CALL FOR PAPERS

Visionary Texts, Past and Present: (Re)visionings and (Re)imaginings
Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought

“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and reimagines the world.” — Malcolm Gladwell

“It’s a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is.” — Aldous Huxley

Jess, A Cryogenic Consideration: Or, Sounding One Horn Of The Dilemma (Winter), 1980, collage, 48 x 72 inches.

Philosophers, poets, and artists in every era have revisioned and reimagined the world in ways that have inspired historical transformations. Visionary texts – whether they reach proleptically into an imagined future, analeptically reconsider the past, or urgently re-envision the present – have offered us alternative possibilities of understanding who and where we are.

Visionary works, too, might consider the numerous implications of “vision”; they interrogate the politics of seeing, imagining, and innovating, even as they attend to the perilously subjective nature of perception. By engaging with human consciousness in this way, these texts destabilize even the firmest of foundations and urge a thoroughgoing reconsideration of our realities.

For its fifth issue, Pivot is calling for critical papers that consider all manner of visionary texts (literary, visual, musical, theatrical, filmic, and oral) and examine how they have changed – and continue to change – our world. The journal invites a consideration of these influential interventions and their inspired visions in a wide range of historical periods and subject areas including literature, fine arts, politics, religion/spirituality, science, and technology. We invite participants from across disciplinary borders to submit papers that engage with any aspect of this field of inquiry.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
• visions of nation and the world
• subversive, nationalist, and anti-nationalist projects
• prophetic and mystical works
• future worlds
• new religions and spirituality
• space as an aspect of the psyche
• dream visions and the psychedelic
• fantasy and the fantastic in art and literature
• technology
• the entrepreneur as visionary
• old and new media

The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2015. Authors are requested to submit full articles of 6000–8000 words either by registering at yorku.ca/pivot or emailing pivot@yorku.ca.