CFP - Feats of Clay: Disability and Graphic Narrative / essay collection (Dec. 15)

Call For Papers

Feats of Clay:

Disability and Graphic Narrative

We invite proposals for chapters in a volume on disability and graphic literature for the new Literary Disability series from Palgrave Macmillan edited by David Bolt, Elizabeth Donaldson, and Julia Miele Rodas. Feats of Clay: Disability and Graphic Narrative will scrutinize the ways that disability has been employed in comic books, graphic nonfiction, graphic novels, underground comix, and/or webcomics. Our aim is to interrogate standard assumptions about disability and sequential art in order to open up new approaches and potential collaborations between both of these vital areas of study.

Some possible but not exclusive topics include:

• analyses of the range of representations of disabled figures in both superhero comics and graphic narratives;
• considerations of the role of the visual in offering multimodal engagement with the textual experience of disability (beyond character, plot, and theme);
• critical investigations of how the systems of meaning associated with disability studies (see Donna Haraway, Tobin Siebers, and others) overlap with or challenge the language of sequential art (as theorized by Thierry Groensteen, Scott McCloud, and others);
• extended examinations of specific comic book characters (such as Batgirl/Oracle, Daredevil/Matt Murdock, Professor Xavier, or Cyborg/Victor Stone);
• delineations of disability as an organizing logic in ongoing graphic series (like Fantastic Four and Doom Patrol);
• theorizations of the role of disability in the texts of individual graphic narrative writers (such as David B., Alison Bechdel, Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Harvey Pekar, and Chris Ware).

Send 500-word abstracts to Chris Foss (cfoss@umw.edu), Jonathan Gray (jgray@jjay.cuny.edu), and Zach Whalen (zwhalen@umw.edu) by Dec 15th, 2013.