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Contributors should submit an abstract (300-400 words) by November 30th 2003 to the e-mail address: [log in to unmask] Call for papers Corporeal inscriptions “... it is always the body that is at issue – the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.” Michel Foucault. “We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity.” Julia Kristeva One of the consequences of the postmodern questioning of totalities is the re-examination of the borders of the human body and its relation to the social. In a much quoted statement, Roland Barthes designates the human body as the “sole object from which [the symbolic field] derives its unity” (1974). More than a reflection or a product of the symbolic, the body becomes the point of encounter between the public and the private, the space where the social and the individual meet to create the ‘new’ that “cannot be invented without memory or repetition” (Jacques Derrida). The editors of this volume wish to examine the complex relations between the corporeal and the social, approaching the body as a discursive product and a producer of discourse. Bodies that disrupt, docile bodies, abjected and liminal ones, idealised and deformed, homunculi, dolls and puppets, cyborgs and monsters – all participate in cultural production of a certain ‘truth’ of the body and the subject. What is the relation between one’s body and one’s self? How are bodies produced in discourse? How do they become intelligible and analyzable? What kinds of discourses/narratives do they produce? What is the relation between bodies and power? How do gender, race and class mark the body? What kind of narratives are mobilized to present the unpresentable? We will seek answers to the questions outlined above through reference to contemporary social, cultural and literary discourses, addressing the body as predominantly a constantly shifting ambiguous border, a limit of signification, social change and cultural intelligibility. Contributors should submit an abstract (300-400 words) by November 30th 2003 to the e-mail address: [log in to unmask] For further enquiries contact the editors: Dr. Edyta Lorek-Jezinska, Dr. Katarzyna Wieckowska Department of English Nicholas Copernicus University ul. Fosa Staromiejska 3 87-100 Torun, Poland