CFP: Apologies – Krypton. Identity powers and representations

Krypton. Identity powers and representations
Krypton is a multilingual digital journal, created as part of the project “Potere, Identità, Rappresentazioni”. The project, which aims at fostering collaborations among scholars at an international level, is funded by the University of Rome “Roma Tre”, with the contribution of the Universitatea din Bucureşti, the Universidad de Granada, the Universidad de Salamanca and the Universidade Estadual Paulista. Krypton aims at exploring the ways in which modern and contemporary thinkers, in the area of romance studies, have constructed notions of power and identity, and to study their chosen forms of representation in a interdisciplinary perspective. The journal – whose web site is under construction (krypton.uniroma3.it) – will be published once a year, and will consist of monographic issues. The first issue, which focuses on the forms of apology, is scheduled for December 2012.

Apologies
Call for papers
Since ancient times man has manifested the tendency, in oral or written forms, to defend, justify, legitimize people, actions, institutions, forms of power, religions. This tendency has given life to a specific literary genre: the apologetics, which may be conceived as the art and science of justification and defense, and needs to be distinguished from the apology as its theoretical counterpart. From ancient Greek philosophy to the writings of the Church Fathers, from medieval and Renaissance diatribes to the decline of the Ancien Regime, from modern practices to contemporary texts or artifacts, to defend, legitimize, justify means to construct convincing and persuasive arguments according to the rules of classical or modern rhetoric (“persuading the souls” is a fundamental part of the apology). Defending someone or something also means to identify the ideal opponent, who will thus constitute the inevitable background against which one articulates his or her apology. Apology is a quest for and a celebration of truth, but also, at the same time, a condemnation of the error defended by those who believe in the opposite truth. Obviously, language is not the only instrument: in the large field of apologetics and defense, illustrations play a pivotal role. We only need to think of all those cycles of paintings and sculptures, emanating directly or indirectly from the will of those in power, which have always given visual and plastic shape to the supposedly legitimate forms of power, not to mention novel forms of iconography (videos, films) that celebrate visible or invisible powers. Defense and attack go hand in hand, constituting two sides of the same coin and revealing a great deal about the current ways of representing people and powers.
For the first issue of Krypton we welcome contributions that address the question of apologetic writing from different perspectives (history of literature, history, art history, political philosophy, anthropology, linguistics) while employing methodologies as eclectic as possible. We encourage contributions that cover a chronological framework spanning from modern to contemporary times (from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First) and deal with the political and cultural contexts of romance countries in and outside Europe. Our goal is to go beyond the usual way of addressing apologetic writing, traditionally linked to issues of religious, doctrinal and confessional thought, and to reach a better understanding of the mechanisms of power, which are often grounded in discursive practices that cannot be relegated to the narrow field of the intellectual élites.
The articles, written in one of the languages of Krypton (Castilian, French, English, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian), must be sent by 30 September 2012 to the following email address: krypton@uniroma3.it
All contributions will be peer-reviewed by two anonymous referees and outcomes will be communicated within a month.
The articles – which cannot exceed in length 45.000 characters including spaces – must be compiled according to the style sheet of the journal.

NORME EDITORIALI KRYPTON EN

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