Fragile Futures: Tipping Points, Literature, Theory (CfP, The English Academy Review)

Tipping Points researcher Marc Botha is guest editor of a new special issue of The English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies on fragility.

The English Academy Review proposes to investigate the relation between literature, fragility, and the future in a special issue on Fragile Futures. We invite essays of up to 5000 words which interrogate how literature, criticism and theory have or might be able to clarify historical fragilities and to confront the fragility of the future, to offer forms of regional or global resistance to crisis or catastrophe, and to foster resilience and hope with respect to the fragile future with which we are all confronted.

The characteristic fragility of human existence has always been marked by a deep ambivalence regarding the future. On the one hand, ceaseless crisis and catastrophe appear to justify a pervasive pessimism, while on the other, it is difficult not to marvel at the seemingly boundless human capacity for novelty, invention and change. Literature, in particular, has the unique capacity simultaneously to exemplify and critically examine the fragile co-existence of utopian and dystopian visions of the future. Indeed, the literary imagination has the ability to negotiate the multiple valences of the past, the contingencies of the present and alternate visions of the future.

Submissions should reach The English Academy Review by 31 MARCH 2014 and should be submitted electronically as a Word document as well as in hard copy to the following address:

English Academy Office
P.O. Box 124
Wits
2050
Johannesburg, South Africa

Please see the journal’s website at Taylor and Francis for further information on the preparation of manuscripts.