April, 2002

Gender and Modernism Between the Wars 1918-1939

Deadline: April 1, 2002

The _NWSA Journal_, the scholarly publication of the National Women's Studies Association, announces plans for a special issue, "Gender and Modernism Between the Wars, 1918-1939."

The interwar period is particularly interesting for interrogating the various meanings of modernism and its connection to gender questions in cultural and social history.  Although the two decades between the world wars are the focus, coverage may be broadly conceived, in terms of trends, causes, and influences outside the period.

The special issue seeks contributions from philosophy, literature, art, music, drama, film, criticism and theory, history, popular culture, and the social sciences. We also encourage studies of events and movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as North America and Europe. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary studies that cut across traditional boundaries and challenge received opinions on modernism and modernization. Reviews and review essays will also be a  part of the issue.

Some topics that could be addressed:
--The Making of the Modern Woman (in different cultures?)
--Nationalism and Gender in Eastern Europe
--Modernism and Gender in the cultures of Asia, 1918-1939
--Is gender a necessary part of the definition of modernism?
--How do the specifics of various national revolutions and independence movements---Russia, Turkey, India, for example---relate to gender questions and received opinions about modernity, race, and sexuality?
--Contextual studies of specific thinkers
--How ideas about "the modern" and "gender" were constructed and
traveled
--How views of feminism intersected with ideas on sexuality, the "abnormal," the disabled."

Authors are invited to query and/or send a 300 word abstract by April 1, 2002, but decisions will be based on complete papers.  Deadline for 3 copies of 25-30 page papers, double-spaced, with parenthetical citations and a complete references page: 30 June 2002. Decisions in the fall of 2002.

Send to:
Dr. Maggie McFadden, Editor, NWSA Journal
109 IG Greer, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC 28608 U.S.A.
mcfaddenmh@appstate.edu

18th Century Theater and Theatricality

Deadline: April 1, 2002 

The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation seeks essays on  for a special issue on theater and theatricality in the long eighteenth century.  In an era that witnessed continued and frequently successful attacks on the stage, the scope of "theater" spread from the playhouse to encompass many domains of culture.  We are interested in essays on the material conditions and ideological location of the eighteenth-century theater as well as on the significance of cultural and cross-cultural performances of all kinds.  And we hope for essays that bring new kinds of evidence and methodological frameworks to bear on how the "play" taken to be inherent to performance actually does "work" in a variety of cultural domains:  the state, the home, the public sphere, the family, the nation, the person. 

 Contributions sought from writers in all disciplines that touch on issues of theater and performance:  literature, theater, philosophy, art history, architecture, music, economics, and anthropology.  Papers should be no longer than 7,500 words.  Deadline April 1, 2002.  Inquiries and papers to John O'Brien, Department of English, University of Virginia, P. O. Box 400121, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121, jobrien@virginia.edu

The Western

Deadline: April 15, 2002 

Paradoxa  is seeking critical essays for a special issue on The Western in literature, art, film, television, and popular culture. Patterns, plots, tropes, icons, and codes from the Western still pervade American culture, still offer popular imagery of America's historical and political identity, and still meet with hostility and parodic critique here, across our borders, and beyond.

Paradoxa invites single discipline, interdisciplinary, and comparative essays that reassess the cultural significance of the Western. Theoretical studies of canonical authors who contributed to the mythos of the West, among them Cooper, Harte, Cather, Grey, Wister, and L'Amour, will be considered. We also seek analyses of contemporary portrayals of the West by Sherman Alexie, Thomas Berger, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, and Leslie Silko, among others. Our expanded view of literary representations of the Western also includes: generic studies paralleling Western themes in hard-boiled detective fiction, adventure sagas, and science fiction; and discussions of "wild" or urban frontiers in world literature, such as in the works of Paco Ignacio Taibo, Camilo Jose Cela, and this year's Booker Prize winner, Peter Carey. Essays devoted to artistic representation of the West from Bierstadt, Moran, and Remington to R. C. Gorman, T. C. Cannon, and Harry Fonseca will certainly be considered.

Of course, film studies and revisionist film histories are very much encouraged, especially those which look beyond the Western formula to disclose political, counter-cultural, socio-historical, racial, or gender issues as commentaries upon modern American values. Other film topics might well include: the Western style and vision of a single director Ford, Walsh, Sturges, Mann, Fuller, or Peckinpah,  as examples; Western patterns played out in non-Western films, such as The Third Man, Bad Day At Black Rock, or L. A. Confidential; or, Western tropes in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, Itami's Tampopo, Leone's spaghetti Westerns, Rodriguez's El Mariachi, or numerous Mexican films of the vaquero style from the 1940s and 50s.

We are also very interested in a variety of interdisciplinary topics about the Western in American popular culture: its fables from frontier sagas, tall tales, dime novels, and comics; its history re-enacted in Old or Wild West shows, exotic sideshows of indigenous peoples, staged Western battles and gunfights, and museums and tourist attractions devoted to portraying the "real" West; its often peculiar reliance upon gender to depict the land, racial categories and foreign customs, and stock  characters from gunslingers to prostitutes; its myths heard again in the music of singing cowpokes, Western swing stars--Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys--and the outlaw subculture of Country Rock; and its  style and idiom apparent in the rise and fall of Cowboy Chic, the cowboy icon in advertisement, the tropes of corporate and American expansionism, and political rhetoric and satire. Popularization of  Western motifs could also include the wide range of contemporary social issues and Western parodies found in television shows, such as Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Maverick, The Wild, Wild West, and Kung Fu.

Finally, we invite critical essays that challenge assumed notions about the Western rather than rehearse now familiar accounts of its historical, figural, and popular development.

Deadline for submissions: April 15, 2002.

Guest Editor for the special issue is Homer B. Pettey, Humanities Program, University of Arizona (petteyh@u.arizona.edu). Please consult submission guidelines on the inside back cover of the journal, or follow MLA guidelines in terms of general format, citation reference, footnotes, headings, etc. Send three copies, each with an abstract of not more than 300 words on a separate page, to  Managing Editor David Willingham, c/o Paradoxa, P.O. Box 2237, Vashon Island, WA  98070 (USA).

For more information about the journal, visit http://www.paradoxa.com

Submit a Call for Papers