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Call for Papers
Exploding Genre
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture
Deadline: 20th December 2008

Genre has undergone radical transformations since the advent of a media 
society, in which popular texts are not so much literary but visual. 
Narrative studies of genre, such as John Cawelti's Six-Gun Mystique 
(1970) and Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science-Fiction (1979), were 
quickly overturned by an increasing interest in cinematic, televisual, 
visual and digital textualities. Studies of different and interrelated 
media superceded the structuralist interest in narrative. Increasingly 
generic identity was conceived of as modal, or adaptable between media, 
consumed and produced by differently situated groups of readers, 
cultures and audiences.

Genre became differentiated from within itself, no longer identical but 
constituted at the interface of various media and readers. It was 
assembled from other genres, a combination of overlapping, discontinuous 
tropes that played ironically with its own established forms. 
Postmodernism had broken with both the neo-classicism of the New 
Criticism and with a historically minded structuralism to produce a new 
critical view of genre, one that fostered the emergence of hybrid and 
self-conscious fictions between media. Its readers were no longer seen 
as isolated but, in their engagement with multiple practices of 
interpretation, were recognized in distinct communities. Studies like 
Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Romance and Popular Fiction 
(1991) and Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers: Television Fans and 
Participatory Culture (1992) explored new ways of looking at popular 
texts within their contexts.

It is with a view to addressing these changes that this issue of 
Reconstruction will investigate the function of genre in theory and 
fictions alike. Papers are sought that address the fragmented state of 
genre theory, spread as it is across studies of new and old media, fan 
and reading communities, narrative and visual theory. We are interested 
in the function of genre in different medias, such as comics and games. 
Why has genre persisted in this age of multi-modal expressions? What 
makes it tick, travel across media, to return and coalesce in new and 
old forms of narrative, visuality and intertextuality?

We  envisage papers covering a variety of theoretical / discursive 
positions, including:
 - feminist theory
 - queer theory
 - postcolonial theory
 - convergent/transformative media
 - new cultural histories
 - ludology

Please send completed essays, multimedial performances, etc. to Helen 
Merrick and Darren Jorgensen at exp.genre_at_gmail.com by 20th December, 
2008. We are happy to consider abstracts and proposals prior to this 
date. Publication is expected in the third quarter of 2009. Papers 
should be about 5,000 - 7,000 words and follow the Reconstruction 
guidelines for submission 
<http://reconstruction.eserver.org/guidelines.shtml>.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 
<http://reconstruction.eserver.org> (ISSN: 1547-4348) is an innovative 
online cultural studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual 
community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the 
ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and 
influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies. 
Reconstruction publishes one open issue and three themed issues 
quarterly. Reconstruction is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

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