James Joyce Quarterly Special Issue Call for Papers:
Joyce and the Non-Human
(abstract deadline June 30th, 1st draft articles by January 15th 2019)
The idea for this issue began with a panel for the Toronto Joyce Symposium on “Our Funnaminal World,” which later turned into the theme for this year’s Zurich James Joyce Workshop (“Joycean Animals”). The topic came about as a result of our growing interest in animal studies and the nonhuman, specifically with reference to an increasingly technologically driven society. This theoretical context is one that intersects nicely with other theories — ecocriticism, Marxism, queer studies, gender studies, technology studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction — but it also transcends these frameworks, in that it is specifically relevant to 21st-century issues. The lens of the nonhuman provides new insights into well-trodden pastures such as Bloom’s cat, Garryowen, and cattle, in addition to bestiality, animality, and the beastly. We anticipate the special issue consolidating and building on recent work in Joyce Studies, including Brazeau’s and Gladwin’s Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce(2014), Lacivita’sThe Ecology of Finnegans Wake(2015), and the special issue of the JJQ on Joyce and Physiology (2009); in addition to recent developments in literary theory, such as, Grusin’s The Nonhuman Turn(2015), and the works of Deleuze, Derrida, Haraway, Bennett, and Hayles (to name a few). We believe the ‘nonhuman turn’ is an especially appropriate methodology for the Joyce community (linking as it does animal studies, the posthuman and ecocriticism), allowing us to examine some neglected and unique aspects of Joyce’s oeuvre. The nonhuman turn provides a framework in which his interests in the potential sentience of rivers, machinery, and insects might speak to each other.
In furtherance of the increased importance of animal studies and the nonhuman turn, this issue seeks to place Joyce’s works alongside these developments in a conceptualization that prioritizes both aspects of this theoretical paradigm. We welcome papers related to all aspects of animals and animality — from fleas to behemoth; worms to gulls; beast to beastly — across the range of Joyce’s works. We particularly encourage papers that position animal studies/the nonhuman alongside ecocriticism, Marxism, queer studies, gender studies, technology studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, psychoanalysis, or deconstruction.
Please send bios and abstracts of no more than 300 words to Katherine Ebury (k.ebury@sheffield.ac.uk) and Michelle Witen (michelle.witen@unibas.ch) by June 30, 2018.
Please find below the strict planned time scale for the issue:
May – June 2018 Open call for papers for issue (abstracts due June 30)
January 15, 2019 First submission of articles to editors
March 15, 2019 Editors return first round of submissions to contributors
May 15, 2019 Resubmission of articles to editors
May 31, 2019 Editors submit finalized issue to JJQ for Peer Review Process
August 30, 2019 Second round of revisions in response to editorial peer review
October 15, 2019 Final version of journal issue sent to JJQ (depending on peer review results)
