Announcements

Call for Papers Upcoming Special Issues

The Cultural Politics of Displacement Spring 1994
Deadline for Submissions: 1 November 1993

The Spring 1994 number, guest-edited by Barbara Harlow, will be The Cultural Politics of Displacement. This issue proposes to examine the pressures that current global demographic rearrangements have placed on the received generic formulas of narrative convention and of literary paradigms. "Travel" now is not just a question of individual decision, but has become increasingly subject to political pressures and economic exigencies. Territorial borders have been redrawn as the lines of a renewed governmental offensive against persons and peoples deemed alien or undesirable. An estimated twenty-five percent of the world's population is now acknowledged to be "refugees," whether from political oppression, economic dispossession, or "natural disaster." Travel and the metaphysics of exile are no longer the prerogative of privilege, either material or theoretical. Possible topics for contribution range from the extradition of political prisoners to the mass movements of famine victims and can address the representations of such events in and across various narrative genres, including fiction, film, historical accounts, legal documentation, and reportage. Papers should raise specifically the mutual implication of the literary, the cultural, and the political in the representation or redress of these social dislocations.

Autobiography, Photography, Narrative Autumn 1994
Deadline for Submissions: 1 May 1994

The Autumn 1994 number, guest-edited by Timothy Dow Adams, will be Autobiography, Photography, Narrative and will concentrate on aspects of photography and lifewriting considered in the widest possible manifestations of both terms. Articles addressing lifewriting in a wide range of narrative genres would be welcome, including autobiography, biography, memoir, diary, daybook, journal, letters, personal literary criticism, oral history, documentary, autobiographical travel writing, testimonio, film and television auto/biographies, fictional autobiography and autobiographical fiction. The term photography would include actual photographs, as well as prose descriptions of photographs and the photographic process, relationships between word and image, and auto/biographies of or about photographers. Possible topics for contributions would include portraiture and self-portraiture, representation, photography and memory, documentary, collaboration between photographer and subject, iconicism, ekphrasis (words on photographs, verbal representations of pictures), verbal and visual semiotics, and photography-as-autobiography.

Articles should range from 20 to 35 pages in length and should conform to the MLA Style Manual. Please submit two copies of the essay along with return postage. Address submissions and inquiries to the Editor, Modern Fiction Studies, Department of English, Heavilon Hall, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1356.