The Underground
The Spring 2008 issue of Working Papers will be devoted to the underground: a topos that operates both below the Earth's surface and on the margins of public consciousness. With such diverse associations as the London subway and graphic novels, the underground functions as a potential intersection of location, ideology, and art. We encourage graduate students to consider the implications of the subterranean in cultural production. Within a narrative context, the underground can be the site of a physical or allegorical journey, as in Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth or Dante's Inferno. The term also carries an aesthetic dimension associated with experimentation and the avant garde. Moreover, it is historically synonymous with subversive political struggle, as in Resistance publishing during World War II. We invite graduate students from all universities and disciplines to submit articles that examine the underground and out-of-sight in French, Francophone, Spanish, Latin American, Portuguese, and Italian literature, film, art, and popular culture from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Deadline for submission is November 15th. Guidelines for submissions can be found on the Working Papers website. We welcome papers in English and in any of the Romance languages. We also invite submissions of digital art and multimedia representations that address this topic.