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 Strange Things: Alternatives, Imaginaries, and Other(world)s Conference (1/31/2023; online 3/24-25/2023)

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Strange Things: Alternatives, Imaginaries, and Other(world)s

deadline for submissions:
January 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Indiana University Department of English

contact email:
iugradconference@gmail.com


source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/11/03/deadline-extended-strange-things-alternatives-imaginaries-and-otherworlds


Call for Papers

Strange Things: Alternatives, Imaginaries, and Other(world)s

20th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

Department of English, Indiana University, Bloomington

Dates: Friday March 24th – Saturday March 25th, 2023



We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for Indiana University’s 20th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference, hosted by the Department of English. This conference will be held virtually on Friday March 24th and Saturday March 25th. Our keynote speaker is Dr. Christy Tidwell, whose recent work includes the co-edited anthology Fear & Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, and a co-edited special issue of Science Fiction Film & Television on creature features and the environment.

In 1937, the Indiana General Assembly officially selected the phrase "Crossroads of America" as the state motto. Almost 80 years later, the Netflix show Stranger Things features the fictional town Hawkins, Indiana as a portal that leads us into the "Upside Down," where all those "stranger" things come from, those Others desiring to annihilate us all. And the kids fight back—the familiar mixture of superpower, blood-spatter, and initiation rite. But we ask: what if we can put the war in abeyance, and cohabitate with that mirroring Otherworld and all the creatures flooding from it? What if we can replace the two-way portal with a crossroads, and (re)imagine other ways—both figuratively and literally—of defining our shared worlds? Indeed, are they really that stranger? We in the humanities have always dealt with things that are strange around us, and we enjoy and yes, have fun imagining strange, alternative worlds and different temporalities, spatialities, identities, and subjectivities that come with them. In 2023, we will make Bloomington such a crossroads, a space where not only people but animals, cyborgs, aliens, indeed, "things" come and go. Out of sync with the normative time and space, we will "make it strange."

Relevant topics may include (but are by no means limited to):

• Representations and interrogations of the “other”
• Crossings of time and/or space
• Worldbuilding
• Materiality or materialisms
• Liminality, borders, and/or margins
• Ghosts, monsters, aliens, and all things “strange”
• Narratives and counternarratives
• Collectivity and collaboration
• Critical identity studies
• Genre studies
• Studies of migration, border, and/or diaspora
• Queer modes of composition and interpretation

Proposals might also situate these topics in the context of rhetoric and composition studies. We invite proposals that consider the “strange” world of the classroom, the role of rhetoric in studies of the strange and the other, and more. Papers that bring together critical and creative elements are also encouraged.

We invite proposals for both individual papers and organized panels: Individual scholarly papers and creative works (15-minute presentations; please submit a 250-word abstract)
Panels organized around a thematic topic (three 20-minute papers or four 15-minute papers; please submit a 350-word panel abstract as well as a 100-word abstract for each individual paper on the panel)

Email your submission to iugradconference@gmail.com by January 31, 2023. In your email, please submit your abstract (both in the body of the email and as a Word attachment), along with your name, institutional affiliation, email, and phone number. Please note that both the keynote and the panels will be given synchronously via Zoom.



Lydia Nixon, Conference Chair

AC Carlson, Conference Co-Chair

Jaehoon Lee, CFP Author



Last updated January 10, 2023

CFP Online Midwinter Seminar 2023 Fantasy Goes to Hell: Depictions of Hell in Modern Fantasy Texts (11/15/2022; online 1/27-28/2023)

Online Midwinter Seminar 2023
Fantasy Goes to Hell: Depictions of Hell in Modern Fantasy Texts

January 27-28 (Friday evening, Saturday all day)
Via Zoom and Discord

Source and registration link: https://www.mythsoc.org/oms/oms-2023.htm

Online Midwinter Seminar
Fantasy Goes to Hell: Depictions of Hell in Modern Fantasy Texts
Co-chairs: Janet Brennan Croft and Erin Giannini

Hell in modern fantasy is usually a far cry from traditional depictions in major world religions — the dry and dusty hells of ancient Mesopotamia and the Classical world, the ambiguous Hel of the Norse, the fiery pit and everlasting torment of medieval Christianity and Islam, the purgatorial hells of reincarnative religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. How do creators of fantasy imagine Hell differently? And more importantly, why? What do these depictions have to tell us about what is hellish in our modern world?

In addition to hosting this Online Midwinter Seminar, the co-chairs will be co-editing a special issue of Mythlore, in which they intend to present selected papers presented at this seminar.

REGISTRATION

Registration is US$20.00 per person.

Since a major component of the online seminar is the discussions and other activities on Discord, we would also like to know what screen name (or "handle") you use, or would like to use, on that platform. Specifying both your real name and your Discord name helps us keep track of who is registered and who is not. However, supplying your Discord name is technically optional, especially if you do not plan on participating in any Discord activities.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The CFP deadline is November 15, 2022.

The Mythopoeic Society invites paper submissions for an online conference that focuses on the various depictions of the concept of hell in modern fantasy works. Aspects of this topic might include but are certainly not limited to any of the following:

• The mystical spiritual descent: what can be gained from a descent to hell
• The escape from hell: What is saved, and what is left behind
• The harrowing of hell: the rescue of others from hell
• The pact with hell: self-damnation or turning the tables
• The intersection of race, racism, and hell
• Hellish places: Mordor, Charn, the Upside Down, the post-apocalyptic world
• The influence of fantastic ur-texts about Hell: Aeneas’s visit in The Aeneid; Dante’s Inferno; Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit; the art of Hieronymus Bosch; Mozart’s Don Giovanni
• “This IS the Bad Place!”: The primary world as Hell

Papers from a variety of critical perspectives and disciplines are welcome. We are interested in ANY form of media — text, graphic novels, television, movies, music and music videos, games — as long as it can be described as fantasy and includes a hell or its denizens.
Some texts to consider:

• C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce
• Charles Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve
• Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens (book and television series)
• Lois McMaster Bujold’s Five Gods series
• Music videos: Lil Nas X’s “Montero” and “Industry Baby”
• Television series: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Lovecraft Country, Supernatural, The Good Place
• Movies: Get Out, Dogma
• Tanith Lee’s Tales From the Flat Earth series (Death’s Master et seq.)
• Works by Vaclev Havel, Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, George Orwell
• Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (graphic novels and television series)
• Walter Wangerin, Jr.’s Dun Cow trilogy
• Evan Dahm’s Harrowing of Hell (graphic novel)

Each paper will receive a 50-minute slot to allow time for questions, but individual papers should be timed for oral presentation in 40 minutes maximum. Two or three presenters who wish to present short, related papers may also share a one-hour slot. Participants are encouraged to submit papers chosen for presentation at the conference to the special issue of Mythlore devoted to this theme. All papers should conform to the MLA Style Manual current edition.

Proposals should be approximately 200 words in length and should be sent to both co-chairs: oms-chair@mythcon.org and oms-co-chair@mythcon.org.

CFP Inklings and Horror: Fantasy's Dark Corners (11/15/2021; Zoom February 2022)

Online Winter Seminar
The Inklings and Horror: Fantasy's Dark Corners 

https://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/ows-2022.htm

February 4-5, 2022 (Friday evening, Saturday all day)

Via Zoom and Discord 

Online Winter Seminar
The Inklings and Horror: Fantasy's Dark Corners

Registration: ($20 fee, see the website)

Sponsored by The Writers of the Rohirrim, a Mythopoeic Society Discussion Group, we invite you to embrace the darkness of those long winter nights and participate in The Inklings and Horror: Fantasy's Dark Corners.

Tentative Schedule:

Friday evening, 5 pm or later, we will have Discord chats, gaming, possibly a digital break-out room, and other ideas that we can come up with. Then papers occur on Saturday with closing activities in the evening.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Downloadable PDF

The Mythopoeic Society invites paper submissions for an online conference that focuses on the connections between and among Inkling authors and the literary tropes of the horror sub-genre of speculative fiction, to be held through Zoom and Discord February 4-5, 2022. Aspects of this topic might include any of the following as well as other approaches not mentioned here: 

• the utopian and dystopian dimensions of fantasy worlds, including those of the Inklings, that include horrific elements
• the role of fear in idealized world building, including the works of the Inklings
• the demonic and the angelic, with reference to the works of one or more of the Inklings
• monstrosity, gore, and/or body horror (possibly contrasted with otherness and/or beauty)
• the redeemable and the unredeemable
• the appeal of dread in Inkling fantasy and in horror examples
• the horrific within the fantastic and the fantastic within the horrific, including in the works of the Inklings
• the horror of otherness within the sameness of the fantastic
• horrific race and/or gender elements in fantastic narratives, including those of the Inklings
• horror as the despoliation of the fantastic
  

Papers from a variety of critical perspectives and disciplines are welcome.

Each paper will receive a 50-minute slot to allow time for questions, but individual papers should be timed for oral presentation in 40 minutes maximum. Two or three presenters who wish to present short, related papers may also share a one-hour slot. Participants are encouraged to submit papers chosen for presentation at the conference to Mythlore, the refereed journal of the Mythopoeic Society. All papers should conform to the MLA Style Manual current edition.

Paper abstracts (250 word maximum), along with contact information, should be sent to the Papers Coordinator, Online Winter Seminar, at the following email address by 15 November, 2021: mythiccircle@mythsoc.org. Please include your AV requests and the projected time needed for your presentation.

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 Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable (4/30/2016)

One final call for the night:

Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable -- Edited Collection
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/61594
full name / name of organization:
Lisa Wenger Bro / Middle Georgia State University
contact email: lisa.bro@mga.edu

Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable: The Cultural Links between the Human and Inhuman

This proposed collection will explore the cultural implications of and the societal fears and desires associated with the literal monsters of fiction, television, and movies. Long tied to ideas of the Other, the inhuman have represented societal fears for centuries. While this depiction of inhuman as Other still persists today, postmodern times also saw a radical shift in the portrayals and long-held associations. The postmodern monster is by no means soft and cuddly; nevertheless, its depiction has evolved. Veering from the traditional, “us vs. them” dynamic, many contemporary works illustrate what posthuman theorists refer to as the “them” in “us” correlation. These new monsters, often found in urban fantasy, eradicate the stark separation between human and inhuman as audiences search for the similarities between themselves and their much beloved monster characters. The shifted portrayal also means that these select, postmodern monsters no longer highlight cultural fears, but rather cultural hopes, dreams, desires, and even humanity’s own inhumanity. This does not mean that the pure monsters of horror are eradicated in contemporary renderings. Instead, they too have evolved over the course of the 20th and 21st century, highlighting everything from socioeconomic anxieties to issues related to humanity and human nature.

Given the many and varied implications of the inhuman in media and their long and diverse history, this volume will examine the cultural connotations of the monstrous, focusing specifically on the monsters of modernism and postmodernism.

In particular, we are looking to fill in certain gaps, and welcome articles related to the following monsters:

• Ghosts
• Leviathons/behemoths—anything from Mothra to Dragons
• Science Fiction related monsters such as artificial intelligence and cyborgs

The proposal for this collection is in progress, and will be submitted once selections are made.

Please email the following to Lisa Wenger Bro (lisa.bro@mga.edu) by Thursday, April 30:

• a 300-350 word abstract
• a brief biography
• the estimated length of the full article
• the number of illustrations, if any, you will use (note, it will be up to individual authors to secure rights to images)

Full articles will be due by June 30. All accepted articles will be peer-reviewed.

By web submission at 03/31/2015 - 16:41

CFP The Automated Body (Spec Issue) (8/15/15)

CFP: ESC—“‘Fear, Love, and Confusion’: A Special Issue on the AUTOMATED BODY” (Deadline: August 15, 2015)
http://accute.ca/2015/05/28/call-for-papers-esc-fear-love-and-confusion-a-special-issue-on-the-automated-body-deadline-august-15-2015/
BY INFOACCUTE ON MAY 28, 2015

ESC—“‘Fear, Love, and Confusion’: A Special Issue on the AUTOMATED BODY”
Deadline for submission of abstracts or completed papers: August 15, 2015

ESC: English Studies in Canada invites submissions for a special issue on the automated body, edited by Cecily Devereux and Marcelle Kosman, to be published Spring 2016. This special issue is situated in response to an expanding range of questions and concerns about humans and automation in early twenty-first-century cultural representation. Such questions and concerns are arguably evident in representation from the earliest days of mechanization and industrialization in the late eighteenth century, and what a scant twenty years ago were referred to as “cybercultures” have been the focus for nearly three decades of academic considerations. Contemporary cultural texts, we suggest, demonstrate a renewed engagement with questions of the implications of the convergence of the biological with the mechanical and the relationships and the limits of what Donna Haraway characterized in her 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto” as “couplings between organism and machine” and the “fear, love, and confusion” they generate. If fear is evident in what a 2014 New York Times op-ed (June 22) characterized as “robot-worriers’” concerns about automation and unemployment in the workplace, to take only one example, love of—and confusion regarding—human-machine convergences is evident in proliferating stories of transformation, connection, and relationship such as the 2014 film Her and Allison de Fren’s 2012 documentary The Mechanical Bride. This special issue of ESC is interested in questions of automated bodies broadly conceived. It undertakes to bring into conversation a range of papers focused on any aspect of bodies and automation in cultural representation across media and disciplines. We are interested in automated embodiment as a distinctively contemporary concern yet also/and as well in the histories and archaeologies of such embodiment across periods and contexts.

• Bodies and/as machines; anthropomorphized machines; mechanical enhancement; prosthetics
• Cybernetics, biomedical engineering, genetic engineering; new eugenics and reproductive technologies
• Science fiction, fantasy, speculative and dystopic fiction and film; genres and subgenres: cyberpunk, biopunk, steampunk; automated bodies in comics media
• Fictions of transformation across media: Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Coppélia, The Nutcracker
• Fictions of male reproduction; parthenogenesis; auto-generation; cloning
• Mechanical bodies and televisual media: The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Dark Angel, Aeon Flux; media and mechanization
• Mechanical bodies in dance; dancing machines; machine music; music and automatism; karaoke; Dance Dance Revolution
• Mechanical bodies and fitness; sports and automation
• Robots as themes and instruments in contemporary music: Daft Punk, Ladytron, Kraftwerk, Radiohead, Robyn; Auto-Tune
• Avatars; gaming bodies (bodies in games, players’ bodies); virtual automation; virtual companions; intimate operating systems: Her; Siri; artificial intelligence
• Humans and computers; computer automation; machine dependency; devices, appliances, watches, glasses; brain-computer interface
• Social media and automatism
• Robot, robotics, fembot, cyborg, cylon, clone, replicant; robots as “immigrants from the future” (The Economist)
• Anthropomorphized robots; robots and affect; robots and love; robots we love; robots we fear; human/robot hybrids; roboethics
• Donna Haraway: reading organisms and machines since “The Cyborg Manifesto”
• Gender and automation; automation and patriarchy; fantasies of automation; housewives and mechanization
• Femininity and living dolls; Mechanical Brides, Stepford Wives, Windup Girls
• Masculinity and living dolls; Lars and the Real Girl, My Living Doll, Metropolis
• Automation, capital, and labour; automation and exhaustion; robots and dirty human work; overwork and automation; automation and unemployment
• Bodies in industry; factory bodies; Taylorism; Fordism; factory girls, typewriter girls; modernism, modernity, Modern Times
• Automated monsters (Chucky); zombies and/as automated bodies; Frankenstein; bodies and/as weapons; automation and monstrosity
• Automatic writing; computer-generated poetry; hypnotism and performing bodies
• Animals and automation; robot animals; cinema and mechanical creatures; technologies of 3D animation
• Automobility, automaticity, bodies and cars; killer cars (Christine, Killdozer)
• Automated toys and other things; sex toys; future toys
• Talking to machines: everyday life and automated systems
• Machines without humans: self-parking cars, self-flying planes, drones, drone photography; killing machines
• Surveillance and security systems; facial recognition technology; NSA monitoring; bio-identification

Please forward either a 500-word abstract OR a completed paper (6000-8000 words, in MLA format) and a 50-word biographical statement to Marcelle Kosman (mkosman@ualberta.ca) and Cecily Devereux (cecily.devereux@ualberta.ca) by August 15, 2015. Final revisions to accepted papers will need to be completed by December 15, 2015.

ESC: English Studies in Canada is a quarterly journal of scholarship and criticism concerned with the study of literature and culture. Recent special issues include “Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder” (40.1: 2014), edited by Derritt Mason and Ela Pryzbylo); “The Global Animal” (39.1: 2013), edited by Karyn Ball and Melissa Haynes), and “Childhood and Its Discontents” (38:3-4: 2012), edited by Nat Hurley. For more information visit ESC Digital at www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc ESC normally accepts black and white images, up to a limit of six per article. Contributors are responsible for providing image files in black and white with a resolution no less than… and for securing permissions in advance of publication. The journal’s style sheet is available at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc/submit.php.