CFP: The Gothic and Death / Gothic Studies journal (Dec. 1)

Call for Papers

Gothic Studies Special Issue:

The Gothic and Death

Advanced by way of various conventions and symbols, memento mori — “Remember that you will die” — is Gothic literature’s greatest cautionary warning. Although Peter Walmsley has suggested that this reminder to live with death in view is “the peculiar property of the British psyche,” it has required much repeating given what Edward Young identifies in his famous Night Thoughts (1742) as a universal tendency towards death denial: “All men think all men mortal but themselves.” Despite Geoffrey Gorer’s claim that death became the new pornography in the 20^th century, uses of the Gothic mode continue to register an ongoing fascination with the Death Question that often vacillates, in various imaginative ways, between repression and acknowledgement.

Proposals for individual or collaborative papers are invited on the idea of the Gothic anddeath, decay, and the afterlife. The editor is particularly interested in proposals that will theorize the Gothic’s engagement with this fixation trans-historically, trans-nationally, and trans-culturally. Proposals from diverse theoretical perspectives ranging across different genres and mediums (poetry, fiction, film, graphic novels, etc.) are especially welcome. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

• the afterlife and undead afterlives — zombies, angels, vampires, ghosts, etc.
• the corpse — abject, female, anatomized, and otherwise
• danse macabre
• acts/rites of mourning & memorializing — personal and national
• death of the author/reader
• dead women/deadly women
• the sanitization/medicalization of death
• decay and ruin
• live burial; gothic resurrections
• femme fatale/homme fatal
• spiritualism, séances, voodoo, and the Occult
• sex and death
• the aesthetics of death
• death and the visual arts/visual technologies
• Victorian necroculture
• manner of death: suicide (self murder); homicide; the war dead; mass murder; sudden death; capital punishment (torture, executions, serial killings)
• elegies and epitaphs
• symbolic/figurative death
• death and the double
• death and/by technology
• graveyards and graveyard poetry
• the death drive
• ars moriendi — the “Art of dying,” death/consolation manuals
• the Good death/bad death
• dead children
• wills, funerals, wakes

Please send electronic copies of proposals of approximately 500 words and a 100-word bio by 1 December, 2013, to Dr. Carol Margaret Davison, Professor and Head, Department of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing, University of Windsor (cdavison@uwindsor.ca). Notices of acceptance will follow shortly thereafter with completed essays of approximately 6000 words (including endnotes) due by March 31, 2014.

 

The official journal of the International Gothic Studies Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.

 

For more information on Gothic Studies, including submission guidelines and subscription recommendations, please see the journal's website: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/journals/gs

 

To view Gothic Studies online, see here: http://manchester.metapress.com/content/1362-7937 

 

To sign up to alerts for Gothic Studies, see here: https://manchester.metapress.com/content/122707/toc-alert

CFP: Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition (edited collection; Sept. 25)

Posted on behalf of Dr. Matt Green.

Call for Abstracts
Edited Collection:
Alan Moore
and the Gothic Tradition

While Alan Moore's work continues to receive acclaim from within the comics industry and in the media more widely, it remains under-represented within academic research. This edited collection will draw together current scholarly investigations of Moore and his collaborators, paying particular attention to the way in which Moore adapts, appropriates and otherwise responds to previous works from the Gothic tradition. Far from a unified or stable legacy, the Gothic is itself characterised by multiplicity and heterogeneity. For this reason, an examination of the particular ways in which Moore responds to this portion of his cultural inheritance can be expected not only to shed light upon particular aspects of the tradition more broadly, but also to yield insight into the interpretative and artistic decisions embedded in his work.

That Moore's work can be situated in relation to this tradition is evident both in the range of Gothic elements (monsters, demons, supernatural powers, plots motivated by questions of violence and oppression) present at the narrative level in his work, and, at a formal level, in the ways in which Moore and his collaborators draw on artistic techniques and forms from a range of Gothic media. The underlying premise of the collection is that Moore, and the artists with whom he works, engage in a process of dialogue with a diverse array of source material. Accordingly, the collection will address two interrelated topics: how an understanding of the Gothic can enhance our understanding of Moore's work and, conversely, the ways in which the ideas and reading practices engendered by Moore's work might impact on a reflexive analysis of one or more of the traditions out of which it emerges.

Though it is anticipated that the majority of papers will concentrate on the comics, the area in which Moore is most prolific and for which he is best known, this should not deter proposals to examine his work in other media (spoken word/audio recordings, prose fiction, etc).

Papers on any aspect of the relationship between Moore and the Gothic are invited, including, but not limited to, the following areas of enquiry:

• Representations of monstrosity
• The supernatural and/or superhuman
• Violence and terror
• The Sublime
• Sexuality
• Gothic technologies
• Psychology, geography and/or the environment
• Degeneration
• Hybridity
• The double
• Gothic romanticisms
• Magic and the occult
• Trauma
• Taboo
• The uncanny
• Crisis and catastrophe
• Dystopia
• Oppression and/or repression
• The Gothic and sci-fi or detective fiction

Abstracts should be approximately 500 words and should be emailed to Dr. Matt Green (matt.green@nottingham.ac.uk) on or before Friday, September 25, 2009.

Image and credit: Alan Moore avoids confronting his own astral projection at "A Tribute to Robert Anton Wilson" in 2007. Photo by ACB; remix by Gene Kannenberg, Jr.