Call for Papers:
Computers and Composition Special Issues
“Designing | Writing”
Jonathan Alexander and Julia Reinhard Lupton, guest editors
Benjamin’s prescient figure of the “author as producer” has given way to the “author as designer,” at once a wordsmith, a typesetter, and a marketer who is expected to demonstrate some fluency with fonts and layouts as well as branding and publishing platforms. We invite proposals for a special issue on the topic of “Designing | Writing.” The mediation of text through numerous contemporary digital platforms has sparked consideration among a range of scholars in English studies about the relationship between textuality and design. Scholars in multimedia studies and rhetoric and composition note how writing is often placed in robust relationships to images and other design elements in multimedia “texts,” as well as how text itself is frequently graphically altered for a variety of aesthetic and rhetorical effects. Theorists of literature note the many ways in which textual layouts might constitute ideological claims, arise out of ideological assumptions and values, or occupy a brand niche. Students of literary forms such as poetry trace the manipulation of textual forms as itself a powerful form of meaning making. We invite scholars from rhetoric and composition, visual studies, design history, and literary studies to consider the ways in which writing and design are entering into new relationships with each other in the age of blogging, Twitter, the graphic novel, indie publishing, brand communities, fan fiction, and DIY everything.
Guiding questions can include, but are hardly limited to, the following:
- How do issues of design, typography, and the reemergence of the visual field in textuality alter composing and reading practices?
- How has branding impacted writing, affected publishing, and itself become a new form of writing?
- What kinds of literacy and literary practices are favored or legitimized in the age of communicative capital?
- How are older aesthetics of reading and writing remediated in new textual and design forms–and vice versa?
- What are the effects of niche marketing and fandom on contemporary textual and multimedia production?
- What forms of multiple dissemination are being used by contemporary textual producers, and how do their affordances impact form and reception?
- How do design aesthetics of television, particularly the long-form and episodic narrative, affect forms of textual production?
Deadlines:
- 500-word proposals due January 15, 2013 (Note: you do not need to submit a proposal to submit a manuscript)
- Initial manuscripts due to the guest editors by June 1, 2013
- Initial decisions and feedback offered authors by September 1, 2013
- Invited revisions and final manuscripts due February 1, 2014
- Submission of complete manuscript to general editor Kris Blair by April 15, 2014
Please submit inquiries and submissions to Jonathan Alexander at
jfalexan@uci.edu .
Computers and Composition: An International Journal is devoted to exploring the use of computers in writing classes, writing programs, and writing research on the basis of sound theoretical and pedagogical decisions, as well as empirical evidence. Topics have included descriptions of computer-mediated writing and/or reading instruction; discussions of topics related to emerging trends and innovations in software development; explorations of controversial ethical, legal, or social issues related to the use of computers in writing and language programs; and to discussions of how computers affect form and content for written discourse, the processes by which this discourse is produced and consumed, or the impact such discourse has on academic and non-academic audiences.
CFP URL: http://computersandcomposition.candcblog.org/html/cfps.html