[ecrea] CFP - journal issue on 'Performing Narratives across Media'

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*/TEXTUS/**n.2* (*2018)*

*Culture*

*/Performing Narrative across Media /*

*Editors: Márta MINIER *(University of South Wales) and*C. Maria 
LAUDANDO *(University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’)

**

*Copy editor:**Jeanette D’ARCY* (University of South Wales)

Over the last decades, a growing interest in performance discourse �D 
with its emphasis on bodies, actions and events, that is, on human 
experience, practices and affections �D has emerged, programmatically 
trespassing theatre boundaries and extending itself to other 
disciplines, including cultural studies. This stress on praxis and 
transformation, indeed, may prove particularly fruitful in exploring the 
multi-layered and fluid constructedness of identity and culture in the 
contemporary digital environment. Any kind of creative work, once 
enhanced by the complex networks of contemporary media, is no longer to 
be intended as a given /product/, but as an ongoing ‘emergent’ /process/ 
at the intersection between porous media boundaries. If the ‘performance 
turn’ has played a relevant part in highlighting the interstitial, 
processual and translational dimension of any cultural production, it is 
especially the vertiginous diffusion of electronic media in the new 
millennium which has largely contributed to a renewed inter-disciplinary 
focus on the interactive, performative and affective aspects of all 
kinds of narrations.

Today narratives �D whether they are novels or hypertexts, art 
exhibitions or cultural events, videogames or political campaigns, 
travelogues or even company profiles �D are more and more frequently 
spread over multiple platforms and media, calling for a renewed and 
probably unprecedented interest in the ancient art of storytelling, both 
as an instinctive need of humankind, capable of infinite mutations and 
adaptations, and a ‘situated’ cultural and performative practice under 
the constant disruptive threat of medial dispersal.

As Salman Rushdie reminds us, “Man is the Storytelling Animal, and [...] 
in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood” (2010: 34), 
and even if today the very all-human capability of reading and narrating 
both the world and the self as a linear, coherent and connected sequence 
of events and memories is questioned, it is still possible to recognise 
the pervasive presence of a basic narrative drive which gives life to an 
endless almost obsessive proliferation of stories, albeit mostly 
fragmentary, chaotic and ever-changing. In the new participative 
transmedia environment, storytelling is on the move, rapidly 
‘travelling’ across all sorts of cultural fields and gaining an 
unparalleled affective and collective bearing, despite its ephemeral and 
tenuous ties, thanks to the re-creative and re-distributive processes 
allowed by the Internet and social media sharing.

Given this protean scenario, the present issue aims to contribute to the 
ongoing interdisciplinary debate on those relational, affective and 
performative aspects of narrative in contemporary culture that have been 
lately brought centre stage with a distinctive and tense prominence 
within the field of cultural studies. Proposals are invited on the 
peculiar ‘processual’, convergent character of new textualities, 
literacies, and subjectivities as they have emerged in the age of 
digital culture. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  * the multi-modal, performative and affective dimension of digital
    narrative;
  * the perception and narrative of the self between the threat of
    de-narration and the resurgence of a narrative drive in collective,
    ritualised enactments of memory;
  * narrativization of trauma as a possible therapeutic perspective
    and/or the risk of inflationary spectacular mediatisation;
  * the growth of intermedia or transmedia storytelling as a typical
    expression of the new convergent and participative culture;
  * the phenomenon of fanfiction as an open process of emotional
    immersion and narrative performance;
  * modalities and mutations of genre in a transmedia context;
  * configurations of authorship in transmedia textual clusters and
    processes of performing narratives;
  * the transformations of contemporary narrative and their contentious
    ‘entanglement’ with cultural memory and/as cultural capital;
  * the interplay between human and technological, public sphere and
    privacy.



    *Abstract submission deadline:by 20 May 2017*

    *Notification of acceptance: by 1 June 2017*

    *Preliminary articles to the editors: by 30 July 2017*

    *Revised peer-reviewed articles to the editors: by 20 February 2018*

    *Final versions from the editors to the publisher*: *by 30 April 2018*


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