Here's something for all you academic essay writers. Paradoxa
asked me to forward this along to the list. Note "our
expanded view of literary representations of the Western also
includes: generic studies paralleling Western themes in
hard-boiled detective fiction." We've often talked about the
hardboiled/western relationship. If you do decide to do
something, a look through the archives might be
beneficial.
Bill
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Paradoxa Call for Papers: "The Western"
Paradoxa
is seeking critical essays for a special issue on The Western
in literature, art, film, television, and popular culture.
Patterns, plots, tropes, icons, and codes from the Western
still pervade American culture, still offer popular imagery
of America's historical and political identity, and still
meet with hostility and parodic critique here, across our
borders, and beyond.
Paradoxa
invites single discipline, interdisciplinary, and comparative
essays that reassess the cultural significance of the
Western. Theoretical studies of canonical authors who
contributed to the mythos of the West, among them Cooper,
Harte, Cather, Grey, Wister, and L'Amour, will be considered.
We also seek analyses of contemporary portrayals of the West
by Sherman Alexie, Thomas Berger, Cormac McCarthy, Larry
McMurtry, and Leslie Silko, among others. Our expanded view
of literary representations of the Western also includes:
generic studies paralleling Western themes in hard-boiled
detective fiction, adventure sagas, and science fiction; and
discussions of "wild" or urban frontiers in world literature,
such as in the works of Paco Ignacio Taibo, Camilo Jose Cela,
and this year's Booker Prize winner, Peter Carey. Essays
devoted to artistic representation of the West from
Bierstadt, Moran, and Remington to R. C. Gorman, T. C.
Cannon, and Harry Fonseca will certainly be considered.
Of
course, film studies and revisionist film histories are very
much encouraged, especially those which look beyond the
Western formula to disclose political, counter-cultural,
socio-historical, racial, or gender issues as commentaries
upon modern American values. Other film topics might well
include: the Western style and vision of a single director
Ford, Walsh, Sturges, Mann, Fuller, or Peckinpah, as
examples; Western patterns played out in non-Western films,
such as The Third Man, Bad Day At Black Rock, or L. A.
Confidential; or, Western tropes in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
and Yojimbo, Itami's Tampopo, Leone's spaghetti Westerns,
Rodriguez's El Mariachi, or numerous Mexican films of the
vaquero style from the 1940s and 50s.
We
are also very interested in a variety of interdisciplinary
topics about the Western in American popular culture: its
fables from frontier sagas, tall tales, dime novels, and
comics; its history re-enacted in Old or Wild West shows,
exotic sideshows of indigenous peoples, staged Western
battles and gunfights, and museums and tourist attractions
devoted to portraying the "real" West; its often peculiar
reliance upon gender to depict the land, racial categories
and foreign customs, and stock characters from gunslingers to
prostitutes; its myths heard again in the music of singing
cowpokes, Western swing stars--Bob Wills and the Texas
Playboys--and the outlaw subculture of Country Rock; and its
style and idiom apparent in the rise and fall of Cowboy Chic,
the cowboy icon in advertisement, the tropes of corporate and
American expansionism, and political rhetoric and satire.
Popularization of Western motifs could also include the wide
range of contemporary social issues and Western parodies
found in television shows, such as Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will
Travel, Maverick, The Wild, Wild West, and Kung Fu.
Finally, we
invite critical essays that challenge assumed notions about
the Western rather than rehearse now familiar accounts of its
historical, figural, and popular development.
Deadline for
submissions: April 15, 2002.
Guest
Editor for the special issue is Homer B. Pettey, Humanities
Program, University of Arizona (
petteyh@u.arizona.edu). Please consult submission
guidelines on the inside back cover of the journal, or follow
MLA guidelines in terms of general format, citation
reference, footnotes, headings, etc. Send three copies, each
with an abstract of not more than 300 words on a separate
page, to Managing Editor David Willingham, c/o Paradoxa, P.O.
Box 2237, Vashon Island, WA 98070 (USA).
----------
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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