CALL FOR PAPERS - 2024

2024-01-12

CALL FOR PAPERS / eSamizdat 2024 (XVII)

Timeline (valid for all sections)

Deadline paper: July 20^th 2024

Publication: December 2024

Authors are invited to express their interest in contributing to this issue by sending a working title of their paper to esamizdat@esamizdat.it by March 20^th. Please note that the final draft of the contribution should include: an abstract (100-150 words ca.), a brief bio of the author (100-150 words ca.) and a list of keywords (up to 5), all in English.

eSamizdat accepts papers in Italian, English and all Slavic languages.

More info and details about the editorial guidelines: www.esamizdat.it

I. Monographic Section

HISTORY OF THE SOVIET AND THE FORMER EASTERN BLOC LITERARY INSTITUTIONS IN THE 20^TH CENTURY

edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Alessandro Farsetti

We would like to invite contributors for the thematic cluster dedicated to the history of the Soviet and the former Eastern Bloc literary institutions in the 20^th century.

With the turn of Slavic studies towards social history in the 1980s, new, previously unnoticed or underestimated, but nevertheless determining practices of the functioning of literary institutions, were rediscovered. The return to the sociology of literature today is caused not only by intradisciplinary trends, but also by the current politicisation of society, which influences the academy. The aim of this project is to problematize the key practices of literary production, which would allow us to take a new approach to historical and literary material, see it in a new context, and conceptualise it in the light of new approaches and methodological keys. Apart from some recent studies, we still know little about the history of literary institutions – there are still no histories of creative unions, thick literary journals, publishing houses, censorship, book distribution, and other key literary institutions in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Even today many scholars in Slavic studies tend to neglect how important these aspects are in our understanding literature and literary products: in fact, the institutional history of literature is a history that is centred not on texts and authors, but on the mechanisms of cultural and literary production that determine – through the interaction of producers with customers, consumers, the authorities, and each other – the specifics of this production itself: aesthetic features, the rise and fall of genres, a repertoire of styles, and language modes. It should also be remembered that in the field of literature there are forces at work not only inside but also outside institutions: they work within their boundaries, which helps to see a lot not only in the mechanisms of their functioning, but, more importantly, in their very nature. Thus, in the absence of a rule of law (which was relevant both for the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 20^th century), all spheres of life – including literature – go through shadow institutionalisation when only shells remain of institutions, and they themselves perform completely different functions than they declared. Real functions remain unspoken, unformalized, and unregulated. They are carried out based on “unwritten norms”, “rules of the game”, “understanding”, “codes”, etc. Through institutions or outside of them, strategies of creative and social behaviour, the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not, aesthetic concepts, relations with censorship and bureaucratic authorities, group identities, financial relations (forms of literary earnings), relations within literary hierarchies, (non)participation in political rituals were built, and much more. In fact, these forms of institutional and extra-institutional organisation became a kind of form of self-organisation of culture within deformed public sphere.

Some of the topics we would like to cover in this cluster include:

mechanisms of institutionalisation (and shadow institutionalisation) of literary life in Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe;
institutional dynamics under the communist rule in post-revolutionary era, in Stalin’s time, in the period of normalisation both in the USSR and the Eastern Europe;
comparative studies of literary institutions in these countries (highlighting what was transplanted from the Soviet system and what was influenced by the local situation in any single country;
institutional transformations of the literary field in post-Soviet era both in Russian and former Soviet bloc countries;
theoretical applications and approaches to literary institutions from the point of view of sociology of literature.

Papers will be selected primarily in order to cover different periods of time that span from 1920s to 1980s and the various national contexts in the Soviet and Eastern European areas.

Bibliography:

Any, The Soviet Writers’ Union and its Leaders: Identity and Authority under Stalin, Evanston 2020.
Babichenko (ed. by), Literaturnyi front: 1932-1946, Moskva 1995.
Babichenko (ed. by), “Schast’e” literatury: Gosudarstvo i pisateli, 1925-1938, Moskva 1997.
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford 1992.
Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture From Revolution To Cold War, Princeton 2001.
Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce, Cambridge 2000.
Clark – E. Dobrenko (ed. by), Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953, New Haven 2007.
Crane, The Production of Culture, Newbury Park 1992.
David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941, New York 2012.
Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, Stanford 1997.
Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture, Stanford 2001.
Dobrenko – G. Tihanov (ed. by), A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond, Pittsburgh 2011.
Dobrenko – N. Skradol (ed. by), Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses, London 2018.
Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia, Ithaca 1992.
Goriaeva, (ed. by), Mezhdu molotom i nakoval’nei: Soiuz sovetskikh pisatelei SSSR, 1925-1941, Moskva 2011.
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge 1989.
Hesmondhalgh, The Culture Industries, London 2002.
Luhmann, Art as Social System, Stanford 2000.
Powell – P. DiMaggio, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, Chicago 1991.
Scott, Institutions and Organizations: Ideas and Interests, Los Angeles 2008.
Ray – A. Sayer (ed. by), Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn, London 1999.
Thornton et al., The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process, Oxford 2012.

II. Miscellany

This section is open to free proposals.

III. Translations

INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN CINEMA AND VISUAL ARTS

edited by Martina Morabito

The Translations section of eSamizdat XVII (2024) will be dedicated to film studies offering a comparative approach, with a particular focus on the dialogue between cinema and the visual arts. Contributions exploring affinities, influences, and intersections between cinematic language and visual artistic expressions are welcomed. Building upon the influential studies by Eisenstein regarding the cinematic potential qualities in the works of artists such as El Greco and Serov, we aim to present in Italian translation subsequent investigations in this direction. This includes themes such as photomontage, cinema as a museum, the cinematic reuse of folkloric patterns, panoramic views, urban architectures, and animation.

The section accepts translations from all Slavic languages; those interested are invited to contact the editorial team for further instructions and materials.