CALL FOR PAPERS
Matraga Journal invites submissions for the next issues. Matraga, published by the Graduate Program in Letters at UERJ, is a senior publication, aiming at promoting a critical review on issues in the fields of Literature and Linguistics studies. Original papers and book reviews in Portuguese, English, Spanish or French are welcome. Papers are submitted to double-blind peer review and must strictly follow Matraga Journal guidelines for paper submission.
Read bellow the complete call for papers. Submissions are online.
MATRAGA 63
This issue is devoted to Literary Studies, with the theme Multiple possible wars.
THEME
In the preface to her book The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Aleksiévitch describes a little of her childhood in a village, with a family determined by the war, among other children whose families had also been ruthlessly marked by the war: “We did not know what the world was like without war, the world of war was the only one we knew, and the war people were the only ones we knew. Until now I don't know another world, other people. Did they happen to exist at some point?”
Aleksiévitch is talking about the war against the Germans in the middle of the 20th century, a war that took place on the battlefield, with deaths and devastation. Already a classic image of war, disseminated especially in cinema, the fields, the trenches and the bombings are part of the common sense of what war is like. But Aleksiévitch's final question, her doubt about the existence at any moment of a world without war, takes us to a contemporary conception of war, in which war involves everyone, soldiers and civilians, total war.
War is perennial, it is latent or manifested in the modern world. It is war that organizes modern politics and order. It is the Hobbesian premise of a natural state of “war of all against all” that legitimizes the creation of the State as the only mechanism for stopping violence; in other words, it is the threat of war that demands order, but, contrary to Hobbes, political order only seems to materialize with war. Even before that, it is war, made “just,” that drives the colonial enterprise. In this sense, the colonial war becomes a paradigm and teaches the metropolises to wage wars against their populations: class, race and sex wars (Alliez; Lazzarato, 2021).
We are interested in the multiple meanings of war. Its effects and “aesthetic facts” all seem relevant to us. From the poems and novels written by survivors of World War I to the testimonial narratives of World War II. From the chronicles that emerged from the colonization of the Americas to stories that try to supplement the history of slavery. From the tales of the borders – of the fronts and the advance and of those who were there and those who remained – to the particularities of the guerrillas, the resistance, and the boycotts.
Amongst the reconstructions of the past to the possibilities of the future, we are also interested in thinking about grief and vulnerability, as conceptualized by Judith Butler (2019); the war between Humans and Earthbound that Bruno Latour (2020) imagined in the Anthropocene; diplomacy between humans, and between humans and other beings, suggested for instance in the narratives of Ursula Le Guin, and in Amerindian shamanism; the critique of war as an instrument against life.
We invite to submit to this issue of Matraga, those interested in questioning the theme of war in its multiple meanings based on its “aesthetic effects.”
EDITORS:
Carolina Correia dos Santos (UERJ) e Agnese Codebó (Villanova University)
SUBMISSION DATE:
Submission of papers and book reviews: March 31st, 2024
Issue Publication: May 2024
MATRAGA 62
This issue is devoted to Linguistics Studies, with the them Variation and Changes in languages.
THEME
Linguistic diversity is an indisputable fact. However, despite the research developed in the linguistics area, there is, concomitantly, the notion that language is seen as homogeneous, that grammatical rules are permanent and immutable, accounting for only a single possibility of use of the language(s). As language scientists, it is therefore necessary, in the 21st century, to awaken society to the constitutive variation of languages, in order to reflect on the phenomenon of linguistic change, in the perspective that variation is the source of change. CALLOU, D.; LOPES, C. R. (2016) propose to rethink “our grammatical code and update it, as a result of the existence of a gap, deeper or not so deep, between the idealized register and the effectively used registers, even by the most educated speakers.” In this sense, articles that contemplate, within an updated and critical perspective, in particular, the following topics will be welcome: (1) considerations on the interrelationship between language and society; (2) discussion about the phenomenon of linguistic change in different languages; (3) analysis of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural diversity; (4) revisitation of different grammars from the perspective of change and variation; (5) studies of language variation and change in different genres; (6) synchronic and diachronic studies of different languages; (7) studies on the influence of different factors in the constitution of the Portuguese language.
EDITORS:
Maria Teresa Tedesco Vilardo Abreu (UERJ, Brasil) e Lurdes de Castro Moutinho (Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal)
SUBMISSION DATE:
Submission of papers and book reviews: October 31st, 2023
Issue Publication: September 2024
MATRAGA 61
This non-thematic issue is devoted to Linguistics and Literary Studies.
THEME
Matraga Journal welcomes original research papers and book reviews in the fields of Linguistics and Literary Studies.
EDITORS:
Deise Quintiliano Pereira (UERJ) e Roberta Stanke (UERJ)
SUBMISSION DATE:
Submission of papers and book reviews: June 30th, 2023 [CLOSED]
Issue Publication: January 2024
MATRAGA 60
This issue is devoted to Literary Studies, with the theme From Babel to the Global (South): Kafka's legacy on the centenary of his death.
THEME
One hundred years later, we are not surprised to read again Kafka's alleged last wish: that his work should be set on fire. Now, as Roland Reuß, one of the editors of the facsimile edition of Kafka's work, has clearly demonstrated, the friend, addressee and literary estate administrator Max Brod knew how to interpret the lawyer's trickery, skilfully instilled by the Prague author in the texts in which, rather jestfully, he drafted his unusual will: two notes, with opposite instructions, made that instead of ashes, the Kafkian legacy became a set of writings edited by Brod, who thus proved, according to Walter Benjamin, his particular "loyalty against Kafka".
At a distance of a hundred years, how can we approach Kafka’s writings if not within the tense arc established between two mutually exclusive injunctions: that of having to read and interpret them repeatedly and that of not being able to do so?
Not only distant in time, but also almost 10,000 kilometres away from Kafka's native Prague, to reread Kafka means to translate him and to displace him in multiple ways, to translate his work between languages, between cultures, between extremely different historical contexts. Moreover, the displacement of Kafka's texts to the context of the Global South also implies bringing to the forefront issues that have long lain hidden under the mantle of the first interpretations conditioned by a catastrophic context that, however, seems to come back to haunt us and whose roots now seem to come to light: on the fringes of capitalism, the violence of colonialism, of anti-Semitism, of extreme social inequality, of the corrosion of political institutions, and last but not least, the tensions within the family and the discrimination against women – phenomena experienced and examined by Kafka with much wit in his own time and which we again now experience, all over the world, and particularly Brazil in a very disturbing way.
In this sense, we welcome articles that address, within an updated and critical perspective, especially the following topics: (1) innovative translations and retranslations of Kafka's work; (2) Kafka’s manuscripts and different editions and their impact on the interpretation of the whole work or specific writings; (3) translinguistic and transcultural diversity: the representation of the minority and the minor in Kafkian texts (4) Kafka as an ironic reader: revisitations of the biblical text, the classical tradition, German-speaking literature and other literary traditions (5) Kafka: canonical or anticanonical author? (6) Kafka's presence in Brazilian literature, cinema and art (7) Literary representations of the post-psychoanalytic subject: biography and autobiography versus fictionality and auto-fictionality in Kafka.
EDITORS:
Júlio França (UERJ) e Susana Kampff Lages (UFF)
SUBMISSION DATE:
Submission of papers and book reviews: March 31st, 2023 new deadline April 14th, 2023 [CLOSED]
Issue Publication: September 2023
Papers might not exceed 25 pages.
Book reviews might not exceed 8 pages.
Read the author guidelines for more information on submission.
Submission of papers and book reviews: January 31st, 2018
Issue Publication: May 2018
