Deadline: January 17, 2023
Cluster Call for Papers: Poetic Voice and Materiality
The editors Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth and Julius Greve seek essays for an ASAP/J cluster on “Poetic Voice and Materiality”. We understand this topic to capaciously include new approaches to questions of poetic voice in contemporary American poetry. Experimental responses to questions of voice in poetry are welcomed, including contributions not only from literary studies but also from sound studies, film and media studies, performance studies, philosophy, the posthumanities, digital humanities, and archives across the globe. We welcome contributions that interpret not only recent poems and collections to respond to this question concerning the materiality of the poetic voice, but also essays that discuss artifacts from music, cinema, new media, and visual art that may have a bearing on it.
Critics from John Stuart Mill in “What is Poetry?” to Jonathan Culler in Theory of the Lyric have posited voice in poetry as a largely closed system: immaterial, atemporal, and self-reflexive. Contrastingly, many writers on the subject have suggested the openness of poetic voice—among them, Audre Lorde, Susan Stewart, and Jahan Ramazani to name a few—by highlighting the necessarily material-historical concerns of a poetic voice that is collective and thus unable to be divorced from the material world. Rather than cordoning off poetic voice from prosaic communication and other discursive modes, we intend this ASAP/J cluster to emphasize the situatedness of poetic voice in the archive, across media, in the racialized, gendered, and disabled body, in late capitalism and the environment.
Contact Dr. Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth (The University of Texas at Austin) zbi [at] utexas.edu and Dr. Julius Greve (University of Oldenburg) julius.greve [at] uni-oldenburg.de to submit a proposal of no more than 300 words and a short biographical statement, by January 17, 2023. Potential contributors will be notified by January 31 and they will then have to submit their essays (1000-2000 words) by April 14.
We are actively seeking pitches for two new review formats: Provocations and Uncanny Juxtapositions.
Provocations brings together multiple scholars and/or artists to consider a recent scholarly monograph or edited volume by situating it within a field and posing questions for future inquiry. Provocations approach a chosen book with a focus on what comes next: what lines of thought are opened up by the book, and what questions does it leave for future research in the field? A prospective guest editor should pitch a title to the Reviews Editors as well as the names of 3–4 other scholars they have invited to join the conversation. In its final, published form, a Provocation will include an approximately 300-word capsule summary of the book written by the guest editor followed by a similar-length paragraph from each of the invited provokers.
In an Uncanny Juxtaposition, a reviewer puts together two very recent works of art, creative production, or literature—or two scholarly monographs on arts of the present—that would otherwise seem to have no connection, traversing the so-called high/low divide, and transcending medium. The review brings out unexpected intimacies and resonances between them. How does a new pop song re-frame a recent gallery exhibit at MoMA and vice versa? How does a book in media studies and a book in architectural theory—two books with minimal overlap in citation networks—work toward a common thesis or intervention? Uncanny Juxtapositions should be 1,500 to 2,000 words.
Please contact both Reviews Editors Jerrine Tan and Michael Dango at reviews [at] asapjournal.com to inquire about either of these formats. There is no deadline to pitch these formats. In your email, indicate the format you are interested in and please include a brief bio (50 words), including prior publications. ASAP/J is committed to boosting the voices of emerging and contingent students and scholars; if you don’t have prior publications, please just tell us why you think you’re the right person for this particular review.