The deadline for submissions for this issue is August 1st, 2012
Kinephanos’ fourth issue aims to explore the relationship between the sacred, the mythological motifs in modern popular fictions, and fandom. Our goal is to understand how the sacred, a pure human emotion, is disembodied from the ‘official’ religious institutions – at least in the Western countries – in order to be reinvested in secular cultural activities like ‘going to see a movie’ or ‘playing a video game’. Eliade wrote: “Movies, a ‘factory of dreams’, are highly inspired by countless mythological motifs, such as the struggle between the Hero and the Monster, battles and initiation ordeals, figures and exemplary patterns” (freely translated from *Le sacré et le profane*, 174). These mythological stories, highly symbolics, exist since ancient times. However, we would like to address the following issue: how the immersive experience in a work of fiction, now facilitated with various technological media forms (movies, videogames, television shows, etc.), changes our own relationship with the emotion of the sacred sparked in people’s life. We propose to identify this emotion with the term “neoreligiosity”. An English scholar of fan culture, Matt Hills, says in this regard: “Neoreligiosity implies that the proliferation of discourses of ‘cult’ within media fandom cannot be read as the ‘return’ of religion in a supposedly secularised culture” (*Fan Culture*, 2002, 119). Indeed, putting side by side the experience of the fan with the religious experience might seem appropriate. Due to a lack of words, needed by fans to describe their own affective experience with their favourite movies, the use of religious terminology seems logical, without calling upon religious institutions structure. Hills quotes Cavicchi: “(…) fans are aware of the parallels between religious devotion and their own devotion. At the very least, the discourse of religious conversion may provide fans with a model for describing the experience of becoming a fan” (2002, 118). This issue of Kinephanos proposes to explore how the sacred, the religiosity, and the neoreligiosity play out in modern popular fictions, and with those who experience it: the fans.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to;
– Sacred and reappropriation (fans creations : fanfics, fanfilms, etc.);
– Social network, sharing interests through Internet;
– Reception, modern and contemporary myths (Star Wars, Matrix, Lord of
the Rings, etc.);
– Cinema and religion, displacement of the sacred;
– Videogames, replayability as a tool of self-exploration (Mass Effect,
Heavy Rain, morality system, etc.);
– Revelation, epiphany, and the fan’s experience;
– Cinema and videogames, mythological motifs between the lines;
vestiges of the sacred;
– Repetition viewing as a ritual, ‘cult fandoms’ and television shows
(Star Trek, Doctor Who, etc.);
– Archetypal figures in the modern mythologies (Order and Chaos,
Lovecrafts’s Great Old Ones, the hero’s journey (monomyth) in Hollywood
movies, etc.).
While Kinephanos privileges publication of thematic issues, we strongly encourage writers to submit articles exceeding the theme which will be
published in each issue.
How to submit?
Abstracts of 1000 words including the title, the topic and the object(s) that will be studied. Please include bibliographical references, your name, email address and your primary field of study.
Send submissions (in French or English) by August 1st, 2012 to: mmarc.joly@umontreal.caail and vincent.mauger@arv.ulaval.ca
Following our approbation sent to you by email (2-3 weeks later after deadline), please send us your completed article by December 1st, 2012.
Editorial rules
Kinephanos is a peer-reviewed Web journal. Each article is evaluated by double-blind peer review. Kinephanos does not retain exclusive rights of published texts. However, material submitted must not have been previously published elsewhere. Future versions of the texts published in other periodicals must reference Kinephanos as its original source.
Production demands
All texts must be written in MLA style. 6,000 words maximum (excluding references but including endnotes) with 1.5 spacing, Times New Roman fonts 12pt, footnotes must be inserted manually in the text as follow : … (1), references must be within the text as follow (Jenkins 2000, 134), a bibliography with all your references, and 5 keywords at the end of the text.
For the editorial guidelines, refer to the section Editorial Guidelines http://www.kinephanos.ca/politique-editoriale/
Kinephanos accepts articles in French and in English
Kinephanos is a bilingual web-based journal. Focusing on questions involving cinema and popular media, Kinephanos encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The journal’s primary interests are movies and popular TV series, video games, emerging technologies and fan cultures. The preferred approaches include cinema studies, communication theories, religion sciences, philosophy, cultural studies and media studies.
The Fan Studies Network 