CALL FOR PAPERS 2024 - ENDED

2023-10-30

“Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich. Formy kultury i teorii”/ “The Problems of Literary Genres. Forms of Culture and Theory” announces a call for papers for 2024. The journal is published as a biannual, starting in 2023 in a refreshed format.

Due to the great interest in “free” issues without a main topic, the Editorial Board has opened a Main Section, which means that both issues per year will publish texts unrelated to the topics of the volumes, presenting current research results from disciplines of interest. We process submissions to the Main Section on a rolling basis.

Main Section and Issue Theme include the following sections:

  • Articles
  • Essays
  • Scientific Reviews
  • Materials to The Companion of the Literary Genres (entries)
  • Miscellanea (discussion panels, conference reports, responses to reviews and polemical texts, interviews…)

Detailed information on text types can be found on the site.

Please send submissions only to the Editor's e-mail address: zrl@uni.lodz.pl

 

ISSUE THEME 1/2024

Gender and queer culture in and on the fringes of Polish literature non-fiction

We invite everyone to submit texts for the next volume of ZRL, devoted to all Polish contexts of categories such as gender and queer. This means that we are interested both in methodological approaches: the reflection on these concepts as analytical and methodological tools, as well as in texts devoted to specific Polish literary works which can be inscribed within the framework of a broadly understood non-heteronormativity and which employ various strategies of gender representation.

  • We also expect analytical articles "queering" various works of Polish literature, reinterpreting them from this gender-queer angle.
  • We also expect texts devoted to the biographies of Polish authors who discuss (or not) this aspect of cultural reality and whose life paths were (or are) determined by transgressing the norms set by the gender order.
  • Moreover, we also expect texts exploring issues related to the conventional conditions of gender categories: for example, the aesthetics of camp.
  • Finally, we are also interested in dissertations devoted to the genre contexts of Polish stories about transgressing, perceiving the fluidity or, on the contrary, the oppressiveness of the limits of the gendered order.

 

Theme Editor:

Agnieszka Izdebska (University of Lodz)

Submission deadline: 2024, February 29

 

 

ISSUE THEME 2/2024

Gender non-fiction

“So don’t dare dismiss my gender as a construct, drag or a performance, because my gender is a work of non-fiction” — is the most provocative sentence from an essay published a decade ago by transgender activist, writer, biologist and musician Julia Serano (2013). Serano, as
a transgender person and a non-fiction author, was entitled, like no one else, to such a strong assertion. A metaphor, for that is indeed what we are dealing with here, according to Aristotle’s classical definition, is ‘the transfer of a name from one thing to another by analogy’. Serano has constructed an analogy: gender – non-fiction. And just as ‘non-fiction’ is a negation of ‘fiction’, Serano's experience of gender contradicts the concept of the gender’s performativity as presented by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990).

Our proposal for a thematic issue of “Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich” (“The Problems of Literary Genres”) stems from our conviction that ‘gender’ and ‘non-fiction’ do not often meet in Polish literary studies, which are, perhaps, “seduced” by the concept of ‘performativity’ and focus on gendered interpretations of mainly fictional and personal-document literature, while treating the field of non-fiction somewhat neglectfully, ignoring, for example, its popularity among reading community.

Below we indicate some possible and, from our point of view, interesting issues related to the main topic:

  • male vs. female writing strategies in non-fiction; 
  • male/female gaze in non-fiction;
  • gender constructions of the subject/hero(s)/reader(s) in non-fiction and their textual consequences;
  • gendered asymmetries of prestige in the literary field (awards, prizes, circulation, etc.);
  • gendered asymmetry of access to facts, information, technology, people, sources in writing/reporting work;
  • gender of the non-fiction viewer/woman;
  • gender of the “Polish school of reportage”;
  • transformations of the field of knowledge on gender and sexuality and  their popular scientific representations;
  • “fearless” reporters vs. “sensitive” female reporters — constructing authorial images;
  • “feminine” or “masculine” non-fiction?
  • non-fiction and moving beyond gender binarity and heteronormativity;
  • the body, gender, sexuality and censorship in non-fiction literature;
  • transformations of intimacy in non-fiction literature;
  • the impact of new media and transmediality on the conceptualisation of gender in
    non-fictional literature;
  • the performance of literature and its non-fictional potential.

 

Theme Editors:

Katarzyna Lisowska (University of Wrocław)

Wojciech Śmieja (University of Silesia in Katowice)

Submission deadline: 2024, 31 May