CFP: The Dream. Readings in English and American Literature and Culture III

We are seeking contributions to the volume entitled The Dream, hopefully a sequel to two previous volumes in our “Readings in English and American Literature and Culture” series: Community and Nearness (2007) and The Body (2009). As with these earlier books, we are interested in critical papers dealing with the literature and culture of the last three centuries. All kinds of approaches and perspectives are welcome.

The Dream (and the Text)

Each text has its own dream: a dark character, a mysterious passage or turn, some repressed feelings, and even writing itself, dumb and blind. Dreams are interwoven into the very texture of literature, either as its potential or its negative. It is interesting to see how a text reveals its latent dreamy aspect and how criticism helps in the process. As the editors of The Dream, we want to give opportunity for analyzing the modes and strategies in which such revelations take place in a literary text or by means of cultural phenomena. Possible topics include:

dreams in literary texts; texts about dreams and as dreams; literary space of the visionary, the gothic, etc.
the notion of the Uncanny; psychoanalytical discourses; fiction of the repressed and repressed fictions; the subconscious and the unconscious
applications of Freudian and Jungian dream theories to literary texts and cultural phenomena
dream-sequences and the like literary strategies (e.g. tropism, ecriture feminine, cut-up technique)
surrealism and its legacies
magic realism
the notions of the dreaming body and dream bodies; “altered states of consciousness”; fiction and rhetoric of the irrational

Our deadlines:

proposal (300-400 words) – December 31th 2009;
notification of acceptance – January 31th 2010;
full text – September 30th 2010;
publication of the volume (University of Opole Press) – first half of 2011.

Please contact Ilona Dobosiewicz (dobosiewicz@interia.pl) or Jacek Gutorow (dreadwork@interia.pl), the editors of the series.