Call for Papers
Experimental Literary Education
ELN 47.2, Fall/Winter 2009
Jeffrey C. Robinson, Special Editor
In AY 2007-2008 the University of Colorado’s Department of English conducted a “State of the Profession Review and Inquiry” that introduced the Department to some well-articulated statements about “where we are” as a profession with regard to such issues as canonicity, new technologies, curricular experiments, and so on, at the beginning of the 21st century. The purpose of this proposed ELN Special Issue (publication date, Fall/Winter 2009) is to pursue the topic’s relevance both for a much wider audience and with a new stress on “education” (as distinct from “the discipline”) and on literary educational practices. Starting with the publication of the eight “State of the Profession” statements as a point of departure into the future, the issue will concern itself with experiments, current or planned or imagined, in the literary education of graduate and undergraduate students—experiments that attempt to push well past the structures of literary education now accepted and practiced. The overall goal will be to provide a compendium of up-to-date and out-of-the-box thinking, from within the Profession, about truly imaginative possibilities for literary study that can play a vital role in students’ emotional and civic lives.
We are therefore seeking papers from professors of literature and creative writing and the arts, 2500-4000 words in length, that report on experiments in literary education. The emphasis here is not primarily on pedagogical techniques. Rather, the papers should demonstrate how experiments in literary education lead to a different understanding of the putative objects of education. (To give just one example: the “deformance” of a poem—e.g. reading a poem from the last line to the first line--completely alters the sense of how poems function.)
Any topic is possible and potentially desirable here, but a few areas to consider include:
- literary education and the New Media
- collaborative literary education
- literary education as production, not only reception
- literary education in the public sphere and “the schools”
- literary education and translation.
We are also eager to consider actual examples of work produced as an experiment in literary education (visual as well as textual items).
Position papers, notes, essays, and provocations are invited from scholars and teachers in all fields of literary studies; the editors would be delighted to consider together two or more related contributions engaging one another on particular themes to be published as topical clusters (for example, papers and responses presented at the MLA or other conferences, provided they have been formatted for publication.
Please send documents formatted according to the Guide to Submissions to:
Special Issue Editor, “Experimental Literary Education”
English Language Notes
University of Colorado, Boulder
226 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0226
Specific inquires regarding this issue may be directed to Jeffrey C. Robinson at jeffrey.c.robinson@colorado.edu.
The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2009.
