Call for Submissions
The Underground
The Spring 2008 issue of Working Papers will be devoted to the underground: a topos that operates both below the Earth’s surface and on the margins of public consciousness. With such diverse associations as the London subway and graphic novels, the underground functions as a potential intersection of location, ideology, and art. We encourage graduate students to consider the implications of the subterranean in cultural production. Within a narrative context, the underground can be the site of a physical or allegorical journey, as in Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth or Dante’s Inferno. The term also carries an aesthetic dimension associated with experimentation and the avant garde. Moreover, it is historically synonymous with subversive political struggle, as in Resistance publishing during World War II. We invite graduate students from all universities and disciplines to submit articles that examine the underground and out-of-sight in French, Francophone, Spanish, Latin American, Portuguese, and Italian literature, film, art, and popular culture from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Deadline for submission is November 15th. Guidelines for submissions can be found on the Working Papers website. We welcome papers in English and in any of the Romance languages. We also invite submissions of digital art and multimedia representations that address this topic.
Past Calls
Heroes, Gods, and Myths:
The Myths That We Create and How They Create Us
Annual Graduate Romanic Association Conference
University of Pennsylvania
Our Fall issue consists of the Selected Proceedings of the Annual Graduate Romanic Association Conference at the University of Pennsylvania. The theme of this year’s conference, ‘Heroes, Gods, and Myths,’ encourages a diversity of methodological and thematic approaches to exploring myths of all kinds in the Romance languages, literatures, and cinema. Papers may examine such topics as the cultural, psychological, ideological and political implications of myth, taking into account its modes of existence, circulation, appropriation, and relevance to writing and artistic practices.
Papers accepted to the conference are eligible for submission to the Fall issue of Working Papers. The deadline for submission is June 15. All conference papers submitted to Working Papers will be subject to our double-blind, peer-review evaluation policy. Please review guidelines and requirements before submitting your paper.
Representations of Violence / Violence of Representation.
Our Spring issue will be devoted to exploring the chiasmic relationship between representation and violence. We encourage graduate students to attend to the ways that cultural products such as art, literature, and film both manifest and perpetuate violence. Whether glorifying heroic violence as in La Chanson de Roland, sparking it as in Hugo's Hernani, or condemning it as does Picasso's Guernica, art is imbued with the violent zeitgeist of its period of creation. Additionally, there are ways in which the very act of creation effects violence. As Russian formalist Roman Jakobson put it, literature is "organized violence committed on ordinary speech." We invite graduate students from all universities and disciplines to submit articles that examine the intersections between representation and violence in French, Francophone, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American, and Italian literature, film, art, and popular culture from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Deadline for submission is January 15th. Guidelines for submissions can be found here.
We welcome papers in English and in any of the Romance languages. We also invite submissions of digital art and multimedia representations that address this topic.