We would be very grateful if you forwarded this on to interested parties.

FORUM, Issue 14: Sacred and Sacrilegious
http://www.forumjournal.org/site/cfp

For the Spring 2012 issue of Forum, we invite submissons which explore representations of the sacred and sacrilegious in literature, art and film. Deriving from the Latin verb sacrare, to consecrate, the word sacred initially and inevitably summons thoughts of gods and religions, worship and veneration. One of its antonyms, sacrilegious, etymologically originated from sacrare and the verb legere, to gather, to steal, oftentimes spawns images of violence and violation, heresy and blasphemy. However, the sacred and sacrilegious does not merely apply to theological matters but can be delved into from a literary, cultural and artistic perspective.

Was an unburied corpse sacrilegious or was Antigone's wish to bury her brother profane?

Was Milton?s Paradise Lost an impious outbreak against Catholicism or a political and philosophical commentary?

Was Roberto Rossellini's film segment Il Miracolo (1948), banned in 1951 in New York, anti-catholic and blashpemous because he was an atheist or was it a film permeated with spiritual symbolism?

Since the 19th century in particular, the sacred was central to a revival in so-called 'primitive' concerns; but modern materialist and psychoanalytic theories of taboo, sacrifice, and magic revealed in the sacred the traces of social construction and psychological force otherwise obscured by centuries of tradition. A wealth of modernist literature and art conceived society and the self, rather than the supernatural or divine, as the sites of the distinction between the sacred and sacrilegious. Moreover, contemporary philosophy and theory revived the ambivalence in much of the language of the sacred in literature, philosophy, and politics - such as Julia Kristeva's conception of the sacred as either potentially pure or abject.

Nowadays sacred has even come to mean merely something that we honour, 'our precious', and sacrilegious is often tantamount to unorthodox or heterodox. In the 20th and 21st centuries, what notions of the sacred still capture us with a sense of awe; what forms of sacrilege, if any, do we still find repellent? Does the transition from the sacred to the sacrilegious (or vice versa) hold real meaning or is it a mere formality of self-appointed practitioners? Do literature, art and film only stand as adamant witnesses of the alteration in the meaning and significance of these two words throughout history, or do they have an active role in changing our understanding of the sacred and sacrilegious?

We are seeking submissions that consider the topic of SACRED AND SACRILEGIOUS pertaining to concepts which include, but are not limited to:

-The sacred and the blasphemous in Roman and Greek mythology and literature

-Transition from the sacred to the sacrilegious

-Sacred character of Art and Art as sacrilege

-Sacrilege as the misuse of the sacred

-Material constructions and materialist conceptions of the sacred and sacrilege

-Psychology of the sacred and sacrilegious

-Primitive versus modern sacred and sacrilege

-The sanctity/desecration of nature and its creatures

-Sacred settings/defilement and vandalism of spaces

-Nihilism and secularism

-Sacred body, sacrilegious thoughts

Papers must be of between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length, formatted according to MLA guidelines. Please email your paper, a short abstract and your academic CV in separate, clearly labelled .DOC files to :editors@forumjournal.org by Sunday the 26th of February 2012. All eligible articles will be peer reviewed prior to publication. Only one submission per author per issue is permissible.