I am looking for papers to round out a collection of scholarly essays with the working title:

ART OBJECTS AND WOMEN’S WORDS: WOMEN’S EKPHRASTIC WRITING, 1750 TO THE PRESENT

A major university press has expressed serious interest in an edited collection of scholarly essays that explore how female authors produce verbal representations of visual representations. Publication is projected for late 2008.

All essays will be considered (see longer description of the topic, below); but in particular, I am still looking for strong essays on the following:

Historicizing ekphrastic trends
Queerness and ekphrastic writing
Ekphrastic texts engaging sculpture, photography, multimedia, performance and/or performance art
Ekphrastic texts by American authors
Ekphrasis as revision, translation, transformation, etc.
Ekphrastic writing and theorized pedagogical applications

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Language. Gaze. Space. Time. These concepts invariably come to mind in academic considerations of ekphrasis, as do difference, desire, otherness, mimesis, muteness, blindness, power, perception, narrative, fragment, (re)production, consumption, and commodity. Notably, these concepts are also inextricably linked to the gendered particularities of the historical moment(s) that produced the author/spectator, the represented subject and its ekphrastic mirror. Nevertheless, while literary critics of the past few decades have observed that ekphrasis engages various gendered dynamics, still, scholarship tends to focus solely upon texts (and the function of gender within texts) authored by men.

What might characterize ekphrastic texts by women? Ekphrasis that is feminist and/or queer? What considerations--formal, historical, material, phenomenological, and philosophical--would be involved in conceiving of such projects? For instance, if temporality and spatiality are both to be considered in relation to ekphrastic writing, what happens when we consider gendered spaces--or how the sex/gender system affects the signification of particular bodies, objects or iconographies in space, over time? What happens, as Judith Halberstam and Lee Edelman have each recently considered, when we eschew “reproductive futurism” and reflect upon the possibilities and implications of queer time? How are accounts of the varied desires and pleasures associated with verbal and visual arts inflected by positing a female reader/spectator? How are ekphrastic texts considered through the lenses of gender and sexuality different from other kinds of literary appropriations and revisions?

With these questions in mind, I seek essays on authors, texts (prose as well as poetry), and/or theories related to ekphrastic writing by American, English (including Commonwealth) and Anglophone women writers, 1750 to the present. Essays that take largely theoretical, interdisciplinary and/or cross-period approaches are welcome.

Please send completed papers of approximately 7000-9,000 words to ehnennjr@appstate.edu no later than May 15, 2007. Submissions should be made by email in Word format. Contributions should follow MLA style, with parenthetical in-text citation and endnotes rather than footnotes. General inquiries welcome in advance of the deadline.