Special Issues
CLS welcomes proposals for special issues. Proposals should include a title and a general description (500-1000 words) addressing the purpose, relevance and contribution of the project to scholarship in comparative literary studies. If you have finalized your list of contributors, please include a title and a 200-250-word abstract for each individual contribution and a 75-150-word professional biography of each contributor. If you have not finalized your list of contributors, please submit a draft of the open call for papers that you plan to circulate. Special issue editors will finalize lists of accepted abstracts in consultation with the journal’s editor. A final list of confirmed contributors will be reviewed by the CLS editorial collective.
The total length for a proposed special issue should be approximately 70,000 words, which is typically no more than seven or eight articles at an average length of 8,000-10,000 words each. CLS welcomes proposal for special issues that may include varying forms of academic writing. If you would like to include interviews, conversations, or forum essays, feel free to mention this in your proposal.
Process: Proposals should be sent to cl-studies@psu.edu. The CLS editor and the editorial collective will discuss the proposal and decide to accept or to reject the proposal. Our goal is to review and respond to a special issue proposal within three weeks.
Call For Papers
Representations of the New Right in Contemporary European and American Fiction
Guest editor, Lena Seauve (Freie Universität Berlin)
New Right movements have moved in recent years from society’s outer fringes into the political mainstream. Disciplines like political science and sociology have given extensive attention to the phenomenon of the New Right, but its representation in fiction has yet to receive scholarly attention. This Comparative Literature Studies special issue aims to address this gap by examining contemporary narratives about and by the New Right across European and American contexts.
Essays may address contemporary literature and film that represent the New Right critically as well as those narratives that clearly propagate its political and aesthetic agenda. Special attention will also be paid to the large gray area between the two – those narratives whose stance is deliberately ambivalent. Working with methodologies borrowed from comparative literature and cultural studies, this special issue will critically examine the aesthetics and politics of contemporary New Right narratives. Questions to be addressed may include: How are New Right ideas mediated by contemporary fiction and film? How do the boundaries of what can be said and done shift in these works? How do contemporary New Right narratives represent the National Socialist, fascist, and colonial past of the (trans)national contexts in which they are set? What are the important continuities and breaks with aesthetic practices of the past? Essays will also examine how the writings of twentieth-century Right thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, and Armin Mohler, or more recently, Alain de Benoist shape the aesthetics and politics of contemporary New Right fiction.
As contributions on France, Italy, Great Britain, North America, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile are already planned, the editor is particularly interested in proposals that address aesthetic productions from other regions within the defined geographical framework, for instance Central or Eastern Europe or Central America.
Contributions may be up to 7,000-10,000 words in length. Please send a proposal of no more than 500 words to lena.seauve@fu-berlin.de by March 30, 2024. Please include a 200-300-word biography, and use “New Right Narratives” in the subject line of your email. Authors will be informed of provisional acceptance by the end of April 2024, the deadline for submitting finished articles will be the end of August 2024.
Archival Turns, Twists, and New Directions
Guest editor, Cristina Vatulescu (New York University)
Is the archival turn still turning? If so, in what direction(s)? This Comparative Literature Studies special issue will address these questions by orchestrating a dialogue across media and disciplines and engaging with timely issues: the place of the body and embodiment in the archive, medium and remediation, silences, erasures, excess, and the potential of archives for anticolonial, antiracist, and gender equity work.
This special issue is intent on both questioning and pluralizing the concept of archival turn. Thus the plurals dominating our title: Archival Turns, Twists, and New Directions. In this project, we were inspired by Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici’s sustained meditation on the work of turning in relationship to the archive: “The idea of turning resists easy immobilization; instead it encompasses multidirectionality, and movements and frictions that traverse space and time… Our focus here is not the destination, or final significance, of any given turn, but rather a reflection on the pluralizing epistemologies and embodiments that are generated by frictive archival turns when understood as performative motions of change and transformation.”
Contributions may be up to 7,000-10,000 words in length. Please send a proposal of no more than 500 words to cl-studies@psu.edu by January 15, 2024. Please include a 200-300-word biography, and use “Archival Turns” in the subject line of your email. Authors will be informed of provisional acceptance by February 1, 2024.