Last-minute call for papers

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There's a conference on the fantastic in the arts coming up that I just found out today has extended their paper deadline, if anyone's interested. Deadline is tomorrow, so you'll want to contact the coordinator right away if you're interested. It's not just children's and YA; there are about seven different tracks including fantastic literature in English, the fantastic in film and media, etc. It sounds more academic than publishing-related, but it still sounds fascinating.

I gave them the info on my paper on George MacDonald (the Princess books), and they snapped it up. There's someone else doing a paper on MacDonald and she said it would be great to juxtapose them against each other. So it looks like I'm going! (So it doesn't necessarily have to be on blurring the boundaries.) This is the organization that publishes the academic journal The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Never looked at it, but it sounds interesting.

http://www.iafa.org/

26th Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts Children's and YA Literature Division

Blurring the Boundaries: Transrealism and Other Movements
March 16-20, 2005
Wyndham Fort Lauderdale Airport Hotel

The focus of ICFA-26 is on the the breaking and blurring of the boundaries between between reality and illusion, between the 'real'world and the possible worlds of the imagination.

Of special interest in Children's and YA fantastic  literature are "metatexts", books where books are part of the story, as in the works of Garth Nix, Cornelia Funke, Michael Ende. Other authors of interest include Phillip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Joan Aiken, Madeleine L'Engle, and any author who uses elements of the fantastic, including science fiction and horror, to tell stories for children and young adults.

As always, we also welcome proposals for individual papers and for academic sessions and panels on any aspect of the fantastic in any media.

The updated deadline for submissions is November 30, 2004. Please contact the Division Head, Mary Harris Russell, at [email protected].

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From the JFA website:

JFA, now in its 13th. year of publication, is an interdisciplinary quarterly devoted to the study of the fantastic in Literature, Art, Drama, Film and Popular Media. It is published by the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University, where production offices are located. Articles are fully refereed and are indexed in the MLA Bibliography. Like the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, from which it was generated, it welcomes papers on all aspects of the fantastic in English, American, French, Spanish, German and other national literatures, as well as interdisciplinary approaches including music, philosophy, sociology, psychology, political science, and religion. All papers are in English. JFA is currently publishing Volume 13.

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And selected contents of the latest issue:

Contents

Articles
Introduction: Goblins
W.A. Senior
 
Paradigms of Colonization: Exploring Themes of Imperialism in Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana
Diana Pharaoh Francis
 
Internal Allusions and Recurring Mysteries in Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation Metaseries
Donald Palumbo
 
The Master and Margarita: A Fantasy of Redemption
Jonathan Ludwig  
 
Toward a Taxonomy of Fantasy
Farah Mendlesohn  
 
Reviews

Parrinder, Patrick, ed. Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia.
Reviewed by Brooks Landon
 
Haber, Karen, ed. Meditations on Middle-earth.
Reviewed by Daniel Timmons
 
Renzi, Thomas C. Jules Verne on Film: A Filmography of the Cinematic Adaptations of his Works, 1902 through 1997.
Reviewed by Tim Sullivan
 
Soister, John T. Of Gods and Monsters: A Critical Guide to Universal Studios' Science Fiction, Horror and Mystery Films, 1929-1939.
Reviewed by Sybil Cummings

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I'm gonna be pedantic here, but whenever someone refers to the "fantastic" in speculative fiction I always feel like they're using it wrong. But that's mostly because I've read Barthes and not everyone has. I find it a very useful distinction when we don't we don't need another synonym for "supernatural" and "magical."

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I think they're calling it that because of the name of the sponsoring organization. I actually know nothing about them, so they could be being pedantic, for all I know. It just sounded like it could be interesting, in an academic, stuffy sort of way.