We are glad to announce the new call for papers of the journal Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy. This issue (vol. 6, no. 1, 2018) will be entitled “Philosophy and Literature” and will be edited by Francesco Campana and Mario Farina.

Please find the call’s full texts below, or download it here.

The deadline for submission is 15 December 2017.

****
Call for papers 

With reference to the well-known Platonic example, Arthur C. Danto presents the relationship between philosophy and literature as a challenge. Indeed, in his 1986’s essay The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, he conceives of philosophical activity as an attempt to drive literature away from its own realm.
In this sense, the conceptual action of philosophy seems to address the non-conceptual exposition of artistic work. The outcome of this conflicting relation would be a conceptual, that is philosophical, clarification of the aesthetic content; and the result of this clarification would be an incorporation of artistic value in the philosophical structure.
According to this idea, the philosophical thought aims to resolve all the artistic content in its conceptual sphere and therefore to convert the essential value of art either into an aesthetic cladding of a philosophical sentence, or into a non-essential divertissement.
Despite this fictional war, philosophy never stopped relating itself with artistic and literary products. On the contrary, since Aristotle, philosophy has tried to offer increasingly problematic definitions of literary artwork. With the Romantic and Hegelian paradigms, the problem of the philosophy of art started to gain a new centrality in the debate, especially through the elaboration of the concept of critique, which attempted to vindicate a pivotal role in the definition and production of literary works. On the one hand, the long-lasting tradition of Hegelian Marxism tried to relate itself to the critical and romantic heritage and to develop a notion of “objective meaning” of the work able to justify the social and historical content of literature itself. On the other hand, the epistemic turn of phenomenology vindicates the role of subjective reception as a constitutive part of the process of creation of artistic meaning.
This theoretical approach broke a new path in the comprehension of the artwork and allowed the connection with structuralist, semiotic and deconstructionist analysis of literature. This ostensible opposition between an objective and a subjective explanation of the artwork resembles, at least, the so-called “post-modernist” condition of literature and, instead of being a quarrel of paradigms, seems rather to explain the contemporary definition of literature itself.

The issue of Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy aims to reconsider the philosophical and literary debate of the second half of 20th century. In that debate, phenomenological tendencies, classic literary theory, hermeneutics and the latest analytic attempts devote their efforts to comprehending literature as a whole. Hence, we invite all the interested scholars to investigate the problem of the relationship between philosophy and literature.
Appreciated are both strictly methodological contributions (about the theoretical and epistemic status of literary phenomena) and analyses dedicated to literary artworks and literary genres in their relation with other disciplines.

Suggested topics for this issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

– Hermeneutics and literary theory
– Phenomenological analysis of literature
– Ontological and/or epistemic conditions of possibility of the literary object
– Relationship between philosophy and literature
– Philosophy and the novel
– Relationship between poetic genres and literary theory as a whole
– Intermediality, interdisciplinarity and literature
– Literature, cultural studies and gender studies
– Politics and literature

Invited contributors: Giovanni Bottiroli (Università degli Studi di Bergamo), Ulrika Björk (Södertörn University Stockholm), Adone Brandalise (Università degli Studi di Padova), Michele Cometa (Università degli Studi di Palermo), Gianluca Garelli (Università degli Studi di Firenze), Eva Geulen (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin), Eileen John (University of Warwick), Stein Haugom Olsen (Østfold University).

Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts and papers should be submitted online. Submitted papers (in English, German, French, Italian, or Spanish) must be in accordance with the basic principles of Metodo, and follow the Author Guidelines.
All contributions will be peer reviewed by two anonymous referees. The editorial board advises authors writing articles in non-native languages to have their texts proofread prior to submission.

Deadline for submissions: December 15th, 2017

Contact: redazione@metodo-rivista.eu
For informal inquiries you can also contact the editors: Francesco Campana (francescocampan@gmail.com) and Mario Farina (mario.farina@gmail.com)