The Editorial Board of PMLA, the Journal of the Modern Language Association invite essay submissions on the following special topics:

Tragedy
Deadline for submissions: 5 November 2012
Coordinators: Jean E. Howard (Columbia Univ.) and Helene Foley (Barnard Coll.)

How does tragedy speak to the critical and the creative imagination today? As a dramatic genre, tragedy has an ancient lineage in the West, connected to some of the most moving documents of the Greek theater; yet its persisting theatrical forms diverge from practices developed by the classical Greek dramatists. New forms of tragedy often coalesce at particular historical moments: Elizabethan England, late-seventeenth-century France, mid-twentieth-century America. But each incarnation of the tragic form has concerned itself with questions of limits (of expression, endurance, and capacity); of human transcendence, sacrifice, and annihilation; or of ethical responsibility to self, others, and the universe.

In the face of the present precariousness of life and new forms of hubristic self-assertion over and against the common good, what resources does tragedy provide for meaningful analysis, critique, and change? Does a traditional focus on the tragic protagonist preclude ideas of collective tragedy? Can the genre encompass experiences of ecological disaster, genocide, and poverty?

The PMLA Editorial Board invites essays that reflect on tragedy’s critical capacity to address urgent political, philosophical, and aesthetic questions. Potential contributors are encouraged to think about tragedy expansively, not only as a dramatic form or a Western invention but also as a mode that exceeds the stage and that might be challenged, paralleled, or rewritten by other literary traditions. Submissions may, for example, consider the contemporary restaging and rewriting of early tragedies, explore tragedy in the context of current political crises and postcolonial politics, and examine the relation between scholarly understandings of tragedy and colloquial, everyday uses of the notion in domains such as news reporting and talk TV.  

Emotions
Deadline for submissions: 4 November 2013

Coordinators: Katharine Ann Jensen (Louisiana State Univ.) and Miriam L. Wallace (New Coll. of Florida)

How do human beings experience or recognize emotions—our own and those of others? What distinguishes an emotion from other faculties and sensations, and how do different fields engage these complex concepts? These questions have recently been the focus of affect studies, which elucidates how visceral forces beyond consciousness impel us toward movement, thought, and relation and explores affect’s ethical, aesthetic, and political implications.

The nature and significance of emotion have engaged thinkers since ancient times. In fifth-century Greece, for example, Hippocrates developed the theory of the humors to posit an intrinsic relation between the body and the emotions. Indeed, discerning connections or disjunctions among body, mind, and emotion has preoccupied philosophers, political theorists, religious thinkers, and literary writers, among others, for millennia. The classification of kinds of emotion—love, joy, hatred, sadness, fear, shame, and so on—an emotion’s positive or negative quality, and the ability to control one’s emotions have also been enduring subjects of theory and debate. Visual and theatrical artists since the eighteenth century studied the facial and bodily manifestations of emotions to depict them persuasively, while Freud famously elaborated the deleterious effects of repressed emotions and conceived of human existence in terms of a persistent conflict between aggressive and erotic instincts.

The PMLA Editorial Board invites essays that reflect on theories or representations of emotions in any period or cultural tradition. Potential contributors are encouraged to consider such questions as these: In what ways have emotions been valued as a form of knowledge or refinement; in what ways have they been rejected or associated with the uneducated? How and why have emotions been gendered or racially defined? How have emotions been understood to affect the imagination? How has emotion been conceptualized as disembodied or as excessively embodied, and what are the implications of these competing notions? What have been the psychological aspects of emotions, whether repressed or unbridled? What are the affective dimensions of reading or viewing (sympathy, identification, alienation, subjective transformation)? What have been the epistemological, aesthetic, political, or moral dimensions of emotion?

Only members of the association may submit articles to PMLA.

For further details on these CFP and on submitting work to PMLA please see the following website: http://www.mla.org/pmla_submitting