*CFP* “DOUBLES, DUALITY, DOPPELGÄNGERS”, SPRING AND FALL 2020 ISSUE, THE MIDWEST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION JOURNAL

Members of the MMLA are invited and encouraged to submit articles to the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association in English, Spanish, French, and German.  Please note that the JMMLA no longer accepts submissions on open topics: each Spring issue will be a single-topic special issue; each Fall issue will be devoted to papers building on the conference theme from the previous year. The current call for papers is listed below.

Please read the submission guidelines for additional information. 

Spring 2020 - Life in the Middle

For this issue, we’re drawing on the organization’s midwestern roots to think about living, working, teaching, and doing scholarship “in the middle,” including (but not limited to) the American Midwest. We invite essay submissions for this general issue that consider what it means to occupy, exist, move, or migrate through middle spaces, and which contemplate themes of intersectionality playing out broadly across the realms of art, activism, politics, institutions, and cultures. While we are inspired by the middle spaces, or “flyover country,” that form our institutional home, we actively seek to build upon the connections linking interior or liminal spaces, and their populations, across on a broad, global scale.

Submissions are due January 31, 2020 to mmla@luc.edu.

Fall 2020 - Doubles, Duality, Doppelgängers

From the invention of writing to the society of simulation, doubles have been present in literatures and cultures throughout the ages. Whether in the form of alter egos, twins, doppelgängers, reflections, or look-alikes, doubles fascinate – in everyday life and culture as well as in literature.  As Pirandello confirmed in One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, there are as many versions of one single person as there are others’ eyes looking on, perceiving, reflecting and judging. Individual and social worlds are comprised of a myriad of doubles. This special issue seeks to engage how these themes are expressed throughout literature and across cultures.

Topics could include, but are by no means limited to: 

• Doubles, doppelgängers, twins, mirror images, reflections in world literature(s);
• Identity, transcultural identity, transgender identity, psychology studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, gender studies;
• Duality in pedagogy, doubles in the classroom (the professor’s persona, teaching Gothic and other generic doubles and duplicities, the student-teacher relationship/dichotomy, teaching with various methods, digital teaching, hybrid and on-line teaching vs face-to-face);
• Double-meanings (linguistics, semantics, multiple interpretations);
• Duality of texts and parataxis
• Double entendre: humor, jokes, dark humor, all aspects of laughter (laughter as a social construct, laughter as a cultural construct);
• Literal/metaphorical; Transnational/ global/local
• Translations and translators (translating double meaning, cross-cultural interpretation, choosing the right word, translating the word vs translating the idea);
• Reproductions, mass productions, copies, reproducing the written word (printing press, mimeograph, electric pen, consumerism, capitalism).

Submissions due June 1, 2020 to mmla@luc.edu.