The Fan Studies Network

Deadline for submissions: December 31, 2017

From the cruel optimism of neoliberalism to the rise of white nationalism to the almost daily reminders of the precariousness of life—especially the lives of those who are othered through race, class and gender—contemporary events show the necessity of studying representations of violent feelings. While “violence” is often evoked as a metaphor for affective exchange, theories of feeling as violence and of violence as feeling remain implicit in the criticism of both violence and feeling. This special issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory seeks essays that examine the relationship between violence and feeling explicitly, in order to raise new questions about emotion, embodiment, and representation.

The essays sought for this special issue seize on violent feeling as a productive avenue for further propelling and complicating the “affective turn” in literary studies. We seek essays that position themselves at the intersection of prevailing understandings of affect and violence, and explore the undertheorized ground of violent feelings in ways that affect theory has not yet fully elucidated.

Essays may explore representations of violent feelings and:

– Race, class, gender, disability

– Theories of disgust, rage, shock

– Genre, narrative or discourse (e.g. terror, horror, pornography)

– Polyvalent intensities (agitation, mourning, hysteria, anger, outrage)

– Other forms of violence (structural violence, state violence, slow violence, sexual violence)

– Brexit, the 2016 US Presidential Election, or other current events of note

LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory publishes critical essays that employ engaging, coherent theoretical perspectives and provide original, close readings of texts. Submissions must use MLA citation style and should range in length from 5,000-9,000 words in length. Please direct any questions relating to this cfp to the guest co-editor, Douglas Dowland; d-dowland@onu.edu. Submissions should be emailed to litjourn@yahoo.com (please include your contact information and a 100-200 word abstract in the body of your email). LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory also welcomes submissions for general issues.

Guest Editors: Douglas Dowland, Ohio Northern University and Anna Ioanes, Georgia Institute of Technology

Editors: Dwight Codr and Tara Harney-Mahajan

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