Call for Abstracts—MLA 2025
January 9 — 12, 2025
New Orleans, LA

Visible (Un)realities: Reconsidering Truth and Appearance in Pirandello and Beyond

We invite abstracts considering how (in)visibility relates to the construction of reality/truth and how (modernist) representation reconfigures that construction by addressing the nature and limits of vision. Work on Pirandello or any related figure/topic welcome.

Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, 20 March 2024

Michael Subialka, University of California Davis (msubialka@ucdavis.edu ) Lisa Sarti, Borough of Manhattan Community C, City U of New York (lsarti@bmcc.cuny.edu )

Call for Abstracts—Special Issue, 2025

The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America

Pirandello on Alienation: Man, Modernity, Technology

Edited by Ana Ilievska (University of Bonn) and Andrea Sartori (Nankai University)

This special issue of the Journal of the Pirandello Society of America will delve into Pirandello’s concept of alienation in all its declinations and across genres. From Mattia Pascal’s impression to be “cut off from life” and to continue living “without knowing just how,” to the camera operator turned machine in Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio (1925), alienation for Pirandello stands for both private madness and the dehumanizing effects of technology, against a historical background connotated by the end of the political ideals of the past, and, in particular, of the Risorgimento (I vecchi e i giovani, 1909). In this disenchanted world, science has shown that “everything is matter” and that man is nothing more than “the product of Nature’s slow development” (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904). And yet, even though modernity seems to have expropriated humanity of its presumed essence or soul, this very “beast that steals, kills and lies”—humanity itself and its materiality/physicality—“can also write the Divine Comedy” (ibidem).

Conjugating the modal verb in the present tense—humanity can indeed write the Divine Comedy, not could—Pirandello implicitly characterizes alienation as the realm of the possible (Serafino adapting to machines and thus becoming posthuman), and not just as a domain ruled by loss, emptiness, violence, and the absence of any apparent logic. In this sense, we invite contributors to send us paper proposals that not only outline a Pirandellian definition or definitions of “alienation,” but also look beyond the author and his times and explore how experiences of isolation, estrangement, expropriation, and purposelessness can create new meanings at the personal, socio-cultural, and techno-scientific levels. We encourage contributions that offer a transhistorical, interdisciplinary perspective on Pirandello’s concept(s) of alienation, one that can be updated and integrated into 21-st century ideas of human-centeredness and AI (Schneiderman 2022), human self-realization and Digital Humanism (Werthner et al., 2021), human autonomy in the age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2018), etc. The following themes and approaches are welcome:

• Pirandello and alienation from a psychoanalytic point of view (Alfred Binet, Freud);

• Marxist readings of Pirandello on man’s estrangement from himself and from his labor

• Feminist readings of the alienation of women in Pirandello’s work

• Alienation and post-/transhumanism

• Human-machine interactions and the resulting alienating dynamics

• Benjamin, Pirandello, and the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

• Alienation then and now: Contemporary implications of Pirandello’s interpretation of modernity and alienation

• Philosophical concepts of alienation in Pirandello

• Nature and alienation: Ecocritical approaches to Pirandello and the Anthropocene

• Pirandello’s humanism and the essence of man in modernity

Interested contributors should send a 250-word abstract and a 150-word biography (in one document) to the editors Ana Ilievska (ilievska@uni-bonn.de) and Andrea Sartori (andrea_sartori1@outlook.it) by 15 April 2024. The completed articles will be expected by December 15th 2024 (8,000-10,000 words).

Accepted papers will undergo a double blind peer-review process.

Call for Submissions to PSA Volume 36 (2024) - Deadline January 31, 2024

We are now accepting submissions for the next issue of PSA, the journal of the Pirandello Society of America. This is an open topic issue – any work on or relating to Luigi Pirandello is invited. The volume will be published in 2024, both online and in print.

PSA encourages interdisciplinary and comparative work; we are happy to consider submissions that address Pirandello or Pirandellian themes in relation to other figures and movements, whether contemporary to Pirandello or not. If you have questions about whether your work might be a fit, please feel free to reach out to the Editors at editorpsa@gmail.com.

Deadline for submissions is January 31, 2024. Send a Word document to editorpsa@gmail.com. Please follow the current MLA Style Manual and use in-text references, minimal endnotes, and a works cited page. Articles should generally be ~6,000-8,000 words in length. All submissions must be in fluid English. The journal does not offer extensive language editing for non-native submissions, nor are we able to offer translation services for authors writing in other languages. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure their submission is in fluid English.

All manuscripts will be screened in a peer-review process by at least two readers. Submit with a separate cover sheet giving the author’s name, affiliation, and contact information. Omit self-identifying information in the body of the text and all headers and footers.

Reviews:

PSA also accepts review submissions on a rolling basis. We publish reviews of scholarly work relating to Pirandello as well as performance reviews of relevance. Reviews should generally be between 750-1,000 words in length and may include images, though the author is responsible for all image permissions. Contact the Editors at editorpsa@gmail.com to submit or with any queries.

Translations and Creative Work:

PSA also publishes new translations of Pirandello’s works or closely related works that have not been previously available in English. Likewise, we publish original creative work with a clear tie to Pirandello. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis. If you are interested in submitting a translation or your creative work, contact the Editors for more info.

Call for Pirandellian Dramaturgies, 3rd edition – Comical and Grotesque Short Stories to Drama

PSA, the Journal of the Pirandello Society of America, seeks submissions of short dramatic pieces (5 to 30 minutes of expected performance time) inspired by Luigi Pirandello’s short stories, for publication in the next or future issues. Scripts should be previously unpublished and unproduced for the stage except for staged readings.

Given that the previous issue highlighted more serious topics, this one will privilege short stories that have a comical and/or grotesque tone.

An essential requirement is that proposed dramaturgies draw inspiration from Pirandello’s short stories, for example those recently translated and available at https://www.pirandellointranslation.org/, a project led by Pirandello scholars Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka that aims at the translation of all Pirandello’s short stories into contemporary English.

Dramaturgies could take several shapes such as:

1. adaptations for the stage of a single short story

2. adaptations that combine two or three stories

3. dramatic development of a section of a short story

4. monologues/dialogues of characters who appear in the short stories

5. dramatic situations that entail the reading/recitation of passages from the short stories

Importantly, each play should stand on its own without requiring previous knowledge of the short story or its characters.

Plays that simply reference Pirandello by “being metatheatrical” won’t be considered. Dramaturgies should also avoid adapting the following, already used for theatre in some form by Pirandello himself, specifically “The Doctor’s Duty,” “The License,” “The Jar,” “The Imbecile,” “Sicilian Limes,” “Think It Over, Giacomino!,” “A Character’s Tragedy,” “Death Is Upon Him,” “The Changeling,” “It’s Nothing Serious,” “Farewell, Leonora!,” “The Lord of the Ship,” “Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, her Son-in law,” “The Friend to the Wives,” “Interviews with Characters,” and “Characters.”

Instead, inspiration should derive from any of the other stories, already translated on the website https://www.pirandellointranslation.org or read in other translations, that have not yet found a dramatic form.

Please e-mail submissions by January 31, 2024 to Stefano Boselli, PSA Theatre and Performance Editor: Stefano.Boselli@unlv.edu. If accepted, scripts will be published in the next issue (XXXVI, 2024) or scheduled for publication in a following issue.

Join us.

“Modern Joy and Sorrow: Emotion, Affect, and Modernist Form in Pirandello and Beyond”
Guaranteed Panel Sponsored by the Pirandello Society of America, MLA 2024 (Philadelphia)

CFP:

Call for papers examining how modernist production focuses on mixed emotional states to interrogate subjectivity; social, political and/or economic reality; and form, across contexts, authors, and languages.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted to Lisa Sarti (lsarti@bmcc.cuny.edu) and Michael Subialka (msubialka@ucdavis.edu) no later than March 17. Any queries can be directed to the session organizers.

Panel Elaboration and Theoretical Background:

The experience of modernity to which various modernist writers respond can be understood as ambivalent, giving rise to emotional responses ranging from joy to sorrow; likewise, various forms of modernist reflection can be seen as digging into these emotional responses both for introspection and for critique (of social and political structures, convention, tradition, order, form, etc.). This panel seeks to interrogate how these emotional responses to modernity are utilized by modernist writers as materials for various projects. While the panel is not wedded to a single theoretical model or concept, our call takes its point of departure from the Italian modernist Luigi Pirandello’s particular theory of humor, or umorismo, in which the tragicomic mixture of joy and sorrow is a key both to subjective introspection and to the construction of modernist forms of reflection that produce an affective impact on the audience. With this notion in the background, the panel invites papers that examine any of the many ways in which literary responses to modernity draw on emotional mixes to interrogate modern life, challenge or construct subjective experience, confront the nature of social/political/economic forms, or create affective responses or epiphanies for both text and reader.

Scholarship in the last decade has approached the question of affect and emotion in a number of helpful ways that inform the background for this call, though we invite submissions that engage any theoretical framework appropriate to the topic. As Eugenie Brinkema has argued in relation to film, affect can be located not just in the responses of an audience to a text but in the formal elements of the text itself (The Forms of the Affects (Duke University Press, 2014), p. 38). This “affective formalism,” as Lee M. Pierce has labelled it (“Feeling Takes Form: Recent Work in Affective Formalism,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 53:2 (2020)), has coincided with a return to and broadening of notions of form proposed by Caroline Levine (Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015) with a focus on the political and social affordances of different patterns in formal structures. On the other hand, as Liesl Olson has suggested, modernist epiphanies thought of as transcendent experiences need to be relocated in relation to the ordinary and everyday, the banality of modern life (Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 8); Jean-Michel Rabaté echoes this logic in his consideration of how the meaning of the final insight in Joyce’s epiphanies is dependent on the whole edifice of experience around it, showing that the mind is represented not only in epiphany but through its ordinary flow of thought and self-reflection (A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Wiley, 2013) pp. 231-233). Perhaps this is one way of reconsidering modernist articulations of hope against the apparent despair of modern existence, as Adam Potkay has examined the meaning of epiphany and other modernist tropes (Hope: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 265-324). Ultimately, then, we ask how the ordinary emotions of joy and sorrow occasioned by modern existence might in themselves constitute the material of and occasion for introspective moments of self-revelation as well as insight into social and political conditions, and how specific modernist forms activate these emotions to create affective insights, in Pirandello and beyond.

While these theoretical interventions have inspired the topic of this panel, we reiterate that they should not be seen as determinative for paper submissions, and the panel invites proposals on a variety of topics engaging the fundamental question of how modernist production draws on and foregrounds a mix of emotional states responding to modernity in ways that are integral to these various (formal) projects.

Call for Abstracts, deadline: 30 September 2022

NeMLA 2023, Niagara Falls – March 23-26, 2023

CFP: “Navigating Existential Hardships: Resilience and Vulnerability in Pirandello’s Creative Works”

Please, consider submitting your abstract to the NeMLA panel Navigating Existential Hardships: Resilience and Vulnerability in Pirandello’s Creative Works to be held in Niagara Falls, NY on March 23-26, 2023.

Inspired by the 2023 NeMLA conference theme, this panel aims to critically explore how Pirandello addressed resilience in his works and how it developed into a process of cultural, mental, and physical adaptation for his characters. Throughout his rich corpus, comprised of poetry, novels, plays, and short stories, Pirandello tended to depict the existential struggles of his characters, framing them within the logic of an unstable and constructed reality. His narrative is in fact generally pervaded by an evident tension between resistance to and acceptance of adversity— a tension he often resolved in the truth of art.

To submit your abstract, please use the direct link: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20050

If you have any specific questions on this panel, you can reach out to the Chairs, Lisa Sarti (lsarti@bmcc.cuny.edu) and Michael Subialka (msubialka@ucdavis.edu)

Call for Abstracts, deadline: 25 March 2022

MLA 2023, San Francisco – Jan 5-8, 2023

CFP: “Provincial Working Conditions in Pirandello: Sicily, the South, and the Mediterranean”

The Pirandello Society of America invites the submission of abstracts for inclusion on our guaranteed MLA panel at the next convention. The topic of the 2023 panel is “Provincial Working Conditions in Pirandello: Sicily, the South, and the Mediterranean.”

The question of “southernness” in Pirandello’s works has been a source of fruitful investigation for some time. In this panel, we propose to reexamine the notion of Pirandello’s “south” in relation to the question posed by the MLA 2023 Presidential Theme of “working conditions.” The panel will consider both how labor/work is represented in Pirandello’s works and how conditions of labor/work impact and shape Pirandello’s context. Likewise, the panel will consider how the “provincial” character of Pirandello’s south can be nuanced and reconceived in relation to new critical discourses on the global south, race, and the transnational Mediterranean.

From poetry and short stories rooted in Pirandello’s experience of his father’s sulfur mines to his novels and plays and their treatments of Sicily, provincial life, and the realities of work and labor, Pirandello’s corpus provides a rich archive of material ripe for consideration in connection with these questions. The complex realities of his historical context impacted both his own working conditions as well as those of the theater-makers and other artists and writers with whom Pirandello worked in the long span of his career. We invite consideration of themes including, but not limited to:

• Economic conditions of labor

• Social conditions of labor

• Literary/artistic representations of labor

• Working conditions of literary/artistic production

• Sicilian theater and working conditions (of actors, impresarios, etc.)

• Historical context of working conditions in Sicily and the south

• Issues of language and dialect as they intersect with southernness and/or labor

• Issues of race and/or ethnicity

• Sicily and the global south

• Sicily and the Mediterranean

Abstracts (~300 words) and short bios should be sent via email to msubialka@ucdavis.edu and lsarti@bmcc.cuny.edu.