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Call for Articles: “Blue Short Stories”

Special Issue of The Journal of the Short Story in English (No. 85, Autumn 2025)
Deadline for abstract submissions: 1 November 2024

Guest Editors

Bénédicte Meillon, Frédérique Spill

Presentation

Since the turn of the century, the stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be indissoluble from the threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of the ocean, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. As a matter of fact, we have come to realize that the future of our predominantly blue Earth and its myriad co-dwellers hinges in great part on the blueing of our minds. Following the recent “blue turn” in the humanities and ecocriticism, which seeks to remedy the rampant “ocean deficit disorder” diagnosed by Dan Brayton and to draw our attention beyond “green,” land-based issues to “blue” ones, the call for papers for this volume arises from the awareness that blue short stories deserve more attention that they have been getting. This special issue of the JSSE will consequently focus on blue short stories, i.e. short stories dealing with marine matters and, more largely, aquatic and terraqueous beings and places in ways that depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to explore short stories that help us venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge, and that may thus promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life.

Oceans and seas know no real boundaries. Reaching out in countless ways, oceans and seas connect with land, watersheds, rivers, underground water tables, and even with the sky, the moon, and the sun. Marine water fluctuates following atmospheric, gravitational, and temperature variation phenomena that rule the tides, the currents, the weather, and the cycles tying saltwater with fresh water, thus interweaving humans and other-than-human lifeforms in the great blue-green web of live. This special issue of the JSSE seeks to look specifically into short stories dealing with the complex, wonderful, but also awful ways in which marine matter and forms may be animate, agential, and entangled with our human activities, bodies, and discourses. Contributors are invited to tap into the blue currents of the earth that run all the way through our own veins, to consider how the permeability and fluidity, the pull and lability of bodies of water may trickle down into a blue poetics of the short story.

A specific focus on cross-species encounters and communication may help counter the alienation from our lives which marvelous marine beings and milieux suffer from—in part because they too often seem unfamiliar and strange, and in part because they are mostly inaccessible to us. Material approaches of humans as evolved from, made of, and dependent on salt water and beings could be confronted with mythical stories of sea worlds that have long shaped our perception, representations, and ways of life as land-dwelling and story-telling mammals. The study of short stories emanating from specific subcultures sharing myths, practices, and values revolving around the sea could potentially provide a grip on what might be called blue spiritualities. This may be of specific interest in the light of both the imaginative and the epiphanic dimensions of the short story genre, bringing us to ponder how the short story form may be of specific value when it comes to shifting paradigms and bringing about blue moments of truth. As a result, we will show great interest in papers demonstrating how certain short stories creatively challenge and reinvent our imaginaries and our narratives of becoming with the sea.

Papers might zoom in on the value of an ecopoiesis anchored in liminal places such as lagoons and coastal areas, which form ecotones and contact zones between water and land. Scholars may also potentially look at rivers and watersheds to reveal how those do flow into blue short stories, the poetics of which may be subtly tied to the sea indeed, thus already gesturing to a shift in paradigms, from “green” to “blue.” Finally, it could be of interest to look at stories anchored in places that are connected to the sea from a more diachronic perspective, i.e. places which used to be submerged in ancient times, which are thus possibly still marked by an ancient blue history, and thus encouraging a radically different perspective onto deserts, forests, plains, or any other place now perceived as antipodes to marine ecosystems.

It could be fruitful to explore the ways in which short stories accommodate the specificities of seascapes as underwater geographies, soundscapes, odorscapes, and feelscapes generating ways of perceiving, moving, and communicating that are properly outlandish and hence hard for humans to imagine. Participants could probe to what extent ecopoetic experiments with blue short stories are designed specifically to speak worlds about underwater ways of dwelling. Furthermore, scholars working in the field of indigenous studies and postcolonial literatures could help us understand the subtle ways in which Traditional Ecological Knowledges, storytelling, practices, and rituals may inform the writing of short stories. Finally, this special issue would greatly benefit from contributions shedding light on short stories that are permeated with scientific takes on wet matters and ocean life.

Practical Details

Proposals (400 to 500 words) should be sent to benedicte.meillon@univ-angers.fr and frederique.spill@gmail.com by Nov. 1st 2024, together with a short bio-bibliography. Completed papers will be due by March 1st, 2025 and should be between 45,000 and 48,000 signs. The style sheet and guidelines for authors are available on the JSSE website: https://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/jsse/234.

Recommended Bibliography

Alaimo, Stacy. “States of Suspension: Trans-Corporeality at Sea.” Material Ecocriticism. Eds. Heather Sullivan and Dana Phillips. Spec. issue of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (Summer 2012): 476-93. Print.

---. “Dispersing Disaster: The Deepwater Horizon, Ocean Conservation, and the Immateriality of Aliens.” Disasters, Environmentalism, and Knowledge. Eds. Sylvia Mayer and Christof Mauch. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, The Bavarian American Academy, 2012. 175-92. Print.

---. “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea.” Material Ecocriticism. Eds. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2014. 186-203. Print.

---. “The Anthropocene at Sea: Temporality, Paradox, Compression.” Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. Eds. Jon Christensen, Ursula K. Heise, Michelle Niemann. London: Routledge, 2017. 153-62. Print.

Amimoto Ingersoll, Karin. Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Print.

Brayton, Dan. Shakespeare’s Ocean. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012. Print.

Chen, Cecilia, Jeanie MacLeaod, and Astrid Neimanis, eds. Thinking with Water. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013. Print.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Lowell Duckert, Eds. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. Print.

Deloughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke UP, 2019. Print.

---. “The Oceanic Turn: Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene.” Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice. Eds. Adamson, Joni and Michael Davis. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 242-58. Print.

Dobrin, Sidney I. Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative. London: Routledge, 2021. Print.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Print.

Hessler, Stefanie, ed. Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018. Print.

Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Sea Water. Durham: Duke UP, 2020. Print.

Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Print.

Roorda, Eric, ed. The Ocean Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2021. Print.

Shewry, Theresa. Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. Print.

Singer, Christoph. Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Print.

Soren, Frank. A Poetic History of the Oceans: Literature and Maritime Modernity. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Print.

Wong, Rita and Dorothy Christian, eds. Downstream: Reimagining Water. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2017. Print.

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