CALL FOR PAPERS

CFP: Co słychać w prozie? (2024/2)
Redaktorzy prowadzący: Dariusz Nowacki, Piotr Gorliński-Kucik

Diagnozowanie rzeczywistości, przyglądanie się lokalnym i globalnym przemianom, opisywanie doświadczeń indywidualnych i zbiorowych mających znamiona typowości – to zestaw najważniejszych oczekiwań, jakie w tradycyjnych ujęciach formułowano w odniesieniu do prozy artystycznej. Czy te nadzieje i pragnienia są dziś aktualne? Być może jest tak, że to nie proza, lecz poezja współczesna okazała się pod tym względem najskuteczniejsza? Albo że lepszymi narzędziami diagnozującymi rzeczywistość dysponuje proza niefikcjonalna, zwłaszcza reportażowa? Wypada zadać pytanie o polityczność polskich powieści opublikowanych w ostatnich kilkunastu latach, o formy zaangażowania, możliwości oddziaływania na publiczność czytającą. Jaki jest potencjał – nie tylko artystyczny – naszej prozy drugiej i początku trzeciej dekady XXI wieku?
Przedstawione pytania wydają się szczególnie ważne w aktualnej dobie. Ostatnie lata obfitowały z wydarzenia kryzysowe, wielokrotnie mówiono o świeckiej apokalipsie, o tym, że znaleźliśmy się w momencie przełomowym, być może na chwilę przed „końcem świata”. Czy proza powieściowa bądź nowelistyczna zareagowała na ten stan rzeczy?
Zapraszamy Państwa do namysłu nad najnowszą polską prozą. Interesują nas nie tylko kwestie „diagnostyczne”, choć one najbardziej. Warto się dowiedzieć, jak nasza proza reaguje na zewnętrzne impulsy, w jaki sposób rejestruje wszelkie możliwe przemiany – kulturowe, technologiczne, polityczne. Chcemy zapytać o ważne debiuty (po roku 2010), nowe poetyki, zjawiska i procesy artystyczne zasługujące na odnotowanie, a także o zagadnienia stylistyczne i gatunkowe.
Obok wymienionych zagadnień interesują nas takie kwestie, jak:
• relacje między prozą artystyczną i tzw. prozą gatunkową (powieści kryminalne, sensacyjne, romansowe, fantastyczne itd.);
• możliwości oddziaływania na publiczność prozy tworzonej w języku polskim zmuszonej do permanentnego konkurowania z prozą w przekładach;
• „zmiana warty”, czyli ofensywa młodszych autorek i autorów funkcjonujących w polu literackim zdominowanym przez starszych twórców;
• kondycja krytyki literackiej wyspecjalizowanej w komentowaniu polskiej prozy.

Na Państwa teksty czekamy do 30 maja 2024 roku. Prosimy o przesyłanie ich za pomocą systemu OJS na stronie: https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SSP

Wytyczne redakcyjne dla autorów:
https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SSP/about/submissions

Kontakt z Redakcją: slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl

CFP: Futurologies & science fiction (2023/1)

Issue editors: Piotr Gorliński-Kucik, Michał Kłosiński, Monika Lubińska

One of the first and most important tasks undertaken by science fiction was literary futurology. Attempts to anticipate the near and distant futures, the development of technology, civilization, or the human species, had become the most essential determinants of this convention, which was, over time, expanded by radio, comics, television, films, graphics and video games.

Over the past decades, the dominants of SF had changed: it transformed into a diagnosis of the present day, had sparked with utopian impulses, built historiosophical parables, experimented with style and language, explored popcultural plot patterns, as well as catastrophic and post-apocalyptic speculations. For the most part SF has envisioned the future (also within the framework of retro-futuristic narratives), even if this future is "science-fiction reality" in which we operate today: the era of globalized capitalism of transnational corporations, dense with interconnections of various spheres of life and technology (these threads are successfully explored today by global post-cyberpunk, biopunk, cli-fi, weird fiction).

Since "(...) the future always looks different than we can imagine (...)" (Lem, 1999), the upcoming issue of "The Silesian Journal of Polish Studies" (1/2023) will be dedicated to these imagined futures: speculative, possible, impossible and alternative.

Therefore, we are interested in the extent to which literary futurology can provide predictions of the future, as "Literature for futurology is more or less like psychoanalysis to computed tomography of the brain" (Dukaj 2004): both of them offer slightly different, but nevertheless valuable findings and diagnoses. Thus, we pose the fundamental question about the essence of the “predictions of the future”: are these an effective extrapolation of the observed trends, designing subsequent stages of history on the basis of well-known historiosophical projects, or maybe simply a forecast of specific events, phenomena and discoveries? What is the significance of the proliferation of science fiction visual cultures (Frelik 2017), the changing, world-creating paradigms (Maj 2019), or the undeniable effects of the Anthropocene (Haraway 2017) for the contemporary futurology?

Finally, perhaps the legitimacy of forging literary and non-literary (transmedial) visions of the future lies in the construction of eutopian and dystopian narratives: compensatory, critical or designing changes (Jameson 2011). If so, then how can we capitalize these "utopian laboratories of social imagination" (Toffler 1998), to what extent can they help us prepare for the inevitable changes and guide us to a brighter future?

We invite submissions inspired by the following ideas and topics:
• the status and character of literary futurology as a discourse or narrative, and their cognitive determinants;
• political, social and cultural entanglements of the visions of the future;
• the effectiveness of literary futurologies: hit and miss extrapolations;
• eutopian and dystopian turns in science fiction, science fiction as uchronia;
• ontology of the fantastic chronotopes;
• science fiction historiosophies and extrapolation methods in "soft" and "hard" SF;
• “science-fictional” reality of the 21st century;
• post apocalypse and retrofuturism as a reverse of futurology;
• climate fiction, speculations about the Anthropocene, eco-topian fiction.

Articles should be submitted by 12 June 2022 through the OJS system: https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SSP.
Guidelines for authors available here: https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SSP/about/submissions
Contact: slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl

 

CFP: Critical thinking (2022/2)

Issue editors: Monika Lubińska, Anna Kałuża

Critical theory is traditionally and narrowly associated with the Frankfurt School – above all – with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. But if we talk about a broad approach, we need to invoke psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, feminist thought, critical studies of globalization, Marxism, and political aesthetics. Kritische Theorie influenced all the primary research schools of the 20th and 21st centuries. However, the distinction between traditional (positivist) theory and critical theory, introduced in the 1930s by Horkheimer, seems to be little effective today. The variety of approaches within critical thinking encompassing the writings of such thinkers as, e.g., G. W. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michael Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas, requires rethinking aimed at overcoming the deadlock of criticality dominated by the ideological and the abstract.

Of course, we do not want to say that critical thinking has become compromised. However, the support that philosophical theories received from literary, sociological, and historical sciences no longer enlivens this thinking to the extent that it was inventive. In the 20th-century tradition, criticism was perceived mainly as "the process of revealing the truth, which enabled emancipation" (Andrzej Kapusta); but this meaning was no longer relevant by the 1990s. Discussion over these revaluations proceeded in many ways: Hal Foster, for example, saw in the post-critical turn a threat to engaged citizenship in the light of conservative twists, neo-materialist, and feminist scholars emphasized the ideological dimensions of criticism and the need to develop attitudes more oriented towards action and change. This discussion is still valid: the categories of criticality and critical thinking, highly appreciated in previous years, are insufficient in the face of today's crises, the prospects for humanistic research, and even more so, emancipation strategies. Therefore, we would like to reflect on the value of criticality in a broad sense, considering the historical background, links with current socio-political problems, and utopian-constructivist forecasts for the future.

We propose a reflection on the current conditions and possibilities of criticism (also of literary /artistic criticism), the consequences of a deadlock in critical thinking replaced by affirmative or negotiating attitudes. We want to ask if the "ruthless critique of all that exists" (Karl Marx) can still form the basis of producing knowledge about society, emotions, and culture. Or perhaps alternatives are being created for the critical theories of society, literature, culture, and knowledge in the form of other conceptualizations of our life forms. Finally – whether outside of critical reflection on the structures of power, state, capitalism, etc. – one can see suggestions for changing the status quo. Above all, whether the contemporary paradigm of criticality allows for rethinking ways to implement utopian projects.

The deadline for the submission of proposals with abstracts is 10.12.2021.
Author Guidelines:
https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SSP/about/submissions
Send your text to the email address of the editorial board of the journal: slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl

 

CFP: Transmediality of the Archive (2022/1)

Guest editor: Aleksander Wójtowicz
Issue editors: Marta Baron-Milian, Piotr Gorliński-Kucik

The archive as a category has come to the fore in the last decade in humanities. Along with it, a wide range of issues also emerged, including, but not limited to, materiality of literature, genetic criticism (Pierre-Marc de Biasi, Jean Bellemin-Noël, Daniel Ferrer), politics of the page (George Bornstein), practices of experiencing collections (Carolyn Steedman), the involvement of the body in creative process and the possibilities of somatic criticism (Adam Dziadek), or the production of knowledge (Michel Foucault) and the mechanisms of memory (Jacques Derrida). Nevertheless, it is still too early to form a conclusive summation of the "archival turn" (Danuta Ulicka) due to the constant unfolding of innovative research perspectives. The last year, however, caused us to perceive the archive in slightly different categories. The current pandemic isolated us from material collections and, at the same time, directed our attention towards collections of a different kind. What seemed particularly interesting to us while utilising such perspective, was the "transmediality of the archive"– the nature and function of the archive and archival materials, undergoing constant remediation and trans-coding, constantly situated in space “between the media.”
In the next issue of “Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne” we would like to scrutinise materiality of the archive, revealing itself in its inter and transmedia form, where audiovisual, photographic and digital (or other) intermediaries transfer the sphere of  materiality of the archive into the area of constant media interactions and transmedial "flows." We observe how the digitisation of collections becomes not only a practice, but also a metaphor, placing itself at the very heart of digital humanities. In our proposed inquiry, we include digitally and audiovisually mediated archives, as well as archival "interfaces" and catalogues, interrogating how they change the experience of the archive and how they interfere with the processes of reading, analysis and interpretation. We are therefore interested in the dynamics of change in the field of archiving "devices"– the relationship between mechanical reproduction and the materiality of collections.
It seems equally important to place the reflection on the "transmediality of the archive" in the social and political perspective. We are simultaneously interested in the archives as private collections of documents as well as them being the cultural, social and political institutions. This in turn provokes questions about the extent to which archives become spaces of democratisation and cooperation, how the policies of the archive (and memory) work between the media, what roles are performed by various types of selection and control mechanisms, and how relations between the archival “enclave” and the intermedia culture of participation and free access constantly change. We would also like to go a step further and inquire about the aesthetic and affective influence of transmedia archiving practices, alongside the artistic potential of digital collections and the archival remediation. What seems particularly interesting to us is the issue of materiality of the archive in intermedia artistic practices, especially its performative potential, often manifested in avant-garde or neo-avant-garde texts, alongside other creative pursuits in art. Finally, we would like to invite you to contemplate the nature and functioning of matters such as concept, figure, metaphor and the archival space in relation to transmedia narratives and artistic practices.

The deadline for the submission of proposals with abstracts is June 15, 2021.
Author Guidelines: https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SSP/about/submissions
Please send your text to the editorial board to the following email address: slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl

 

CFP: Walls (2021/2)

2020-04-24 

The motif of the wall evokes negative associations through its connotations of separation, confinement, isolation, and segregation. The building of walls, and their tearing down, assume the proportions of symbolic events, always fraught with special significance in the history of any given community, and hence recorded in literature and visual arts with great excitement. The continuing life of a society divided in two by a wall also belongs to a cultural phenomenon conscientiously studied by anthropologists and sociologists. The scientific and artistic tension concentrated around the motif of walls (their building and tearing down, and the way they accompany the setting-out of the rules of a socio-political order) usually has a documentary character, which explains the reportage-like tone of most of artistic renderings of such events. However, when we examine closely the verbal accounts, photographic coverage, and the various forms used to record of a historically crucial moment, it turns out that elements of staging, artistic calculation and fabulation are always involved. Here we want to inquire into the ways in which narratives about walls being built and walls being torn down are shaped; the decisive role played by the media; how the memory of such crucial moments is fabricated; how an individual copes with these events; and how areas of conflict are depicted.  

Another area of interest in this project has to do with how communities confined within walls during states of emergency, separated from neighbouring communities, organise their lives. The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall and the security wall in Israel supply the best-known examples, and we can refer to them when trying to approach this kind arrangement of social existence. 

Also of interest – alongside the historical, political and social – are metaphorical and figurative meanings of walls. As a trope of separation, set in contrast to bridges, walls attract the attention of many artists and writers. Open to examination are various representations of the trope in contemporary literature and art. Such investigations may be acquiring special urgency due to the fact that recent years have seen intensive efforts (in both the symbolic and literal sense) to build walls in various countries and cities. Such efforts indicate class differences as they isolate the poor from the rich; they put in place new divisions and – perhaps – decide about who is to live and who is to die.  

The deadline for the submission of proposals with abstracts is 20.12.2020. 

Send your text to the email address of the editorial board of the journal:   slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl 

 

CFP: Minor literatures (2021/1)

Issue editors: Marta Baron-Milian, Anna Kałuża 
2020-04-24

The concept of minor literatures has aroused a great deal of emotion for some time now. The reason for this is that the idea links literature with minority, revolutionary action, materiality, and politics. When referring to minority, we don’t necessarily need to have in mind the literature representing unofficial regions or languages, marginalised and unrecognised by state legislation, though we also do not want to lose sight of them. Deleuze and Guattari, the most widely discussed codifiers of this concept, write about the deterritorialisation of dominant meanings which is carried out by the experimentally oriented minor literatures. “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language […] it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (Deleuze and Guattari 2016, 84). And even though they focus on recognised writers (Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce), the merit of their typology consists in making it possible to examine the complex relations between the centre and peripheries. The aesthetic and political tensions between the minor and the dominant, the particular and the universal, the individual and the communal, are essential in the construction of the concept of minor literatures.  

In the upcoming issue of The Silesian Journal of Polish Studies, we want to look at various conceptualisations of minor literatures and ask chiefly about their artistic significance and political potential. We ask: How can the marginal, despite lacking political representation, question the power of the majority? Which contemporary authors could be regarded as representatives of minor literatures? What are the examples of minor languages operating in essential cooperation with dominant languages? What visions of revolutionary politics and identity politics do minor literatures propose? 

The deadline for the submission of proposals with abstracts is 10.06.2020. 

Send your text to the email address of the editorial board of the journal:  
slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl 

 

CFP: Engaged and Revolutionary (2020/2)

2020-04-24 

The upcoming issue of The Silesian Journal of Polish Studies is going to be devoted to the problem of revolutionary engagement in changing an existing reality. In the context of literature and art, this problem requires the adoption of at least a double lens: 1. Examining the capabilities of the artistic medium itself and 2. Examining the possibility of revolutionary action today.  

For some time now, artistic creativity has been located between craft, the laws of the market, and demands from the mass media. Our idea that art and literature are capable of changing the world is growing weak; yet still we believe that their interventional character and their political potential are an asset. Hence, the questions about the possibility of thinking of literature and the arts as subversive practices, engaged and engaging, are not losing currency. On the contrary, we need to keep updating and refining them: What does literature/art want to be engaged with? What are the consequences of political and social involvement? What changes are sustained by the forms of artistic intervention? What does artistic efficacy consist in? Within these specific contexts we would like to examine the meanings and possibilities of contemporary artistic activism and its historical variants.  

Along with the conviction that utopia has ended, the treatment of the idea of revolution has changed, namely the idea that the existing reality may undergo a radical change. We encourage potential contributors to examine ideas that carry with them revolutionary potential and the historical personhood of revolutionists. We wish to examine our contemporary ideas of revolution, the literary accounts of 20th-century revolutions that can be accessed, and whether or not revolution is still capable of fuelling the imagination.  

The deadline for the submission of proposals with abstracts is 31.12.2019. 

Send your text to the email address of the editorial board of the journal:  
slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl 

 

CFP: The End of Masculinity? Men and Masculinities in Postmodern Culture (2020, no 1) 

A few years ago, the term “masculinity” sounded a bit exotic and peculiar. Of course everybody was familiar femininity studies, gender studies had been domesticated, and queer theory had found its adherents. But the prospect of doing masculinity studies did not seem very alluring, despite the fact that outside Poland, in Europe and America, it was already a recognised academic discipline. These days, the situation is very different: the number of publications is steadily growing; there are new publication series (e.g. Studia o męskości [Masculinity Studies], published by Wydawnictwo IBL), research grants, conferences, and thematic issues of scholarly journals focused on masculinity (often used in the plural form) – all of these clearly indicate that this type of reflection has taken root in Polish humanities. Masculinity has turned out to be an important and inspiring field of research; moreover, this type of research seems to be especially desirable now, in a time of the increased politicisation of gender categories, as well as tensions which this phenomenon generates in Western societies. 

The dictionary of the Polish language defines masculinity as “a class of characteristics typical of a man”. Masculinity studies across the world have problematised and even questioned the dictionary category of “typical”. Researchers now speak, for instance, of “inclusive masculinities”, “transnational masculinities”, alternative masculinities”, “global masculinities”, “postmodern masculinities”. The monolithic solidity of the term in its traditional usage has yielded its place to plurality, not only in scholarly discourse but also in social practices: Traditional ways of understanding masculinity are being rejected as a category of exclusion, binary and nationalised; shaped by references to the local culture, economically conditioned and privileged; in a phallogocentric universe, both hegemonic and constantly under attack.  

Masculinity studies keep evolving. Evidently, the phase of carving out and naming this field of research is slowly receding into the past. Due to dynamic social and linguistic transformations, however, there has appeared the necessity for masculinity studies to make conceptual alliances with other areas of contemporary humanities and social sciences. These alliances have cognitive benefits for all the parties involved. Understanding the interactions of masculinity with the natural environment, economy, technology, politics, the digital and biotechnological revolutions, and so on, allows for a better understanding of the meaning of the world we live in and, even though this dilutes the academic specificity of masculinity studies, it also makes us realise that our attempts to describe the reality around us must no longer ignore gender categories. In an effort to join the new trend, we direct out attention to new models of constructing masculinity, to experiments with masculinity, to redefinitions of masculinity, and to nonstandard male roles as depicted and found in 21st-century literature and culture. It is our wish that this interest in “masculinity post masculinity” be accompanied by a reflection on language and theory, and it is our belief that it is necessary to adopt an interdisciplinary perspective when talking about “masculinity”. 
Among the problems which we consider worth pondering are: 
• Masculinity from an ecocritical perspective; 
• Masculinity and / in digital humanities; 
• Neomaterialist perspective on masculinities; 
• Masculinities and gender; 
• Utopias/dystopias of masculinity; 
• Nonbinary identities and conceptualisations of masculinity; 
• Biopolitics of masculinity; 
• Masculinities and posthumanism; 
• Masculinity vis-à-vis the endangered Anthropocene;  
• Men and animals: towards an animal-studies approach to masculinities. 

The deadline for the submission of proposals with abstracts is 30.11.2019. 

Send your text to the email address of the editorial board of the journal: slaskiestudiapolonistyczne@us.edu.pl 

The deadline for the submissions of articles is 31.01.2020 

 

CFP: Feminist Historiographies: The Philosophy of Luce Irigaray (2019, 1) 

Even though Luce Irigaray’s thought has exerted enormous influence on the humanities of the 20th century, her presence in Polish reflection (philosophical reflection in particular) seems slender; the philosopher’s name rarely appears among the most significant representatives of contemporary philosophy. For more than 40 years, since the publication of Speculum. De L’autre Femme (1974), Irigaray has been recognised in Poland – along with Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva – exclusively as a representative of the so-called “French feminism” (thanks to the Anglo-American criticism of the 1980s), or as a critic of psychoanalysis. It has been equally common to read her through the prism of deconstruction and post-structuralism, which has resulted in associating her with various spiritual fathers and intellectual mentors. However, the way in which the historiography of Western feminist theories has narrowed the scope of Irigaray’s philosophy solely to one intellectual tradition has resulted in an impoverishment of the critical response to her thought and a petrification of critical reception, which has concentrated around yet-undecided debates over essentialism or feminist conservatism. It seems that a later phase of Irigaray’s thought has been ignored, in particular her philosophy of gender difference, which had its origin in her critical reading of the most important representatives of the Western metaphysical tradition: Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and also in her years-long involvement in the activity of social and political movements in France and Italy. For these reasons, the image which became rooted in the Polish humanities – chiefly due to the translation of two of her books, Ciało w ciało z matką [The Bodily Encounter with the Mother] (Polish trans. A. Araszkiewicz) and Ta płeć (jedną) płcią niebędąca [This Sex Which Is Not One] (Polish trans. S. Królak) and several articles, seems incomplete and insufficient.  

This thematic issue of The Silesian Journal of Polish Studies is an invitation to an in-depth discussion about the presence and absence of Luce Irigaray’s thought in critical reflection in Poland and abroad. This task makes necessary a reconstruction of feminist historiographies, in which the presence of the author of Speculum is limited solely to French feminism and psychanalysis – a reduction that she herself contested. Hence, of interest are the following problems: 
• The philosophy of Irigaray vis-à-vis contemporary feminist and critical theories, e.g., new feminist materialism, posthumanism, ecosophia, and others;  
• The philosophy of Irigaray and Polish feminist reflection; 
• The philosophy of gender difference: criticism and interpretation; 
• Irigaray and the Western philosophical tradition; 
• Irigaray and French philosophy after 1968; 
• Irigaray and Italian feminist thought. 
The list of topics is much longer, which is why I envision a joint reflection on the possibility of new readings of Irigaray’s philosophy. 

I cordially invite proposals for contributions with brief abstracts to be sent in by 1 June 2018 to the address: szopa.katarzyna2@gmail.com. 

The deadline for articles (length of up to 40 thousand characters, incl. bibliography and summary) is 1 December 2018.