Forthcoming Issues
Summer 2021
The Documentary Mode / Rhétoriques du document
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.
In press
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.
In press
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.
Summer 2022
The Early Modern Francophone World in Twenty-First Century Theater and Performance
Guest Editors, Michael Meere and Annelle Curulla
If the past has never really passed, then how is this contemporary moment remaking our understanding of the early modern francophone world (1500-1800)? This issue uses the concept of the “replay” as a way to examine the reframing, redescription, and reimagining of the past through performance (broadly conceived as performing arts, commemorative practices, reenactments, games, and so forth). Adopting a global perspective, this issue includes contributions from scholars and practitioners often separated by disciplinary, historical or geographic boundaries, and whose work explicitly engages with theater history, theatricality, and current theoretical discussions concerning theater and performance studies.
Fall 2022
Proust to Other Ends
Guest Editors, François Proulx and Hannah Freed-Thall
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.
In press