Since its publication in 2014, Canadian author Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven has attracted enthusiastic critical responses. This post-apocalyptic novel won an Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction in 2015 and was shortlisted for many other awards, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. In this OLH Special Collection, we seek to explore Station Eleven’s position within twenty-first-century writing.

Station Eleven intersects with various debates in contemporary literary studies, opening up questions about genre, politics, national literary traditions, literary form and intermediality, popular culture and prize culture. The novel partakes in what James Berger describes as the “pervasive post-apocalyptic sensibility in recent American culture”. This sensibility is no longer the sole province of science fiction, as canonical literary authors like Cormac McCarthy and Jim Crace have written novels imagining post-catastrophic futures. Indeed Veronica Hollinger speaks of the “’disappearance’ of science fiction as a separate generic enterprise” in the contemporary and Mandel herself, Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction notwithstanding, identifies her novel as literary fiction rather than science fiction. How might Station Eleven help us to frame issues of genre in twenty-first-century writing, in particular the debate between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction”, and how are these issues entangled with the production of cultural capital through literary prizes? Biblical apocalyptic narratives, as Lois Parkinson Zamora underlines, “developed in response to political and moral crises”. To what do we owe the contemporary surge of post-apocalyptic narratives and is Station Eleven radical or conservative in the way it imagines a hopeful future after global capitalism? The post-apocalyptic world of Station Eleven is post-national.

Similarly, the reception and publication history of the novel raises questions about the importance and legitimacy of national literary traditions and awards in the age of transnationalism. Station Eleven was written by a Canadian, published first in America and was nominated for and won awards aimed at American, Canadian, and Women’s Fiction. So is the novel American Literature? Canadian Literature? A new kind of Trans- or even Post-National fiction? And if it is post-national, does the text feature “the eclecticism and borderlessness in language and structure” that Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz claims is “typical of the best postnational fiction”? Finally, the narrative’s apocalyptic erasure of borders leads us to interrogate artistic and cultural borders. Station Eleven is an intermedia text that places comics and Star Trek alongside Sartre and Shakespeare. This concern with intermediality is reflected in the novel’s materiality, as physical copies of the Dr Eleven comic depicted in the text were included in some American editions. How does the materiality of a text like Station Eleven influence our reading of its intermediality? Does the critical acceptance of Station Eleven mean that, as Wolfgang Hallet predicted, works featuring “the co-presence of different media in one work of art” now “constitute a literary or aesthetic genre of their own”? And, finally, what are the implications of the apocalyptic collapse of the “popular” and “elite” culture binary?

Topics for submission may include, but are not limited to, Station Eleven and:

• contemporary literature
• the literary fiction/genre fiction debate
• the apocalyptic imagination
• the utopian and dystopian tradition
• literary prize culture
• national literary traditions
• the contemporary publishing industry
• women’s writing
• popular culture
• politics
• the materiality of its different editions

Research articles should be approximately 8000 words in length, including references and a short bibliography. Submissions should comprise of:

• Abstract (250 words)
• Full-length article (8,000 words)
• Author information (short biographical statement of 200 words)

The deadline for submission is 30th April 2017.

The special collection, edited by Dr Diletta De Cristofaro (Harlaxton College) and Dr Daniel King (University of Derby), is to be published in the Open Library of Humanities megajournal (ISSN 2056-6700). The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded open access publisher with a strong emphasis on quality peer review and a prestigious academic steering board. Unlike some open-access publications, the OLH has no author-facing charges and is instead financially supported by an international consortium of libraries. Submissions should be made online at: https://submit.openlibhums.org/ in accordance with the author guidelines and clearly marking the entry as [“STATION ELEVEN AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY WRITING” SPECIAL COLLECTION]. Submissions will then undergo a double-blind peer-review process. Authors will be notified of the outcome as soon as reports are received.

To learn more about the Open Library of Humanities please visit: https://www.openlibhums.org/.

The Eccles Centre for American Studies, The British Library, London

Monday 16 January 2017

Cold War Geographies

Keynote Speaker: Professor Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics, Royal Holloway

The British Library’s next major exhibition will focus on ‘Maps and the Twentieth Century.’ The Cold War had a seismic impact on global geographies during the second half of the twentieth century. Not only did it physically impact lands from the barren Nevada desert to the jungles of South East Asia, but the ideological conflict of the Cold War also had a significant impact on national borders, global cities and imagined geographies. The legacy of the Cold war on global geographies has had a profound effect upon the way in which nations now think about their place in the world and their relationships with each other. From an American point of view, this has had a particular influence on how the U.S. is viewed and engaged with on an international level.

This one-day symposium seeks to explore and assess how the Cold War changed boundaries, restructured terrain and redefined concepts of space and place. In doing so it seeks to prompt discussion and assessment of the geopolitical impact this had, particularly on the United States.

This is an interdisciplinary symposium, both panel and paper proposals are welcomed from across the disciplines, including, but not limited to, geography, politics, history, visual culture and American Studies. Papers which make use of the Library’s collections are particularly encouraged.

Possible topics could include:

    The politics of space and place

    Geographical imaginaries

    Legacies of Cold War conflict

    Dark geographies and covert spaces

    The evolution of Cold War cities

    Cold War cartographies

    Borders and borderlands

    Changing global narratives

    Aesthetic and cultural responses to contested geographies

    The impact and legacy of nuclear testing

    Issues of decolonisation and western-centrism

    Technologies of mapping and surveillance

Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent to Mark Eastwood (mark.eastwood@bl.uk) by the deadline of midnight on Sunday 27th November 2016. All submissions should include the name of the presenter, their institution, email address, a short profile, and the title of the proposed presentation. Proposals from PGs and ECRs are warmly welcomed.

Symposium registration will open in October 2016.

Heidelberg Center for American Studies

14th Annual Spring Academy Conference

Heidelberg, Germany, March 20-24, 2017

The 14th annual Spring Academy on American History, Culture and Politics will be held from March 20-24, 2017. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one week conference that provides twenty international PhD students with the opportunity to present and discuss their PhD projects.

Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Possible topics for discussion are American literature and culture, U.S. history, domestic and foreign policy, geography, religion, and musicology as well as economic and sociological issues, and aspects of jurisprudence. Race, class, and gender are frequently employed analytical categories.

Participants are requested to prepare a twenty-minute presentation of their research projects. Each presentation is followed by a forty-minute discussion session. Proposals should include a preliminary title and run no more than 300 words. These will be arranged into ten panel groups.

Accommodation will be provided by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies

Application deadline: 15 November 2016

Please use our online application system: www.hca-springacademy.de

More information: www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de

For futher questions: springacademy@hca.uni-heidelberg.de