CFP: The Gibson Critics Don't See

The Gibson Critics Don’t See:
Omissions, Lacunae, and Absences
 
There are few science fiction writers whose critical coverage can rival that of William Gibson, the pope of cyberpunk, whose Neuromancer (1984) stormed postmodern syllabi and majorly contributed to opening the academy to science fiction. Nevertheless, the critical attention to Gibson has been running mostly in several intensely interesting, albeit selective, grooves, leaving many aspects of his work unexplored.
This project aims to reexamine and reassess William Gibson’s literary oeuvre in the early decades of the 21st century. While the writer’s technological prescience, his obsession with brands, and his reflections on the nature of cognition have been investigated by numerous scholars, there are other dimensions of his work that warrant more critical attention. To address this lacuna, Polish Journal for American Studies (PJAS) seeks articles for a special issue devoted to the neglected, forgotten, and bypassed aspects of the Canadian master’s fiction. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

• the poetic and stylistic quality of Gibson’s fiction  
• the author’s generic maneuvers at the intersection of science fiction, noir, crime, and spy genres  
• the increasing realism of his later novels and his relationship with science fiction
• the representation of the post-Cold War world order
• the artistic, literary, and pop-cultural influences and references
• the preoccupation with cultural memory, retroism, hauntology, and spectrality
• the politics of Gibson’s fiction
• the apparent un-adaptability of Gibson’s fiction in the age of transmedia and cultural franchises
• the critical and popular reception of Gibson’s fiction in various countries and territories

Abstracts of 500 words should be submitted by March 31, 2017 to Prof. Paweł Frelik, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin (pawel.frelik@gmail.com) and Dr. Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska, University of Warmia and Mazury, Olsztyn (alphabase17@gmail.com). Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by April 28, 2017. Full drafts (5,000 to 7,000 words) will be due by September 30, 2017. The issue is provisionally scheduled for the second half of 2018. For more information about the journal, please visit our website: http://www.paas.org.pl/pjas/.