Merde ! Excremental Poetics, Politics, and Practices in French and Francophone Literatures and Cultures

We are seeking additional contributions to complement those already submitted for an edited volume entitled Merde ! Excremental Poetics, Politics, and Practices in French and Francophone Literatures and Cultures, in which Brill has expressed initial interest.

We are especially interested in chapters that focus on aspects of the literature, philosophy, visual arts and/or political cultures of a period or periods between the Middle Ages and the 19th century (inclusive), but we will also consider excellent proposals focusing on 20th- and 21st-century topics.

Our project is structured by three theoretical frameworks of inquiry focusing on:

1) the value, or rather the anti-value of excrement, conceived as a transgressive element that is nevertheless (re)incorporated into aesthetic, cultural and political practices and made to participate in the production of both value and meaning;

2) the allegorical functions of digestion and excrement as models of textual creation and dissemination, intertextuality, and canon formation, as well as of various psychological, social and political processes;

3) the materiality, and therefore the irreducible literality of excrement, which constantly exceeds the textual constraints that keep it in place, testing the limits of representational systems and emphasizing the aesthetically and ideologically momentous question of human corporality and embodiment.

We are thus especially interested in proposals that attend to the coincidence of value and worthlessness, negation and construction, and literality and allegory in French and Francophone cultures’ representations of meaning-making merde. 

Contributions may be written in either English or French.

Finished chapters will be due August 1, 2022.

Please send a detailed abstract and a short bio-bibliography to both

Bruno Penteado (bpentead@ttu.edu) and Lucas Wood (lucas.wood@ttu.edu) before March 15, 2022.