for this determination.

We are looking for 300-500 word abstracts and a short biography, to be submitted by August 31, 2020, to lanzendo@uni-mainz.de and maxdreys@uni-mainz.de. We will collect the most promising abstracts into a coherent volume addressing the problems laid out above, and will propose the collection to Palgrave Macmillan’s series Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, who have already expressed an interest in the project. Finished essays of about 7000 words are expected around June 2021; details to be cleared later.

CFP NEPCA Monsters and the Monstrous (Open-Topic) (6/15/20; remote/virtual conference 10/24-25/20)

Call for Papers on Monsters & the Monstrous (Open-Topic)

The Northeast Alliance for Scholarship on the Fantastic and the Monsters & the Monstrous Area invite paper proposals for the 2020 conference of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA) to convene at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire, from Friday, 23 October, to Saturday, October 24.

The revised deadline for proposals is June 15, 2020.

Please note: This year’s conference will either be hybrid (some sessions online and some face-to-face) or entirely virtual. NEPCA is dependent upon what the host institution, decides and their announcement will come in early June.




Monsters & the Monstrous Area:

Area Chair: Michael A. Torregrossa (Independent Scholar) (Popular.Preternaturaliana@gmail.com)

This area welcomes proposals that investigate any of the things, whether mundane or marvelous, that scare us. Through our sessions, we hope to pioneer fresh explorations into the darker sides of the intermedia traditions of the fantastic (including, but not restricted to, aspects of fairy tale, fantasy, gothic, horror, legend, mythology, and science fiction) by illuminating how creative artists have both formed and transformed our notions of monsters within these sub-traditions in texts from various countries, time periods, and media and for audiences at all levels. Our primary goal is to foster a better understating of monsters in general and to examine their impact on those that receive their stories as well as on the world at large. However, as a component of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association, the Monsters and the Monstrous Area is also especially interested in celebrating both the New England Gothic tradition and the life, works, and legacy of H.P. Lovecraft, a leading proponent of Weird Fiction and an immense influence on contemporary popular culture. (Further information on the area at https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/.)



Please submit your proposal for the area via the online form at https://forms.gle/TTbp6EVTkYJqcGgM6.

Membership in NEPCA is required to present; further details on the can be found at https://nepca.blog/.

Northeast Alliance for Scholarship on the Fantastic: https://northeastfantastic.blogspot.com/.