*Authorship*
*Call for Contributions*The peer-reviewed, open access e-journal *Authorship*, planned to go online
in the summer of 2011 and to appear twice a year, is seeking submissions for
its inaugural issue. The journal aims to offer a venue in which to describe
diverse historical and discursive settings of authorship, and to grapple
with the complex issues of authorial authority, independence or
interdependence, and self-fashioning. The Romantic or New Critical concept
of the solitary genius or auteur (if indeed such an entity ever existed at
all) has for decades now been the subject of intense critical scrutiny and
revision; as a result, what the general public might once have thought of as
authorial agency is now submerged in an elaborate tissue of critical
feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention, and accidents of
publishing, branding, and spin. And yet the Author persists, as a
nomenclature, as a catalogue entry, as a biographical entity, as a popular
icon, and as an assumed agent of creativity and innovation. In analyzing
cultural formations of 'authoriality' as they developed historically, over a
long period of time and in a variety of geographical locations, in relation
to cultural networks and social change, to transformations of the media, as
well as to changing perceptions of gender and personhood, *Authorship* hopes
to foster a more refined and precise theoretical and historical
understanding of the complex ideological, technological and social processes
that transform a writer into an author. We therefore welcome articles in
English on the cultural performance of authorship in any contemporary or
historical literary milieu.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Authorship across and within diverse languages, literatures, and
geographical locations: colonial, transatlantic, transnational, translated,
polyglot.
- Varieties of authors: dramatists, novelists, poets, journalists, sages,
critics, humorists; authors as entertainers, public intellectuals,
moralists.
- Authenticity, authority, agency, attribution.
- Authorship and the canon.
- Gender and authorship: interrogating putative "feminine" and "masculine"
models of writing, self-fashioning, and getting published.
- Fame, infame, disfame, lack of fame; the self-creation, branding and
reception of authors.
- Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorial personae.
- Authors and collaboration; single and multiple authors. Authors and
cultural networks.
- The quotidian activities of writers as they relate to the public image of
authors.
- Translation, editing, redacting, and reviewing considered as kinds of
authorial performances.
- Authorship and the marketplace; authors and patrons; authorship and
intellectual property.
- The textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers, and printers.
- Authorship and/in the material book; authorship & new technologies (film,
digital media, the internet).
Submissions may be sent to the editors (mailto: authorship@ugent.be). The
recommended length for articles is about 5,000 words, and the deadline to be
considered for inclusion in the first issue is
1 May, 2011. See the website
of *Authorship *at
http://www.authorship.ugent.be/ for more information and to sign up for email notification of future issues.
This journal is an initiative of the Research project on Authorship as
Performance (RAP). For further information, visit
http://www.rap.ugent.be/--
Dr. Sören C. Hammerschmidt
Postdoctoral Research Fellow/Postdoctoraal onderzoeker
Research on Authorship as Performance (www.rap.ugent.be)
English Department/Vakgroep Engels
Ghent University/Universiteit Gent
Room 130.033
Blandijnberg 2
9000 Gent
Belgium/België
soren.hammerschmidt@ugent.be
http://www.rap.ugent.be/index.php?id=15&type=contenthttp://www.english.ugent.be/sorenhammerschmidt
