A Special Issue of ARIEL - A Review of International English Literature: Experimental Writing in a Globalizing World

Where some critics see experimental writing as unified by a quest to revitalize literature itself, others would argue that this vitality and heterogeneity cannot be uncoupled from world-transformative processes, however desirable or unwelcome. This special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature will examine how experimental writing from the 21st and late 20th centuries rises to the challenges of representation associated with the complex, uneven, and disparate dynamics of global change.
In particular, it aims to explore experimental poetics (whether in prose, poetry, or other textual forms) as a critical and (re-)creative mediation of the globalizing world.Contributors are invited to consider contemporary literary experimentation in terms of (a) the fresh visions of the world it expresses through innovative techniques, (b) the kinds of textual, planetary, world-cultural, or other global mappings it performs, and/or (c) its role in a system of textual and material circulations throughout the global market. Specifically, this issue considers questions such as the following:

• What are the particular challenges to literary form and aesthetics in an age of globaluncertainties: world economic challenges, terror / terrorism, planetary environmental crisis, and intensified forms of globalization under neoliberal capitalism?
• How do transformations in publishing and/or the pressures of market values in the worldliterary field affect the production, dissemination, publication, and consecration of experimental writing from different sites, such as the First World or the Global South? 
• What does the future hold for literary experimentation in the twenty-first century?

We welcome new critical approaches to global poetics as well as essays that seek to interrogate established critical perspectives concerning experimentation as a vehicle for socio-political change (such as Marxist, feminist/queer, postcolonial, and ecological). Papers addressing the globalized poetics of location are welcome, but we are especially interested in papers that map multiple sites or positionings, such as through distant proximities, imperialisms, decolonisation, planetary perspectives, cosmopolitanisms, or world-systems.

Please submit 500-word abstracts and a brief CV to guest editors wendy.knepper@brunel.ac.uk and sharae.deckard@ucd.ie by 14 May 2014. Prospective articles of 6000-9000 words are due for submission by 1 September 2014.