Deadline: 1st October 2023 (abstracts) and 29th February 2024 (articles),
Contact: Sophie Aymes, Senior Lecturer, Université de Bourgogne (France)
Email: sophie.aymes@u-bourgogne.fr
In December 2024, the bilingual online journal Interfaces will issue a volume on the relation between the book, its materials and the lifeforms of the non-human world. It welcomes papers (in English or in French) showcasing the book as ecomedia that can be explored from the perspective of ecocritical intermediality (Bruhn). The theme of this volume will also reflect the environmental and ecocritical turn in art history (Anderson et al.; Patrizio), and it may prompt theoretical forays into media archaeology (Huhtamo and Parikka). The papers can cover a wide variety of sources, such as single editions or book series, publishers’ and suppliers’ archives, librarian’s catalogues and book artists’ writings. Book historians and print scholars, specialists of ecocriticism and environmental history, plant studies and animal studies, of craft and material culture, word-and-image studies and literature, are invited to submit papers on the following topics of discussion:
– Ambivalence of the book as archive of the living world
Bibliophily entails a sensual enjoyment of the material properties of the book and its illustrations. They not only provide pleasure for the eye but also provoke an interplay of all the senses (Rubery and Price). As such the book offers a mediated enjoyment of the living world, especially when the texts and images represent lifeforms whose shapes and colour enliven its pages. However bibliophily as biophilia comes at a cost. As archive of the living world, the book is the repository of collected life forms (Garascia) – some of which may now be extinct – and has been shaped by the use of animal, vegetal and mineral resources. Similarly, the page of print is a space of cultivation that may be compared to such practices as gardening, but it is also the end product of systems of natural exploitation.
– Affordances, textuality and physicality
Authors are also invited to contribute papers on the materials used in the making of print and digital books as well as book illustration (such as vegetal fibers, animal skin and metal). They may look at how material affordances shape the making and meaning of books in print and digital cultures (Anderson et al.; Piquette and Whitehouse; Stoicheff), and at the interplay of physicality and textuality in their crafting and reception. The papers can deal with the motivated choices of certain types of materials or the way these shape the reading experience and relate to iconography and textual imagery. They may also steer away from an anthropocentric perspective by engaging with material ecocritical analyses (Iovino and Opperman), and discuss the book as assemblage and interface between the human and the non-human worlds (Calhoun; Elvey; Garascia).
– Networks and ecosystems
The papers may rework the communications circuit initially defined by Robert Darnton but never revised from an ecocritical perspective. The book as an artefact and as a site of knowledge, preservation and/or exploitation is related to agents such as collectors, suppliers, traders, and translators (Belle and Hosington), but also animals, plants and minerals. Books follow routes of transmission and circulation construed as “entangled itineraries” (Smith) and they are enmeshed in ecosystems (Garascia) since they interface between the human and non-human worlds. Tapping into the perspectives opened by global and transnational history (Boehmer et al.; Fraser and Hammond; Joyeux-Prunel; Kaufmann et al.), the papers may trace the itineraries of the book and disentwine interconnected networks, such as supply chains, biological and ecosystemic disseminations of species of plants and animals, intertexts, and editorial / publishing strategies. Therefore the book will not only be analysed as a bound artefact but as “unfinished” (Gillespie and Lynch).
Deadlines for submission: please send an abstract (500 words, in English or in French) and a biobibliographical note to sophie.aymes@u-bourgogne.fr before 1st October 2023.
If accepted, the completed papers will have to be submitted by 29th February 2024.
All submitted articles should follow the journal’s guidelines and stylesheet: https://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/530 and they will be double-blind peer reviewed.
The final version of the accepted papers will have to be delivered by 1st September 2024.
Works Cited
Anderson, Christy, Anne Dunlop and Pamela H. Smith (eds.). The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, 1250-1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.
Belle, Marie-Alice and Brenda M. Hosington. “Translation, history and print: A model for the study of printed translations in early modern Britain”. Translation Studies 10:1 (September 2016): 1-20.
Boehmer, Elleke, Rouven Kunstmann, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay and Asha Rogers (eds.). The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Bruhn, Jørgen. “Towards an Intermedial Ecocriticism”. Beyond Media Borders, Vol. 2. Ed. Lars Elleström. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 117-148. URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-49683-8_5
Calhoun, Joshua. The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Darnton, Robert. “‘What is the History of Books?’ Revisited”. Modern Intellectual History 4:3 (2007): 495-508.
Elvey, Anne. “The Matter of Text: A Material Intertextuality and Ecocritical Engagement with the Bible”. Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches. Ed. Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. 181-193.
Fraser, Robert and Mary Hammond (eds.). Books without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Garascia, Ann. “Littoral books: archiving oceanic memory through pressed and printed plants”. European Journal of English Studies 26:1 (January 2022): 14-41.
Gillespie, Alexandra and Deidre Lynch (eds.). The Unfinished Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Huhtamo, Erkki and Jussi Parikka (eds.). Media Archæology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity”. Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 3:1 (March 2012). URL: https://ecozona.eu/article/view/452
Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice. “ARTL@S: A Spatial and Trans-national Art History. Origins and Positions of a Research Program”. Artl@s Bulletin 1:1 (2012). URL: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol1/iss1/1/
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel. “Introduction: Reintroducing Circulations: Historiography and the Project of Global Art History”. Circulations in the Global History of Art. Ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 1-22.
Oppermann, Serpil. “How the Material World Communicates: Insights from Material Ecocriticism”. Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication. Ed. Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Vidya Sarveswaran. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2019. 108-117.
Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Patrizio, Andrew. The Ecological Eye: Assembling an Ecocritical Art History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
Piquette, Kathryn E. and Ruth D. Whitehouse (eds.). Writing as Material Practice: Substance, Surface and Medium. London: Ubiquity Press, 2013.
Rubery, Matthew and Leah Price (eds.). Further Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Smith, Pamela H. “Nodes of Convergence, Material Complexes, and Entangled Itineraries”. Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia. Ed. Pamela H. Smith. Pittsburgh (Pa.): University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. 5-24.
Stoicheff, Peter. “Materials and Meaning”. The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book. Ed. Leslie Howsam. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 73-89.
Posted on September 5, 2023
