Forthcoming Issues

Spring 2021

French Thanatology

Guest Editors, Enda McCaffrey and Steven Wilson

Thanatology has taken a distinct interdisciplinary “turn” in recent decades, moving from death as a purely medical encounter framed by the dominant discourses of biology and forensic science towards the “de-medicalization” of death and its relocation within a wider compass of cultural, social, and philosophical experience. This issue explores how death and dying are reimagined in contemporary French literary, cinematic, and philosophical narratives.

In press

Summer 2021

Rhétoriques du mode documentaire

Guest Editors, Jan Baetens and Éric Trudel

French literary production of the last few decades has challenged the connection between the literary text and the documentary mode. Notwithstanding the well-established difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction, such categories remain operative in many hybrid forms. It is such contemporary practices – some less canonical than others – that this issue will highlight. (Proposals by June 1, 2020; articles by December 1, 2020.)

Fall 2021

His Legacy Relates: Édouard Glissant’s Thought in Literature and Culture

Guest Editors, Renée Larrier and Georgette Mitchell

Commemorating the tenth anniversary of Édouard Glissant’s passing, this issue examines the impact and significance of his theoretical thought in contemporary art forms and cultures. Articles attest to an archipelagic dissemination of Glissant’s guiding concepts and their power to generate new pathways for rethinking questions of marginalization, displacement, and the transnational.

In press

Winter 2021

Disability’s Worldmaking: Pasts and Futures

Guest Editors, Tammy Berberi and Jennifer Row

Worlds are made through time and space, and disabled writers, thinkers, and artists have challenged the “givenness” of the world as-is to show that there can be alternative, vibrantly crip modes of existing. How do we leverage this moment of flux – and francophone disabled re-imaginings of the past or future – in order to reconfigure the temporalities and spaces of our impoverished present? Engaging minor aesthetics, notions of presence and affordance (from the ephemeral to the sustained), interrelation and uniqueness, action, affect, and storytelling, this issue takes up these threads to recraft the exigencies and possibilities of francophone disabled worldmaking. Proposals of 300-500 words, in French or English, to Jennifer Row jjrow@umn.edu and Tammy Berberi berberit@morris.umn.edu by January 15, 2021, with final submissions due June 1, 2021.

Spring 2022

Poetic Practice and the Public

Guest Editors, Jeff Barda and Eric Lynch

From the 1990s to today, poetic practices in France engage with the forms and languages of public life. These works focus on representations and discourses circulating within the public sphere. Poetic practices turn to public problems; issues that seem to surpass available theoretical tools and demand new conceptual and artistic approaches. Proposals of 250-300 words to ericlynch@msutexas.edu and jeff.barda@manchester.ac.uk by April 15, 2021; articles by Oct. 1, 2021.

Fall 2022

Proust to Other Ends

Guest Editor, François Proulx

On the centenary of Marcel Proust’s death, this special issue proposes counter-readings of À la recherche du temps perdu and its manuscripts, in minor or unexpected modes, toward surprising points of comparison or theoretical reflection. Rather than study its sources or its reception, articles consider how the Proustian text continually unfurls to other ends, including against its own monumentalization.

Please send article proposals in English or French (300-400 words) together with a short biography to François Proulx (fproulx@illinois.edu) by June 1st, 2021. The deadline for completed articles (max. 6,000 words) is December 1, 2021.