CFP What is a life worth living? Speculative Fiction and Eternal Life (3/15/2023; MLA Philadelphia 1/4-7/2024)

What is a life worth living? Speculative Fiction and Eternal Life

deadline for submissions:
March 15, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Christene d'Anca, University of California Santa Barbara

contact email:
christene_danca@ucsb.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/01/22/what-is-a-life-worth-living-speculative-fiction-and-eternal-life.

Despite numerous post-apocalyptic storylines, many science fiction texts are a celebration of life and seek ways of prolonging it, whether artificially or by providing warnings against our current behavior in order to preserve the life that already exists. The fact that death and potential immortality are so frequently featured throughout the genre underscores our preoccupation with overcoming the limitations imposed on our bodies by nature, while seeking means to go beyond what is currently possible.

Such an interest has informed a broad literary fascination with immortality and rebirth, particularly in nineteenth and early twentieth century fantasy and science fiction, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. Rider Haggard’s She, or Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Ring of Thoth” being prime examples. These concerns persisted into the late twentieth century, especially in the aftermath of two world wars, and continue to intrigue us in the twenty-first.

Moreover, we look towards modern technology to grant us invincibility, and these developments have been foreshadowed through a variety of texts from Ovid’s Daedalus in antiquity to Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire, Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy in the modern era, to name but a few. As such texts interrogate what a world might look like in which human and/or non-human beings experience immortality, or versions of it, they address questions such as what constitutes the human soul, individuality, and our relationships with others as well as the planet over periods of time beyond a single human lifespan.

For our panel at the 2024 MLA conference January 4-7 in Philadelphia, we welcome 250-300 word abstracts for 15-minute papers focusing on the extension of life in science fiction or fantasy, with topics including, but not limited to the following:

- Human enhancement

- Monstrosity and reconceptualization of the human body

- Digital consciousness

- Carnality and bodily experience

- Bodily commodification

- Immortality pros/cons

- Death as a character

- Life-extending instruments and technology

- New perspectives on death, immortality, and rebirth

- Theological afterlives

- Time travel

Please address abstracts and/or questions to Christene d’Anca (christene_danca@ucsb.edu) and Darren Borg (borgdj@piercecollege.edu).




Last updated January 26, 2023a

CFP Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic (1/31/2023; Magdeburg, Germany 4/29-5/1/2023)

Defying Death: Immortality and Rebirth in the Fantastic

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Inklings Society for Literature and Aesthetics

contact email:
carsten.kullmann@ovgu.de

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/10/05/defying-death-immortality-and-rebirth-in-the-fantastic

In fantasy and science fiction, death, immortality and rebirth are topics that feature frequently, elucidating that the loss of life and the questions of how it might be prevented or reversed are at the centre of human concern. These questions also constitute an essential focal point of the works of the Oxford Inklings, particularly Tolkien and Lewis. They created places of immortality, such as Valinor, also known as the undying lands in Tolkien’s legendarium, or Aslan’s Country in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, wrote about the struggles of immortal beings amongst mortals in the fight of good versus evil, and frequently introduced ideas of resurrection or rebirth (the White Tree of Gondor, Gandalf the White, Aslan, the multitude of worlds in The Magician’s Nephew) and the neither living nor dead (The Nazgul, The (un-)Dead Men of Dunharrow) in their works.

Yet, the Oxford Inklings were by far not the only ones concerned with such themes. An interest in ancient belief systems, alchemy, theosophy, and science informed a broader literary fascination with immortality and rebirth, particularly in 19th and early 20th century fantasy and science fiction, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Ring of Thoth” being prime examples.

Issues of life and death, immortality and rebirth remained a persistent concern in the later 20th century, especially in the aftermath of the two world wars, and continue to fascinate us in the 21st century. In the fantastical imagination, texts in all media, such as The Sandman, Good Omens, The Expanse, A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter, Hologrammatica, Altered Carbon, or the Maddaddam Trilogy, to name just a few examples, all explore the idea of what a world might look like in which human and/or non-human beings experience immortality, or versions of it, thereby addressing questions of what constitutes the human soul, individuality, and the significance of existence beyond a single lifetime.

2023 marks the anniversary of the death of J. R.R. Tolkien (50) and C.S. Lewis (60) as well as the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the German Inklings-Society. We take these anniversaries as a cue to discuss the intersection of death, rebirth, and immortality in our symposium.

We invite contributions investigating how these topics are represented in the mode of the fantastic beyond the limitations of realism, including but not limited to the following possible topics: 

• death as a character
• psychopomps
• (dis)advantages of immortality
• the pursuit of immortality
• art and immortality
• elixirs of life
• life-extending instruments and measures
• metaphorical or literal rebirth
• rebirth as new beginning or redemption
• afterlives and underworlds
• ethical, philosophical and religious perspectives
• circle(s) of life
• (ab)use of power
• new perspectives on death, immortality, and rebirth in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s works in particular

Please send proposals (300–500 words, either in German or English) as well as a short bio to carsten.kullmann@ovgu.de or maria.fleischhack@uni-leipzig.de. Please use the subject line “Inklings Symposium 2023”. The deadline is 31 January 2023. Presentations at the symposium should be 20 minutes long and a selection of them will be published in the Inklings Yearbook.

Location: Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg

Date: 29 April to 1 May 2023

Travel Allowance: There will be a small allowance available to speakers for accommodation and travel expenses.

Organisers: Carsten Kullmann, M.A. (Magdeburg) and Dr. Maria Fleischhack (Leipzig)


Last updated October 10, 2022

CFP FRAME 36.1 “Dying Wor(l)ds” (Spec. Issue, proposals by 12/7/2022)

FRAME 36.1 “Dying Wor(l)ds”

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/10/31/frame-361-%E2%80%9Cdying-worlds%E2%80%9D

deadline for submissions:
December 7, 2022

full name / name of organization:
FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies

contact email:
info@frameliteraryjournal.com



In “Land Sickness”, Nikolaj Schultz describes how he goes on vacation to “detach from the material consequences of [his] existence,” but upon arrival on a French island, he is once more faced with the material reality of existence, as the island’s coastline is eroding, caused by rising sea levels and the pressure of foreign tourism. He writes: “Neither Pareto, Marx or Bourdieu died in vain, but none of them offer a language sufficient to articulate the geo-social struggle for territory that unfolds on the island. I myself lack a language to understand what is happening.” How indeed, does one think and write about the world that is disappearing under our feet?

FRAME’s next issue is titled “Dying Wor(l)d’s” and accordingly focuses on questions of death and dying, in our world and our language. The understanding of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch has highlighted humanity’s ineffable impact on the planet we inhabit, but simultaneously, the Anthropocene continually draws attention to humanity’s inability to act upon that understanding. The cultural apathy that arises in discussions about the planet and our future illustrates our inability to think and write about such matters. We would like to invite scholars of literary studies and related fields to consider the (textual) implications of dying worlds and dying words. What happens when we, like Nikolaj Schultz, find ourselves without the vocabulary to express the loss we experience around us? Is literature able to narrate such complex matters, or is the environmental crisis also an illustration of the limits of literature—or indeed, the death of literature, brought about by the ‘poisonous gift’ that Bruno Latour titled the Anthropocene? And yet, there is a promise of global survival. Anna Tsing writes, while landscapes globally are dying, “[i]n a global state of precarity, we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin” (6). How can we react to wor(l)ds dying?

Themes and topics related to these questions might include, but are not limited to:

• The death of animal species and ecosystems
• The use of death as narrator in literature
• Cultural mediation of disasters
• The human as destructive agent
• Gothic literature and its anticipation of disaster
• Cultural representation of good and evil
• The death of literature, including increased illiteracy or the death of the physical book
• (Eco)mourning
• Posthumanism or the death of the human
• The Great Dyings
• The death of Indigenous and minority languages

The above questions and concerns are only a few of the many themes that could be explored in the upcoming issue. However, we would like to stress that while FRAME encourages interdisciplinary and creative approaches, every proposal/article should show a clear connection to literary studies, as we are a literary journal first and foremost.

If you are interested in writing for FRAME, please submit a brief proposal of max. 500 words before 7 December 2022. Proposals should include a thesis statement, general structure and a preliminary reflection on the theories and discourses in which the argument will be situated. On the basis of all abstracts, contributors whose proposals are accepted will be notified by 15 December 2022, and asked to submit a draft version of the paper before 11 January 2023. Be mindful that we hold the right to reject draft versions to ensure consistency and coherence across all contributions to the issue. The deadline for the article’s first full version will be 26 February 2022, after which the editing process will begin. A regular article has a word limit of 6000 words, including bibliography and footnotes. For our Masterclass section, graduate and PhD students are invited to write up to a maximum of 4000 words. Please feel free to contact us at info@frameliteraryjournal.com, should you have any questions. More information about our journal, as well as our submission guidelines, can be found on our website: www.frameliteraryjournal.com.




categories
cultural studies and historical approaches
ecocriticism and environmental studies
journals and collections of essays
theory
world literatures and indigenous studies

Last updated November 3, 2022