Duke University Press Log

Call for Papers in American Literature: New Media and the Digital Humanities

Communications media have been integral to American life from the early colonization of New England to the transnational networks formed during the twentieth century. This special issue will explore the insights that emerge when we think about mediation in general and digital technologies more specifically in the context of American literary history and cultural production. Over the last decade, the work of scholars such as Alexander Galloway and Lisa Nakamura has already reframed key questions about class, gender, and race in visual and digital contexts. This issue seeks to explore further how new media change the way that we think about American literature and the methods we use to study it.

       This issue encourages a broad range of questions about the relationship between new media and American literature. How, for instance, might we think about literary representations of media that are perceived as new in their historical period? How do digital media transform the formal and political dimensions of contemporary American literature? How have prose styles and aesthetics, at different historical moments, been influenced by new communications technologies from the telegraph to the phonograph to cinema to the digital computer to mobile phones? Moreover, do the transmedia dimensions of such technologies suggest a scope that surpasses the geopolitical boundaries of the United States? Finally, how do American studies methods help us think about paraliterary productions such as electronic narratives and digital games? How does American literature help us understand the relationship between cultural theory (for example, critical race scholarship) and media studies (such as software studies)? How are digital humanities methods, both qualitative and quantitative, affecting American studies for better or worse? Are the humanities now necessarily digital?

       For this issue, there is also the possibility of an accompanying Web site that would publish peer-reviewed multimodal pieces that use new media in their very form. If you are interested in submitting a more experimental piece, please contact the editors before submitting. Some production support may be available for these works, especially for work undertaken in the new authoring platform Scalar. Scalar is designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form scholarship online. The platform particularly facilitates work that engages visual materials. For more information about Scalar, please see scalar.usc.edu/anvc.

     Special issue editors will be Wendy H. K. Chun, Patrick Jagoda, and Tara McPherson. Submissions of 11,000 words or less (including endnotes) should be submitted electronically at www.editorialmanager.com/al/ by 31 March 2012. When choosing a submission type, select “New Submission-New Media Special Issue.” For assistance with the submission process, please contact the office of American Literature at (919) 684–3948 or am-lit@duke.edu. Please direct other questions to Wendy H. K. Chun (Wendy_Hui_Kyong_Chun@Brown.edu), Patrick Jagoda (pjagoda@uchicago.edu), or Tara McPherson (tmcphers@usc.edu).

 

Walt Whitman, Bureaucrat

Poet Walt Whitman has been in the news this week, when the National Archives announced that scholar Kenneth M. Price has found a trove of thousands of documents Whitman worked on when he was a government clerk. What's perhaps most surprising about the documents is that Whitman appeared to take his work seriously and even enjoy it. As Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Jennifer Howard puts it, "Government workers, take heart: One of America's most influential literary figures found his federal work engaging and thought well of many of his fellow bureaucrats, according to Mr. Price." Previous accounts of Whitman have described Whitman as a slacker at his government job, putting in a few hours a day for a much-needed paycheck. This is also the justification scholars give for his writing of the temperance novel, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate. Whitman himself described the novel as "rot," but perhaps in light of this new, more earnest Whitman the editors will need to reconsider? Regardless, the discovery of the government documents and the novel both add to our understanding of the complexity of one of America's greatest poets.

President Obama Names National Humanties Medal Winners

We congratulate Roberto González-Echevarría, author of Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative on winning a 2010 National Humanties Medal. Originally from Cuba, González-Echevarría has taught for many years at Yale, where he is currently the Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literatures. Myth and Archive won the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award. The National Humanities Medal honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans' access to important resources in the humanities. Other winners of this year's prestigious award  are: historians Bernard Bailyn, Jacques Barzun, and Gordon S. Wood; biographer Arnold Rampersad; literary scholar Daniel Aaron; education policy scholar Stanley Nider Katz; novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth; and poet, novelist and environmentalist Wendell E. Berry. Congratulations to them all, and thanks to them for their contributions to humanties scholarship.

Sophia A. McClennen Shares Insights into Ariel Dorfman's Work

Check out our most recent author interview video! Sophia A. McClennen, author of Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope, answers a few questions about her book and tells Helena Knox, our Exhibits Manager, about her acquaintance with the internationally renowned Dorfman and how that affected the book project.

 

Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope is a critical introduction to the life and work of the internationally renowned writer, activist, and intellectual Ariel Dorfman. It is the first book about the author in English and the first in any language to address the full range of his writing to date.

Shakesqueer Authors Read in Atlanta

Last week Outwrite Bookstore in Atlanta hosted Madhavi Menon, editor of the new book Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare and Richard Rambuss, a contributor to the volume. We're pleased to share a few photos.

Madhavi Menon describing the Shakesqueer project.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Rambuss, a contributor to Shakesqueer, Madhavi Menon, and Philip Rafshoon, owner of Outwrite. 

 

Madhavi Menon and Richard Rambuss and the staff of Outwrite.

Duke Professor and Author Reynolds Price Dies

The Duke community is mourning the death of Reynolds Price, Professor of English for over fifty years and beloved author of more than three dozen books. The New York Times called him "one of the most important voices in modern Southern fiction" in their obituary. At Duke he is remembered also as a beloved teacher whose rich, deep voice was instantly recognizable on campus. Duke President Richard Brodhead told the News and Observer, "Reynolds was a part of the soul of Duke; he loved this university and always wanted to make it better. We can scarcely imagine Duke without Reynolds Price." At Duke Press we were proud to publish Price's notebooks in 1998, in the form of the book Learning a Trade: A Craftsman’s Notebooks: 1955-1997. Critics praised the book for giving readers a look into the workings of the mind of an author. "Learning a Trade is a rare contemporary example of [a published working journal], giving us an almost full documentary of the mind of this author," wrote Alexander Theroux in the Wall Street Journal. Duke University Press Books Marketing Mangaer Emily Young sums up our experience working with Price: "It was an honor to be able to work with him on this project and to share in his unending generosity and enthusiasm for the craft of writing and teaching others about writing. And his deep appreciation for the role of publishing was felt in every email and conversation. He wrote in an email to me, after a meeting to discuss how to market his book, 'delighted to know the staff are hopeful—thanks again for all the good feeling.' And now we say thank you, Reynolds Price, for all the good feeling you brought to our world at here Duke Press. You will be missed."

Louis Budd Passes Away

We are sad to learn of the death of Louis Budd, former James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of English, former managing editor of American Literature, and editor of seven books with Duke University Press. Budd was 89 years old. He was a noted scholar of Mark Twain. At Duke Press, he edited a collection of books featuring the best writing on canonical American authors from the journal American Literature. They include On Poe, On Faulkner, On Melville, On Henry James, On Humor, and On Mark Twain. They are all still in print. Budd retired from Duke in 1991.

Miller and Litvak Win MLA Prizes

The Modern Language Association announced its 2010 book prize winners today and we were thrilled to see two Duke authors on the list. Monica L. Miller's Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity has won the William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture. We might add that this is the third Duke University Press book to win that prize in five years! We also congratulate Joseph J. Litvak,  whose The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture was an honorable mention for the very prestigious James Russell Lowell prize. We look forward to celebrating with our authors at the MLA convention in January in Los Angeles!

Praise for Bring on the Books for Everybody

Some great praise today for Jim Collins's Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Collins's book is a hopeful assesment of the culture of reading and books that considers film, e-books, Oprah, and the rise of the chain bookstore. Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Tara Brabazon says the book is "the "killer app" for popular cultural studies." She exhorts readers to "Buy it. Borrow it. Download it. Now. It is a book that we will remember where we were when we we first read it. This is a game-changer for popular cultural studies, media studies and the new humanities." The Chicago Tribune thinks the book is one of five that writers should read right now. So what are you waiting for? Get reading!

Janell Watson discusses the minnesota review

Janell Watson, editor of the minnesota review (new to Duke University Press in 2011), recently sat down to discuss the journal with us.  In the video below she recounts her first encounter with the journal at the MLA, considers the journal's future under her editorship, and lets us in on what the minnesota review looks for in new submissions.