Call for Abstracts

Textus issue 2/2025 – Literature

The Voices of Water: Intermedial and Multimodal Blue Eco-Stories

 

Guest co-editors:

Gilberta Golinelli (Bologna University)

Maddalena Pennacchia (Roma Tre University)

Niklas Salmose (Linnaeus University, Vaxjio, Sweden – Center of Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, Sweden)

Copy Editor: Gaia Amrita Whitright (Roma Tre University)

 

What does water tell us of its story? How many stories are there in the voices of water? And how can we learn to listen to its many languages and eventually ‘speak’ them? There have been in the past artists and writers who have tried to listen to the voices of the rain, the sea, rivers and lakes. But was it really the voices of water they were listening to? Or was it just their own? And how did they transform it into a communicative object that could be shared by other fellow beings. “The nymphs are departed” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922) with a nostalgic take on the polluted Thames, as if centuries, and not just one, had passed from Wordsworth’s sublime exaltation of “the roar of waters, torrents, streams / Innumerable, roaring with one voice’ (Prelude, 1805). And that was before any discussion concerning climate changes and unprecedented droughts, before we knew of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, before the Dutch Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Paul Crutzen, gave a name and a visibility to the concept of Anthropocene (2000), before we ever heard the word Solastalgia (G. Albrecht, 2005), before the sustainable development goals were even conceived. Is there a possible genealogy of old and multifaceted blue eco-stories? And if it exists, does it contain values and perspectives that can be worthy of transformation and reintegration into today’ and tomorrow’s society? What of writers who in their literary works try to listen to the voices of water today? How do they interact, if they do, with science reports and evidences? What multimodal and intermedial strategies do they explore to host and welcome the voices of water and their own? Can their work facilitate the process of societal changes so necessary to the survival of future generations? Some, like Carla Benedetti (2022), think so. With the help of a powerful leverage: empathy. This volume invites papers dealing with old and new eco-stories of water, how they are fashioned and communicated multimodally and intermedially, and what they can do for us.

 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

· Textual, figurative, and multimodal representations of old and new eco-stories of water and their intermedial relation.

· Nostalgia, pastoral and environmental discourses: between fiction and scientific knowledge.

· Literary critical approaches and ocean/blue cultural studies.

· Gender, genre(s) and genealogies of blue storytelling.

· Empathy, social impact and transformative power of blue-eco-stories.

· Issues of gender, nature, and aquatic environment.

Social changes and changing constructions of aquatic environment.

· The rhetoric of water: questioning and re-fashioning aquatic environments

 

Keywords: blue ecocriticism, water, anthropocene, solastalgia, climate changes, resilience, transformation, humanities and science relation, empathy, intermediality, multimodality, language ecology (with specific reference to the aquatic environment), fiction and literary texts.

 

References:

Albrecht, Glenn, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2019

Benedetti, Carla, La letteratura ci salverà dall’estinzione, Torino, Einaudi, 2021

Bruhn Jørgen, Schirrmacher Beate, Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, New York, Routledge, 2022.

Bruhn, Jørgen and Niklas Salmose, Intermedial Ecocriticism, Lanham, Lexington Books 2023

Dobbin, Sidney I., Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative, New York, Routledge, 2021

Ellestrom, Lars, Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, Palgrave, 2010

Hogan Colm, Patrick et al (eds), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotions, Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2022.

Salmose, Niklas (ed.), Contemporary Nostalgia, special issue of Humanities, 2019 [available at https://www.mdpi.com/books/reprint/1568-contemporary-nostalgia]

Submission of abstracts and timeline

Please send abstracts to: gilberta.golinelli2@unibo.it, maddalena.pennacchia@uniroma3.it and niklas.salmose@lnu.se

 

Timeline

Deadline for abstracts submission (400 words plus references): 15 September 2024. Please put as subject line “Textus Literature Issue 2/2025 – abstract submission”

Notification to authors: 30 September 2024

Deadline for submission of first draft of article (maximum 7500 words including references): 31 December 2024

Request for revisions following peer review: 15 February 2025

Deadline for final version of article: 15 April 2025