Call for papers: Special Issue of Axon: Creative Explorations, Edited by Caren Florance, Jen Webb, Jordan Williams

There has been a great deal of thinking and publishing on the topic of image-and-text. Do they fit together? And if so, how? Reid and Turner, in their introduction to the 1994 issue of Yale French Studies, titled Boundaries: Writing & Drawing, write:

We are all aware of the narrative history of the disjunction which, from the very beginning, heralds the relation between writing and drawing.

Many scholars and creative practitioners have tested out the boundaries between writing and drawing, text and image, abstract thought and material actuality, finding instances where those apparently divided by form have found ways to converse, or even to cohabit. Wallace Stevens, for instance, urges poets (and other artists) to aim for: “Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself” (1983: 565). Francis Ponge uses abstract language to remind us about the thingliness of things, saying: “there is in the orange a yearning to recover its content after having been subjected to the ordeal of squeezing” (1972: 36–37). Stevens, the poet of ideas, and Ponge, the poet of things, both prompt us to construct bridges capable of traversing the boundaries between word and object, ideas about the thing and the thing itself.

We are interested in receiving papers, photo essays, interviews, and creative works that address both the breach, and the connections, between text and image: between the material and the poetic. We are interested too in submissions that consider how material poetics might go beyond mere quotidian meaning to achieve a deepened, kinaesthetic experience of the world, one that brings into the poetic present the worlds of objects and emotions.

We invite writers, artists, philosophers and fellow travelers to present papers (visual, verbal, or both; poetical, theoretical, or both) that explore, examine and elucidate the concept of materiality.

The Special Issue will be published in October 2018 in the open access journal Axon: Creative Explorations (http://axonjournal.com.au/)

Queries, EOIs et al to jen.webb@canberra.edu.au

Dates:

24 December 2017: Papers submitted for peer review process

28 February 2018: Peer review reports returned to contributors

31 May 2018: Final papers submitted to Axon for editing

31 October 2018: Publication goes live