a CFP that puzzled us over here on 112th street

[lapsedmodernist]

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

•Changing narrative “technologies” in Victorian/neo-Victorian fiction
•markets and economics of the Steampunk universe
•science and environmental politics
•Steampunk and the myths of the Industrial Revolution
•redefining the human: intersections with cyberpunk
•Steampunk and old/new/lost world empire(s)
•the terrors of Steampunk in a post-9/11 world

Dear livejournal, please suggest how steampunk is related to 9/11, aside from both of them being important symbolic categories in my brain, but even I am not apopheniac enough to assume that this CFP is All About My Referential Mania.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Combos of old and new technology leading to massive explosions in cities that combine old and new buildings?

Also, don't think I can make it before we leave for NYC Friday. And then we return 1/4. You're leaving 1/5? What time?

[contrasoma.livejournal.com]

That's what I was thinking: rusty boxcutters (the rustier, the steampunkier, remember) and pirated Microsoft Flight sims doing more damage than the traditional technoscientific blowback (stolen Cold War nukes, etc.) we've been taught to expect by Bond films.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

... retrofitting nostalgia?

Yeah, I'm stumped. Also, wildly curious where you found this!

[missmimesis.livejournal.com]

CALL FOR PAPERS
SPECIAL ISSUE
Steampunk, Science, and (Neo)Victorian Technologies

Neo-Victorian Studies invites papers and/or abstracts for a 2009 special
issue on neo-Victorianism’s engagement with science and new/old
technologies, especially as articulated through the genre of Steampunk. As
a lifestyle, aesthetic and literary movement, Steampunk can be both the act
of modding your laptop to look like and function as a Victorian artefact
and an act of (re-)imagining a London in which Charles Babbage’s analytical
engine was realised. Steampunk includes applications of nineteenth-century
aesthetics to contemporary objects; speculative extensions of technologies
that actually existed; and the anachronistic importation of contemporary
science into fictionalised pasts and projected futures. In all cases,
Steampunk blurs boundaries: between centuries, between technologies, and
between “those” Victorians and “us” neo-Victorians. This special issue will
explore why particular scientific and technological developments are
revisited at particular historical moments and trace Steampunk’s importance
to neo-Victorianism, as well as its wider cultural implications.

Deadline for submissions of completed papers: 1 June 2009

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
* Steampunk and the importation/transformation of Victorian aesthetics
•Changing narrative “technologies” in Victorian/neo-Victorian fiction
•markets and economics of the Steampunk universe
•science and environmental politics
•Steampunk and the myths of the Industrial Revolution
•redefining the human: intersections with cyberpunk
•Steampunk and old/new/lost world empire(s)
•the terrors of Steampunk in a post-9/11 world
•historicising the Steampunk phenomenon
•gender constructions in Steampunk art, literature, and practice
•mad geniuses: scientists, inventors, doctors, engineers
•Steampunk pasts and futures (e.g. The Difference Engine vs. The Diamond Age)
• modding and maker practices: objects and (neo-)Victorian materialism
•real and imagined difference engines
•scientific (im)practicalities of Steampunk contraptions
•visual Steampunk vs. narrative Steampunk (e.g. graphic novels or movies
vs. novels)
•cosplay and conventions

Articles and/or creative pieces between 6000-8000 words should be submitted
by email to the guest editors Rachel A. Bowser (rbowser_at_emory.edu) and
Brian Croxall (brian.croxall_at_emory.edu). For submission guidelines, please
consult the journal website at http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/

===================================
From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
cfp_at_english.upenn.edu
more information at
http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
===================================

[todfox.livejournal.com]

Yay, this might be handy for someone I know.

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

Haven't pressurized steam lines been erupting under the streets of Manhattan on and off for the past few years? Bam. Nailed it.

[zerodivide1101.livejournal.com]

Clearly when you're embarrassingly obsessed with something dumb, everything else in the world can be seen in context of that dumb thing.

[ex-dalenae.livejournal.com]

wow, strange. i am also on 112th street.