NEPCA Panels 2010

The following represent the proposed panels for this October's NEPCA conference in Boston. Abstracts and biographies will be posted once the program is official.

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area 2010

(Revised 6/13/10)

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend I: Children’s Culture

Presider: Michael A. Torregrossa (The Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages)

1. “War, Veterans, Disabilities, and How to Train Your Dragon”

Will Eggers (University of Connecticut)

2. “The Book’s the Thing: Books as Artifacts of Power in Children’s Fantasy”

Amie A. Doughty (SUNY Oneonta)

3. “From Muggles to Merlins: The Representation of Mentor Figures in The Secret of NIMH (1982) and Ewoks (1985-86)”

Michael A. Torregrossa (The Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages)

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend II: Monstrous Medievalisms (Sponsored by The Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the Middle Ages)

Presider: John P. Sexton (Bridgewater State College)

1. “An Unsung Hero: The Arthurian Legacy in the Gabriel Knight Game Series”

Angela Tenga (Florida Institute of Technology)

2. “Staking them Out: Shakespeare’s Vampires”

Danielle Rosvally (Rutgers University)

3. “The Impaling of Vlad: Dracula, Literary Tourism, and National Identity”

Tony Giffone (Farmingdale State College/SUNY)

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend III: Race and Gender

Presider: Macey M. Freudensprung (The University of Texas at San Antonio):

1. “The Lilith Character: Critically Analyzing Women’s Roles within African-American Speculative Fiction According to the Portrayal of Lilith within Jewish, Greek, and Afro-Diasporic Folklore and Mysticism”

Macey M. Freudensprung (The University of Texas at San Antonio)

2. “Vampire as Tragic Mulatto: Angel and Spike in the Whedonverse”
Wendy Wagner (Johnson & Wales University)

3. “Nyota Uhura: Feminist Star of Freedom”

Mayan A. Jarnagin (The University of Texas at San Antonio)

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend IV: SF TV

Presider: Wendy Wagner (Johnson & Wales University)

1. “From Dunne to Desmond: Disembodied Time Travel in Tolkien, Stapledon, and Lost”

Kristine Larsen (Central Connecticut State University)

2. “Watching Death in Torchwood: The Impact on Characters and Fans”

Marla Harris (Independent Scholar)

3. “Battlestar Galactica and the Cults of Seriality”

Jordan Lavender-Smith (CUNY Graduate Center)

Extrapolation Submissions Guidelines

For ease of reference, here are the most recent submission guidelines for the journal Extrapolation.

© The editors of Extrapolation 2008. Page created and updated 12 March 2009 by Andrew M. Butler

Extrapolation is an international, peer-reviewed journal which publishes articles and book reviews on science fiction and fantasy texts, broadly conceived.

We invite papers on all areas of speculative culture, including print, film, television, comic books and video games, and we particularly encourage papers which consider popular texts within their larger cultural context. We welcome papers from a wide variety of critical approaches including but not limited to literary criticism, utopian studies, genre criticism, feminist theory, critical race studies, queer theory, and postcolonial theory. Extrapolation promotes innovative work which considers the place of speculative texts in contemporary culture. We are interested in promoting dialogue among scholars working within a number of traditions and in encouraging the serious study of popular culture.

We are particularly interested in the following areas of study:

• Racial constructions in speculative genres
• Children's and YA sf and fantasy
• Sexualities
• Fantastic motifs in mainstream texts
• Gender and speculative texts
• History of sf and fantasy
• New weird fiction
• Remakes, rewriting and retrofitting
• Pulp sf and fantasy
• The body in speculative texts
• Posthumanism
• Political sf and fantasy
• Non-Western speculative traditions
• Technoculture

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Essay Guidelines

Essays should be approximately 4000-9000 words, written according to MLA standards and include a 100 word abstract. Neither embedded footnotes nor generated footnotes that some software systems make available should be used. Electronic submissions in MS Word are encouraged. Submissions should be sent to:

javier.a.martinez @ utb.edu

Or by conventional mail to:

Javier A. Martinez
Department of English
University of Texas at Brownsville
80 Fort Brown
Brownsville, TX 78520
USA

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Book Review Guidelines

Book reviews should be titled. The title should reflect the theme of the review. The title of the review should appear in boldface and be placed before the bibliographic information.

Bibliographic information should be listed at the beginning of the review, including: author(s) or editor (s), complete title (in italics), publication information (including city, state and publisher), year of publication, page count (including differently paginated introduction or preface), price and form of publication (hc or pbk).

Body Consciences. Sherryl Vint. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 243 pp. $50 hdbk / pbk.

Book reviews should run an average of 2,500 words.

All references to outside sources should be made in the review. Reviews should not include a works cited or notes section.

Reviews should examine critically the work in question. We do not want only a synopsis of the book and the points it makes, but rather an engagement with the ideas expressed and a judgment on both their efficacy and the author’s ability to express them.

Review essays should follow the same format as above, except that they should be no less than 4,500 words. A works cited page is allowed in the case of review essays.

If you are interested in reviewing a book for Extrapolation or if you have published a book you would like reviewed by Extrapolation, please contact:

pmelzer @ temple.edu

Or write to:

Patricia Melzer
Director, Women's Studies Program
Temple University
816 Anderson Hall
1114 West Berks Street
Philadelphia, PA 1912
USA.

Extrapolation Spring 2010 Issue

The latest issue of the journal Extrapolation is now available. Details as follows:

Extrapolation

Volume 51 Issue 1 (Spring 2010)

Articles

Darren Jorgensen and Helen Merrick. "Introduction: Making Science Fiction Histories", 5-12

M. Elizabeth Ginway and Roberto de Sousa Causo, "Discovering and Re-discovering Brazilian Science Fiction: An Overview", 13-39

Debjani Sengupta, "The Wondrous Traveler: Leela Majumdar and Science Fiction in Bengal", 40-52

Mark Bould, "Revolutionary African-American Sf Before Black Power Sf", 53-81

Sylvia Kelso, "Out of Egypt: Histories of Speculative Fiction and Carole Mcdonnell’s Wind Follower", 82-99

Robert Savage, "Paleoanthropology of the Future: The Prehistory of Posthumanity in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey", 100-12

Stephen Dedman, “Murder in the Air”: The Quest for the Death Ray", 113-33

Darren Jorgensen, "The Numerical Verisimilitude of Science Fiction and EVE-Online", 134-47

Andrew Milner, "Tales of Resonance and Wonder: Science Fiction and Genre Theory", 148-69

Ken McLeod, "The Indifference Engine: How Science Fiction Contributes to the Public Understanding of Science, and How It Doesn’t", 170-5

Review

Carl Freedman reviews John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, 176ff.