Two Publications in One Day: Law & Lit and JTR

The hard thing about slowness in academic publishing is that I've had 7-8 articles "in process" for at least two years, more in some cases, which can be spiritually trying.

The plus side? Sometimes, you get a bonanza of riches, or two publications in one day!
For the first article, it's entitled "The Image of Law in Stephen R. Donaldson's 'Reave the Just': Agency, Blame, and Sexual Assault," and it comes from the journal Law & Literature. I wrote about the publication misadventures of this piece a few weeks ago. Basically, it's about the strengths and weakness of the liberal position on rape law. From what I gather, it'll appear in the print version shortly -- Taylor & Francis (the publisher) seems geared to the sciences model of publication, in which immediate publication is important for impact factor. 

The second article comes courtesy of The Journal of Tolkien Research. This one has the snazzy title of "On Ways of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward a Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism." In short, it defends a Straussian approach to literary studies and explains why certain models of critical theory are poor vehicles for studying Tolkien and genre fantasy. Perhaps more than any of my other publications, this one makes me feel a little more "naked" . . . rather than just a cool idea, it's the intellectual basis for my entire approach to literature. It'll be the foundation of my monograph, too, although this piece isn't a prospective chapter -- it's just the intellectual groundwork behind the monograph.

This article, too, has a fun publication history. After I was invited to a roundtable discussion at the IMC in Leeds for 2019, I wrote a 10-page conference paper for the corresponding panel, plus an 4-page spiel as my intro for the roundtable. Later that July, after a modest 2-weeks of revision, I lumped both pieces together and sent it off to JTR. It came back revise-and-submit . . . but the fall was a brutal time for me, so I didn't get a chance to make the deep revisions the article required. That took 5 weeks when I finally got around to it, but now I'm extremely happy with how the piece turned out. 

And I would never, I admit, have thought about writing an article about methodology in Tolkien Studies if Dr. Fimi hadn't kindly invited me to that initial roundtable, so she's owed a great debt of thanks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distin...
Read more

A Look at Charles R. Saunders and "Sword & Soul"

Image
So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall...
Read more

NEW POETS OF RUM-RAM-RUF: Zach Weinersmith & Boulet

Image
In the opening paragraph of my metrical appendix to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival , I raised a conundrum: how do revivalists today officially arrive at an alliterative meter? The question’s a good one. In every case known to me, at least in English, revivalists never “grow up” with alliterative poetics. They don’t – they cannot – know the meter on an intuitive cultural knowledge, not as medieval skalds or scopas did. In other words, the meter has been moribund for centuries, and if young poets today – those crazy kids – experiment with alliteration at all, it is only of the ornamental variety. That’s what tongue twisters teach you: the rum-ram-ruf of sounds jingle-jangling together. Accordingly, if revivalists know what they are doing at all, they deploy a poetic form learned only as an adult. Someday, though, I hope to eat those words – or at least chew them slowly. The parties responsible are author Zach Weinersmith and the artist Boulet, the creators of a w...
Read more