[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure (3/31/06; collection)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Suzanne Diamond <sdiamond@ysu.edu>

Collection -
Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure

(abstracts by 3/31/06; accepted manuscripts by 5/19/06)

Personal testimony seems ubiquitous in contemporary culture, raising 
fundamental
questions: is the authentic personal disclosure we apparently prize 
"whether in
classrooms, on television, in clinical or legal settings, or elsewhere"
productive, advisable, or even possible, from a psychoanalytic or other
theoretical perspective? Manifestations of a confessional impulse are widely
available not only in in fiction, poetry, autobiography, and memoirs but 
also in
ethnography, within therapeutic or legal frameworks, in popular, so-called
"reality" television, in "expressivist" writing theories and, 
increasingly, in a
testimonial strain observable in pedagogical scholarship. Less available to
general readers and viewers, however, are the strategies for assessing 
modes of
personal disclosure in literature, the classroom and popular media.

Which theories, concepts, and terms equip interested observers with a 
critical
understanding of confessional strategies and effects? Compelling Confessions
aims to make available to general readers a range of essays (2500-5000 
words)
that visibly interact with relevant theory by way of making clear the 
promise,
pressures, procedures and/or pitfalls connected with "telling one's 
story." In
other words, this compilation aims to provide a critical vocabulary with 
which
its readers might more systematically assess the confessional rhetoric they
encounter. Essays that interrogate unexamined assumptions within the 
discourse
about personal disclosure are welcome; the crucial point is that they 
make what
is at stake in their interrogations clear and meaningful to a general
readership. Compelling Confessions differs from collections such as Modern
Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (Routledge) in its inclusion of
popular media, non-literary communication, and contemporary pedagogy 
within the
confessional paradigm and in its purposive aim at a non-scholarly audience.

Please direct all inquiries/abstracts to sdiamond@ysu.edu and use 
"Compelling
Confessions" as the subject line to ensure a prompt response. Abstracts 
should
be pasted into e-messages (not posted as attachments) accepted manuscripts
should be snail-mailed (along with authors' contact information) to S. 
Diamond,
Department of English, Youngstown State University, One University Plaza,
Youngstown, OH 44555.

Deadline for abstracts: March 31, 2006.

Deadline for accepted manuscripts: May 19, 2006.



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