PLL: Papers on Language and Literature

09/29/2024

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12/02/2023

PLL: Papers on Language and Literature is hiring a Managing Editor. Illinois friends, or friends who know someone in Illinois, please apply or spread the word:

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09/01/2019

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08/02/2019

The contents of the final issue of 2019 are ready:

Essays

Coercion and Conversion Using Christain Magnanimity
in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Jeevan Gurung

“Worse than two fathers”: Steampunk Pygmalion and a
New Look at Double Standards and
the Language of Things in the Digital Realm
Andrew Cooper

The Mixed Chinese Images as the Oriental Other
and the Occidental Savior in John Steinbeck’s Novels
Junwa Tian

Book Reviews

Naomi Morgenstern’s Wild Child:
Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics
Britni Marie Williams

Alison A.Chapman’s The Legal Epic:
Paradise Lost and the Early Modern Law
Stephen M. Fallon

Language and Literature in the World:

"Academic Celebration of E. M. Forster in Ludwigsburg"
Anna Kwiatowska, Krzysztof Fordonski, and Heiko Zimmerman

07/03/2019

Happy Fourth to our US followers! Here are the updated contents of the upcoming Volume 55 Issue 3:

Special Issue:
Decolonial Aesthetics of World Literature
Kyle Wanberg, Guest Editor

Essays
KYLE WANBERG, Introduction, “Decolonial Aesthetics: Decentering Geographies and Literatures”

JAMES M. ROBERTSON, “Dispatches from the Appendix of Europe: Miroslav Krleža’s Abject Modernism”
ABSTRACT: Through a reading of the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža’s 1932 novel Povratak Filipa Latinowicza (The Return of Philip Latinowicz), this article explores the distinct historical experience of modernity in Europe’s south east periphery. Focusing on Krleža’s use of the abject in the literary construction of the periphery, it pursues three interrelated arguments. First, it demonstrates that the paradigm of peripheral modernism offers productive new avenues of research in considering the Balkans as a cultural zone distinct from Europe. Second, it explores the rivalry of realist and modernist aesthetics on the Marxist left beyond the literary metropoles of Western Europe, North America, and the USSR. Finally, it accounts for the predominance of the abject in peripheral literatures more broadly and links this aesthetic effect to the disjuncture between the spatial unevenness of modern capitalism and a narrative of modernization that privileges the West as a teleological ideal.
CHIENYN CHI, “‘The Madness’ of What Wasn’t Known Then: Reading Orphan of Asia through the Lens of Memory”
ABSTRACT: Postcolonial studies primarily examines the relationship between European colonizing powers and their colonies, often ignoring the Japan-Taiwan relationship. This paper calls attention to this marginality and offers a reading of a text set in Taiwan written under Japanese colonialism. Orphan of Asia dramatizes the journey of a colonized subject in Taiwan and his ultimate descent into madness. This paper uses Pierre Nora’s and Nicola King’s memory theories as a framework to analyze how the novel represents colonial trauma, gender, and national and cultural memory constructions. This paper also challenges how previous readings of Orphan of Asia are predicated on a recovery of an “authentic past” and an unproblematic merging of the past and the present for national identity construction.
SABELO J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI, “Discourses of Decolonization/Decoloniality”
ABSTRACT: The continuing hegemony of imperial powers around the world and the reality of persistence of formal colonialism in the form of French “departments” of the Caribbean Islands and such territories as Puerto Rico make discourses of decolonization/decoloniality very necessary and ever urgent. Conceptually, this article sutures the Latin American and African discourses around decolonization and decoloniality together as it challenges the idea that the insurgence and resurgence of decolonization/decoloniality cascades solely from a Latin American knowledge formation known as “modernity/coloniality.” African thinkers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o have been very active in the production of discourses of decolonization and decoloniality. Paradigmatically, the article places at the center of the discourses of decolonization/decoloniality three empires (physical, commercial, and cognitive/metaphysical) in an endeavor to effectively make sense of the challenges facing contemporary struggles against coloniality. At the same time, the article grapples with the complex convergences and divergences of decolonization/decoloniality and postcoloniality/postcolonialism as it pushes forward the “decolonial turn” as a foundation for pluriversality.
Book Reviews
CIARÁN FINLAYSON reviews Jazz as Critique: Adorno on Black Expression Revisited, by Fumi Okiji
THEODRA BANE reviews Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, by Katherine McKittrick, ed.
HOSAM ABOUL-ELA, “In Memoriam: Samir Amin”

06/03/2019

We are always looking forward to receiving special-issue proposals:
Special-Issue Proposal Guidelines
Papers on Language and Literature is seeking proposals for special issues on subjects including but not limited to
Digital Humanities
Film
Literary Translation
Print Culture
PLL is a generalist publication that is committed to publishing work on a variety of literatures, languages, and chronological periods. We accept proposals year-round. We are a quarterly and expect to publish a special issue once a year, every year. The specific volume and issue will be determined later, depending on the editors’ schedule.
Prospective guest-editors should submit current CVs and researched proposals of approximately 500 words describing the argument and rationale behind the special issue. If the guest-editor(s) decide to solicit contributions prior to the submission of the proposal, abstracts of articles and biographies of authors should be included with the proposal.
Proposals and supporting materials should be sent to the Editor at [email protected] as Word or PDF attachments. The subject line of the email should read “Special Issue Proposal.”
If a proposal is accepted, the guest-editor(s) will be responsible for soliciting contributions, appointing outside reviewers, and establishing submission deadlines. PLL practices double blind peer-review.
Please note that our typical issue is 112 print pages. We strongly recommend that a special issue include 2 book reviews related to the topic, in addition to articles.
Our house style follows the 2008 MLA Style Manual.
We look forward to hearing from you.

05/02/2019

Traveling to conferences, workshops, exhibits, or performances this summer? Consider writing a review for our "Language and Literature in the World" series. 1000 words; flexible deadlines. Queries to [email protected]

04/02/2019

Coming up this Summer (55.3):

Special Issue:
The Anticolonial Aesthetics of World Literature
Kyle Wanberg (New York University), Guest Editor

Essays
KYLE WANBERG, Introduction, “Comparative Regionalism and Its Literary Representations”

JAMES M. ROBERTSON, “Dispatches from the Appendix of Europe: Miroslav Krleža’s Abject Modernism”
ABSTRACT: Through a reading of the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža’s 1932 novel Povratak Filipa Latinowicza (The Return of Philip Latinowicz), this article explores the distinct historical experience of modernity in Europe’s south east periphery. Focusing on Krleža’s use of the abject in the literary construction of the periphery, it pursues three interrelated arguments. First, it demonstrates that the paradigm of peripheral modernism offers productive new avenues of research in considering the Balkans as a cultural zone distinct from Europe. Second, it explores the rivalry of realist and modernist aesthetics on the Marxist left beyond the literary metropoles of Western Europe, North America, and the USSR. Finally, it accounts for the predominance of the abject in peripheral literatures more broadly and links this aesthetic effect to the disjuncture between the spatial unevenness of modern capitalism and a narrative of modernization that privileges the West as a teleological ideal.
CHIENYN CHI, “‘The Madness’ of What Wasn’t Known Then: Reading Orphan of Asia through the Lens of Memory”
ABSTRACT: Postcolonial studies primarily examines the relationship between European colonizing powers and their colonies, often ignoring the Japan-Taiwan relationship. This paper calls attention to this marginality and offers a reading of a text set in Taiwan written under Japanese colonialism. Orphan of Asia dramatizes the journey of a colonized subject in Taiwan and his ultimate descent into madness. This paper uses Pierre Nora’s and Nicola King’s memory theories as a framework to analyze how the novel represents colonial trauma, gender, and national and cultural memory constructions. This paper also challenges how previous readings of Orphan of Asia are predicated on a recovery of an “authentic past” and an unproblematic merging of the past and the present for national identity construction.
CAROLE BOYCE-DAVIES, “Schizophrenic Seas and the Caribbean Trans-Nation”
ABSTRACT: “Schizophrenic seas,” as framed by Harris, captures the sometimes-frenetic nature of the Atlantic and identifies its Caribbean intersections as places of multiple currents and movements from hurricane trade winds to middle passage epistemologies and expresses, therefore, the motions of the oceans, as some would define them, and the ways that those movements and journeys have an impact on how the transnational is identified. Thus schizophrenic seas and the Caribbean trans-nation, are each constitutive of the other, a set of imagined trans-nationalities that pull “tidalectically.” They move in different directions but allow for a series of returns to unsettled boundaries, redefined sea-scapes, and land-scapes definitely given the nature of island instability and the effects of environmental turns, creating a Caribbean trans-nation that also in my reading redefines Caribbean space.
Book Reviews
CIARÁN FINLAYSON reviews Jazz as Critique: Adorno on Black Expression Revisited, by Fumi Okiji
THEODRA BANE reviews Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, by Katherine McKittrick, ed.
HOSAM ABOUL-ELA, “In Memoriam: Samir Amin”

03/04/2019

The Thomas Hardy Society Study Day will take place this April. Dr. Tracy Hayes will review it for PLL's "Language and Literature in the World" series.

https://www.hardysociety.org/oxo/126/far-from-the-madding-crowd-ths-study-day-2019/

2019 will mark the 145th anniversary of the publication of Far From the Madding Crowd.

02/04/2019

Trauma studies and the medical humanities across the world and centuries, from Hawthorne to A. L. Kennedy, in 55.2 (Spring 2019):

Essays
ZHONGFENG HUANG, “From ‘Purified with Fire’ to ‘That Impression of Permanence’: Holgrave’s Conversion in The House of the Seven Gables”
ABSTRACT: In his major novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne is constantly concerned with the intimate and interactive relationship between social reform and historical consciousness. This paper investigates the three phases of Holgrave’s perspective of social reform and examines the inseparable relationship between Hawthorne’s reformist impulse and historical consciousness in The House of the Seven Gables, which illustrates the power of social reform for renewal and regeneration and the force of history (as embodied by ancestral sins). By focusing on Holgrave’s transformation from a radical reformer to a conservative, this paper argues that the inextricable relationship between Hawthorne’s concept of social reform and a strong sense of historical continuity is prominently displayed in The House of the Seven Gables. In other words, Hawthorne advocates for social reform that is not divorced from a sense of the past.
CATHERINE FORSA, “The American Woman’s Health: Stowe’s Writings about Headaches, Health, and Home”
ABSTRACT: Headache sufferer Marie St. Clare is one of the sickest characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s oeuvre. While critics tend to view Marie’s headaches as feigned or imagined, the headaches have a physical nature linked in large part to her failures of domesticity. This essay examines how Stowe’s depiction of the headache in the novel and in a series of advice texts is consistent with a nineteenth-century discourse that casts the headache as a catchall symptom of poor housekeeping in all of its forms. This vision of the headache presents women with a great deal of agency in relation to health, home, and the public arena as the headache becomes intertwined with Stowe’s message about women’s capacity to act against slavery. Attending to Stowe’s representation of the headache emphasizes her message about the scope of women’s capacity to remedy a number of problems inside and outside of the home.
JESSICA ALIAGA-LAVRIJSEN, “‘To Love Beyond Breath, Beyond Reason’: A. L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad”
ABSTRACT: A.L. Kennedy is another Scottish writer who has dealt with trauma in her writing. Her novel So I Am Glad (1995) focuses on the trauma of Jennifer Wilson, who had been sexually abused as a child by her parents—who died very soon, leaving her orphan. However, the novel shows that the character can re-establish her commitment to the world through the love and care she gives to an amnesiac stranger who knocks at her door, Martin, who claims to be the writer and duellist Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac. Regardless of the paradoxical consequences of the fantastic encounter with such an extraordinary person, the fact is that this unusual and fantastic love-experience allows Jennifer to regain some hope, to overcome her own traumas and to re-establish a real connection with other individuals—a working-through in the ambiguous territory of fantasy that might be shared by readers too.
Book Reviews
DEANNA P. KORETSKY reviews Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century by Manu Samriti Chander
ANNETTE M. MAGID reviews Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity by Kathleen Riley, Alastair J. L. Blanshard, and Iarla Manny, eds.

01/03/2019

Happy New Year from PLL! If you are at the MLA Convention in Chicago, please visit us tomorrow, January 4th, at the Chat with an Editor Event (10-11, Columbus EF, the Hyatt) or attend the Future of Scholarly Journals panel (12-1:15, Plaza Ballroom A, the Hyatt).

12/04/2018

Happy Holidays from PLL! At the upcoming MLA Convention in Chicago, the Editor of PLL will participate in a Chat with an Editor, sponsored by the Council of the Editors of Learned Journals. Meet us on Friday, January 4th, 10-11 a.m. in the Columbus EF room at the Hyatt.