Call for Papers

The New ELN Announces Its Second Issue:
Photography and Literature

A respected forum since 1962 for new work in English literary
studies, ELN (English Language Notes) has undergone a change in
editorship and an extensive makeover as a biannual journal devoted
exclusively to special topics in all fields of literary and cultural
studies. The new ELN is particularly determined to revive and
reenergize its traditional commitment to featuring shorter notes,
often no more than 3-4 pages in print, an attribute of the journal
that will provide a unique forum for cutting-edge scholarly debate
and exchange in the humanities.

Volume 2 of the new ELN (43.2, September 2006) will address the
subgenre of photographic and literary collaborations that has emerged
since Talbot's photographically-illustrated The Pencil of Nature
first appeared in England (1844-46). This ELN issue welcomes
consideration of literary texts that directly incorporate photographs
as well as those whose engagement with photography's unique
representational characteristics is central to their epistemology. We
also invite analyses of photography that incorporates text. Finally,
we solicit original poetry and photography that engages the
intersection of text and the photographic image.

Contributors may address formal issues, such as: what sorts of
instructions do texts provide for reading of images in texts and vice
versa, and in what ways does each respectively comply with or resist
those instructions? How does the alleged "truth" of the photograph
infect the perceived status or genre of its accompanying text, and
renegotiate its rules of recognition, authenticity, or artifice? How
do photographic images delimit or enhance textual possibility and
play? How is photography related to narrative? Under what conditions
does the text itself function as a graphical element, and with what
effects? Or they may address issues more directly related to the
historical development of photographic discourses and its dialectical
engagement with optical truths and visual pleasures, such as: how
does photographic "evidence," from the medical to the pornographic,
work to redefine the truth of the body as a sight, or recodify the
relations between self and other? How does the photographic capacity
for preservation collaborate with imaginary possession, aesthetic
consumerism, image addiction and fetishization, or the threat and
promise of machine technology? How is the imbrication of text and
photographic images tied to the projects of history making,
memorialization, and nostalgia? How does the photograph's discourse
of the real parallel or diverge from the history of the novel in its
forms, its thematic preoccupations, and in the changing conventions
of reading and perceiving?
Position papers, notes, essays, and provocations are invited from
scholars and artists in all fields of literary and visual 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 contributions and/or proposals to The Editors, English
Language Notes, University of Colorado at Boulder, 226 UCB, Boulder,
CO 80309-0226. Deadline for final submissions is February 1, 2006.
Specific inquires regarding volume two may be directed to the issue
editor, Karen Jacobs, via e-mail (karen.jacobscolorado.edu).

Karen Jacobs
University of Colorado
UCB 226
Boulder, CO 80309
303-492-7381
Email: karen.jacobscolorado.edu