CFP Creature Redux: Considering the Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Chimera in Fiction and Popular Culture (3/31/2023)

Creature Redux: Considering the Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Chimera in Fiction and Popular Culture

deadline for submissions:
March 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
academic anthology edited by Samantha Baugus and Ayanni Cooper

contact email:
creatureredux@gmail.com


source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/01/04/creature-redux-considering-the-pasts-presents-and-futures-of-chimera-in-fiction-and.

Call for Papers - Creature Redux: Considering the Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Chimera in Fiction and Popular Culture

Animals are the quotidian absolute Other. They are not inherently horrifying, dangerous, or invasive; nor do they have designs to usurp or subjugate humanity. In his lecture-turned-book The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida critiques the use of the word “animal” to describe an almost limitless array of creatures. “Animal” becomes a catch-all term for everything that is otherwise than human–and not the biological entity, but a specific, constructed hegemonic entity.

Similarly, monsters and monstrosity are oft used to delineate the limits of “the human” or “the normal.” And yet, the boundaries around what makes a monster are in constant flux, adjusting to fit the time and place of a monster’s creation. As Jeffery Jerome Cohen famously states in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, monsters are “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place.” “Monster,” then, becomes a term to understand not only the creature it describes, but the people wielding it as well.

Drawing a bridge between the study of animals and monsters, this collection turns toward the chimera. As a proper noun, Chimera are figures in Greek mythology. However, the term has transformed to, a) suggest any blend of persons, places, or things (though frequently creatures) that is an amalgamation of different elements or to, b) dismiss something as a flight of fancy, entirely unrealistic. Across time, the chimera has maintained a presence in literature and, in our modern era, has become entwined with cutting-edge scientific research. Yet, while stories of chimera abound and are even becoming a complex, biological reality, the chimera resists classification and rejects taxonomy. She instead creeps, leaps, and breathes fire through staid categories, forced boundaries, and comfortable assumptions. And she does not always do it nicely.

This collection aims to combine the meanings of chimera in our own chimerical creation–monster, animal, mythological, fantastical–to propose a “neither this nor that,” but an “all of the above.” Though we look to center fictional representations of chimera, we encourage writers to think broadly about the figure and what she could be or represent across genres and time. Additionally, this collection could be considered posthuman and posthumanist–rejecting the Cartesian definition of the individual and the traditional binaries–but rather than something that comes after, the chimera is something that comes through. The chimera extends from the past to the future, evolving and mutating along the way.

Through this collection, we look to investigate junctions, crossings, and mixtures of creatures that push, challenge, and distort the boundaries of the human in numerous ways. What the human is, has been, or could be is a question that possesses serious and highly relevant implications in our contemporary moment. How does the chimera’s inherent hybridity complicate our understanding of the familiar and the other? We seek analyses that center the idea of the chimera in fictional texts of any medium, genre, place, or time period. 

Some topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Animals becoming monsters
• Body horror and the chimera
• Chimera across genre/chimerical-genres
• Chimera across time
• Hybrids, transformations, and blends
• Kaiju as chimera
• Mythological origins and histories of chimera
• Pets as chimera
• Pop-culture franchises as chimera; the chimera and the crossover event
• Post-subject chimera, the chimera after “humanism”
• Realistic depictions of chimeras in fiction
• Robo-chimera; the machine animal; or the animal as machine
• The legacy of H.G. Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau
• The posthuman as chimera
• The sliding scale of anthropomorphism
• Time/place/space as chimera

Please send chapter proposals to creatureredux@gmail.com no later than March 31st, 2023. We welcome proposals from scholars, researchers, and practitioners of all levels and particularly encourage early-career scholars and scholars without university affiliation to apply.

Additionally, we’re looking to produce a short, companion podcast series for Creature Redux that interfaces with collected essays. The series might consist of interviews with contributors or conversations around points of connection between essays, but will ultimately evolve and take shape based on the pieces we receive and interest from authors/publishers. Please know that this podcast will not be a requirement of participation.

Please include the following with your chapter proposal:

Name


Preferred email contact


Institutional Affiliation, if applicable


A 350 - 500 word abstract of the proposed essay


Working title for your essay


A brief, 150-word biography

Chapter proposals are due no later than March 31st, 2023. If the essay is accepted to the collection, we anticipate complete chapter drafts of approximately 5000-7000 words will be due in October 2023. All drafts should be in MLA format, reflecting the 9th edition updates. The editors, Dr. Samantha Baugus and Dr. Ayanni C. H. Cooper, are happy to receive questions, queries, and concerns at creatureredux@gmail.com.




Last updated January 9, 2023

CFP From "Them" to Now: Changing Metaphors of the Monstrous Insect (8/15/2022; NEPCA Monsters Area - online conference 10/20-22/2022)

“From ‘Them’ to Now: Changing Metaphors of the Monstrous Insect”

Session Organized by Eddie Guimont, Bristol Community College

Co-Sponsored by the Monsters & the Monstrous Area and the Animals and Culture Special Topic of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association

2022 Annual Conference of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association

Virtual Event to be held Thursday, 20 October, to Saturday, 22 October 2022

Proposals are due 15 August 2022



In the early twentieth century, H. G. Wells’ “Empire of the Ants” used an outbreak of intelligent ants to critique European colonialism, while in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, every aspect of the metaphor of the titular transformation of Gregor Samsa is debated, save the fact that it is a metaphor. In the 1950s, classic science fiction B-movies like Them and Beginning of the End introduced the trope of radiation mutating insects to enormous size, reflecting Cold War fears over invasion and nuclear war. 1958 The Fly served as a criticism of the same science run amok that led to the development of nuclear weapons, and was remade in the 1980s when Cold War tensions returned for their last major peak. In the last two years, congruent with the covid pandemic and various political protest waves, not only has Mothra returned and Spider-Men encountered themselves, but the news has included such stories as the return of the cicada Brood X, grasshopper swarms in the western US, “murder hornet” scares, and crickets as an explanation for “Havana Syndrome.” We seek papers that investigate the depictions of monstrous insects in pop culture (including news stories) across history, particularly with how such depictions reflect various social, political, and economic concerns of their eras.


The Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (also known as NEPCA) invites proposals for 15-20-minute presentations that engage with the idea of the monstrous insect in popular culture.


Send any questions on this session to Michael A. Torregrossa, the Monsters & the Monstrous Area Chair, at Popular.Preternaturaliana@gmail.com. However, please submit your proposal directly into NEPCA’s conference system at https://bit.ly/CFPNEPCA22. You will need to have prepared the following: Yout Email, The type of proposal (single paper or full panel), Your Name, Your Proposed Subject Area (select “Monsters and the Monstrous” please), An Abstract (no more than 250 words), Academic Affiliation (if applicable), Scholarly Role, and Short Bio (up to 200 words), and Timing preferences for the session. The system will send you a receipt of your submission and alert the area chair of its readiness for review.

If accepted, presenters must join NEPCA for the year and pay the conference fee. This year the costs are $54.67 USD for Conference Registration & Membership Dues. Payment is expected in advance of 1 October 2022. Do connect with the area chair (at Popular.Preternaturaliana@gmail.com) or NEPCA directly via Lance Eaton, the Executive Secretary, (at northeastpopculture@gmail.com), if you are experiencing financial challenges that might impact your ability to present.


NEPCA prides itself on holding conferences that emphasize sharing ideas in a non-competitive and supportive environment. NEPCA conferences offer intimate and nurturing sessions in which new ideas and works-in-progress can be aired, as well as completed projects.

We welcome proposals from scholars of all levels, including full-time faculty, graduate students, independent scholars, junior faculty, part-time faculty, and senior scholars. We are also open to undergraduate presentations, provided a faculty member is also included as a point of reference (please include the faculty member’s name, institution, and email in the bio section when submitting).


For further details on NEPCA, please visit its site at https://nepca.blog/. The dedicated page for the conference is https://nepca.blog/conference/.

The Monsters & the Monstrous Area maintains its own site for news and resources. Please check us out at https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/.


This call for papers can be accessed at https://tinyurl.com/FromThemToNow.

CFP Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out (edited collection) (11/7/2017)

An intriguing theme:

Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out (edited collection)

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/08/01/gothic-animals-uncanny-otherness-and-the-animal-with-out-edited-collection

 

deadline for submissions: November 1, 2017

full name / name of organization: Ruth Heholt and Melissa Edmundson

contact email: me.makala@gmail.com

 

Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out

'The boundary between the animal and the human has long been unstable, especially since the Victorian period. Where the boundary is drawn between human and animal is itself an expression of political power and dominance, and the ‘animal’ can at once express the deepest fears and greatest aspirations of a society' (Victorian Animal Dreams, 4).

'The animal, like the ghost or good or evil spirit with which it is often associated, has been a manifestation of the uncanny' (Timothy Clark, 185).

In the mid nineteenth-century Charles Darwin published his theories of evolution. And as Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay suggest, 'The effect of Darwin’s ideas was both to make the human more animal and the animal more human, destabilizing boundaries in both directions' (Victorian Animal Dreams, 2). Nineteenth-century fiction quickly picked up on the idea of the 'animal within' with texts like R.L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau. In these novels the fear explored was of an unruly, defiant, degenerate and entirely amoral animality lying (mostly) dormant within all of us. This was our animal-other associated with the id: passions, appetites and capable of a complete disregard for all taboos and any restraint. As Cyndy Hendershot states, this 'animal within' 'threatened to usurp masculine rationality and return man to a state of irrational chaos' (The Animal Within, 97). This however, relates the animal to the human in a very specific, anthropocentric way. Non-humans and humans have other sorts of encounters too, and even before Darwin humans have often had an uneasy relationship with animals. Rats, horses, dogs, cats, birds and other beasts have, as Donna Haraway puts it a way of 'looking back' at us (When Species Meet,19).

Animals of all sorts have an entirely different and separate life to humans and in fiction this often morphs into Gothic horror. In these cases it is not about the 'animal within' but rather the animal 'with-out'; Other and entirely incomprehensible. These non-human, uncanny creatures know things we do not, and they see us in a way it is impossible for us to see ourselves. We have other sorts of encounters with animals too: we eat animals, imbibing their being in a largely non-ritualistic, but possibly still magical way; and on occasion, animals eat us. From plague-carrying rats, to 'filthy' fleas, black dogs and killer bunnies, animals of all sorts invade our imaginations, live with us (invited or not) in our homes, and insinuate themselves into our lives. The mere presence of a cat can make a home uncanny. An encounter with a dog on a deserted road at night can disconcert. The sight of a rat creeping down an alley carries all sorts of connotations as does a cluster of fat, black flies at the window of a deserted house. To date though, there is little written about animals and the Gothic, although they pervade our fictions, imaginations and sometimes our nightmares.

This collection is intended to look at all sorts of animals in relation to the Gothic: beasts, birds, sea-creatures, insects and domestic animals. We are not looking for transformative animals – no werewolves this time – rather we want essays on fictions about actual animals that explore their relation to the Gothic; their importance and prominence within the Gothic. We invite abstracts for essays that cover all animal/bird/insect/fish life forms, from all periods (from the early Modern to the present), and within different types of media – novels, poetry, short stories, films and games.


Topics may include (but are not bound by):

• Rats (plague and death)
• Dogs (black and otherwise)
• Killer bunnies
• Uncanny cats
• Alien sea creatures
• Horses
• Bulls
• Cows (perhaps with long teeth)
• Killer frogs
• Beetles, flies, ants, spiders
• Worms
• Birds
• Snakes and toads
• Whales/Dolphins
• Animals as marginalised and oppressed
• Animals in peril
• Animal and human intimacies and the breaking of taboos
• Exotic animals/animals in colonial regions (Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, India)
• Demonic animals
• Dangerous animals (rabid dogs, venomous snakes, wolves)
• Invasive animals
• Animals and disease
• Domestic animals
• Uncanny animals
• Animals connected to supernatural beings (Satanic goats, vampire bats)
• Witchcraft and familiar spirits/animal guides
• Rural versus urban animals
• Sixth sense and psychic energy

Please send 500 word abstracts and a short bio note by 1 November 2017 to: Dr Ruth Heholt (ruth.heholt@falmouth.ac.uk) and Dr Melissa Edmundson (me.makala@gmail.com).

The collection is intended for the Palgrave MacMillan 'Studies in Animals and Literature' series. Completed essays must be submitted by 1 July 2018.

Last updated August 4, 2017