CFP Rotting Corpses: Ecocritical Approaches to Death and Decomposition (9/1/2024)

Edited Collection: Rotting Corpses: Ecocritical Approaches to Death and Decomposition

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2024

full name / name of organization: Ashley Kniss, Stevenson University

contact email: ashley.anne.kniss@gmail.com

Editors: Sara Crosby, Carter Soles, and Ashley Kniss

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/01/12/edited-collection-rotting-corpses-ecocritical-approaches-to-death-and-decomposition

In Julia Kristeva’s seminal work, The Powers of Horror, she describes decay as the “contamination of life by death” (149). She goes on to write that “a decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is indistinguishable from the symbolic—the corpse represents fundamental pollution” (109). Kristeva’s work has influenced countless treatments of Gothic horror, helping to define the parameters of an unstable genre and explain why the corpse features so heavily in a genre where bodies, especially dead ones, are de rigueur. However, as scholars devote more attention to the ecoGothic and ecohorror, the role of the corpse is changing. The rotting corpse, dead or undead, is as multifaceted in ecohorror as the macro- and microinvertebrates that swarm within it. On one hand, the corpse remains a site of uncanny blurring between the familiar, human form and that which is alien, frightening, and inhuman. On the other hand, the corpse, especially when it rots, is also a site that teams with nonhuman life, a thriving ecosystem unto itself that represents potential hybridities, posthuman potentialities, and layers of transcorporeal encounters. Corpses in ecohorror rise from both biodiverse swamplands as well as petroleum-rich wells. Ecohorror’s corpses are not limited to the human, but also extend to the enormous corpses of the monsters in creature features. Ecohorror’s corpses are useful, disgusting, beautiful, and funny. Moreover, rotting corpses in ecohorror challenge the anthropocentric reactions of disgust that Kristeva outlines in The Powers of Horror, and evince new ways of conceptualizing the common materiality that binds the human and the nonhuman together.

This collection seeks essays that feature the rotting corpse in ecohorror, addressing topics such as but not limited to corpses in relation to

• Posthumanism
• Transcorporeality
• Materiality
• Disgust
• Hybridity
• Monsters
• Pop Culture
• Petrohorror
• History
• Burial Traditions
• Green Burial
• Aesthetics and Beauty of the Corpse
• Folk Traditions and the Dead
• Animal Corpses
• The gothic
• Ecohorror
• Extinction
• The Anthropocene
• Spirituality
• Race, Sex, Gender
• Nonhuman decomposition
• Mythology
• Graveyards, Cemeteries, and Crypts
• Relics and Religion
• Corpses in Videogames

Please submit a 250 word proposal/abstract to ashley.anne.kniss@gmail.com  along with your name, affiliation, and a short 50-word bio by September 1st, 2024.

Last updated January 17, 2024

CFP: “Death, Sickness, and Plagues in 19th-century British Literature” Collection (proposals by 5/1/2023)

Call for Book Chapters: “Death, Sickness, and Plagues in 19th-century British Literature”

deadline for submissions:
May 1, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Editor

contact email:
reyam.rammahi@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/02/15/call-for-book-chapters-%E2%80%9Cdeath-sickness-and-plagues-in-19th-century-british-literature

Vernon Press invites book chapter proposals for the forthcoming edited volume “Death, Sickness, and Plagues in 19th-century British Literature”, edited by Reyam Rammahi.

Much research has already been done on some of the themes of interest to this volume, especially in relation to Victorian literature and its depiction of womanhood and sickness. Still, with the continuing and growing interest in race and gender studies, more is yet to be explored. The importance of this volume lies in its focus on critical issues for today’s literary studies such as race, gender, and the apocalypse and the interconnectedness of these issues. The volume is aimed at including such voices that tackle readings of such political implications in unprecedented ways. As more studies continue to emerge that apply postcolonial and feminist theories, for instance, to the works of the nineteenth century, this collection aims to combine such readings under the specified theme to provide a connection among a number of literary works through issues of illness, race, gender, and politics. Whether in the Brontë sisters’ works or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or other works, less known or less discussed, we welcome studies that include such issues as the East/West binary, race, and oppositions between warring political, religious, and social factions, to name a few. Proposals that would especially be welcomed are those that tackle race and gender topics. We welcome proposals that tackle the following topics:

• Death, illness, and race
• Sickness of individuals representing sickness of nations
• Sickness and women
• Motherhood and sickness
• Madness, suicide, and Victorian heroines
• Female illness and the patriarchy
• Apocalypse
• The plague of people and nations
• Literary responses to plagues, epidemics, and pandemics

Please submit a one-page proposal and a short bio by May 1st, 2023 to Reyam Rammahi at reyam.rammahi@gmail.com.




Last updated February 22, 2023

CFP Versions of the Afterlife Conference (7/1/2023; online 12/7/2023)

VERSIONS OF THE AFTERLIFE (online conference)

deadline for submissions:
July 1, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland

contact email:
kbronkk@amu.edu.pl

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/04/17/versions-of-the-afterlife-online-conference

VERSIONS OF THE AFTERLIFE

7th December 2023

Online Conference



Call for Papers

Between Matthew’s description of heaven as a wedding (22 1-14) - most memorably delivered by Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ - and Jean Paul Sartre’s verdict that “hell is other people,” there is not only a gap of centuries but also cultures and religions.[1] Despite their disparity, however, both conceptualizations render the fundamental human anxiety related to the weighty question of “what comes next?” They point to the necessity of envisaging the unfamiliar through the familiar, thereby taming the terrifying void.

Versions of the afterlife, therefore, are not only related to the need to imagine the hereafter in the sense of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (for the Catholics), but also to the contemporary notions of “post-theory”, such as post-humanism and the ideas of postmodernism, post-feminism, post-colonialism and post-nationalism.

The aim of this conference organized by the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, in Poznan, Poland – and co-hosted with the Faculty of Philosophy, AMU, and the Poznań Chapter of the Agder Academy of Social Sciences and Letters – is to explore and discuss the literal, the literary and the metaphorical meanings of the notion of “the afterlife”. We welcome papers representing the humanities in their conceptualizations and literary reifications of the religious, medical and political “hereafters”.

Literature (in English) / Art

• Literary narratives on the hereafter across cultures and religions
• Saints’ lives and visions
• Theatre and the drama of/on the hereafter
• Gothic literature and the visions of the afterlife
• Literary visions and versions of post-apocalyptic reality
• Artistic representations of the afterlife: Imaging the hereafter
• The afterlives of theory: post-humanism and the ideas of postmodernism, post-feminism, etc.
• The afterlives of ideologies, doctrines, political systems as represented in literary works (post-nationalism, post-colonialism, etc.)
• The afterlives of literary texts and their authors: adaptations, rewritings, etc.

Medical Humanities / Social Sciences (in literary texts in English)

• The moment of passing
• The mystery of one’s body shutting down
• Marketing death and the life after death
• Out-of-body experience
• End-of life dreams and visions versus science

Theology / Ethics (in literary texts in English)

• Versions of the afterlife from the earliest records to contemporary times across cultures and religions
• Ars moriendi (good endings vs bad endings)
• Secular / atheist alternatives for life after death

300-400 word abstracts should be sent to BOTH afterlifewaconference@gmail.com and kbronkk@amu.edu.pl by 1st July 2023. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of August 2023. There will be no fees for conference participation, but active and passive participants need to register in advance.




[1] Sartre, Jean Paul. Huit-Clos [Przy Drzwiach Zamknietych]. Dramaty: Muchy, Przy Drzwiach Zamkniętych, Ladacznica z Zasadami, Niekrasow, translated by Jerzy Lisowski. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy 1956.



Last updated April 27, 2023