The scholarly team working on the project “New Perspectives on Poetics,” financed by the Polish National Program for the Development of the Humanities, invites submissions for the fourth issue of the bilingual internet publication Forum of Poetics.


The title of this issue, “Multimedia Poetics,” declares our interest in discussing a phenomenon of increasing importance for literature: its presence in the context of new media. New forms of writing, modalities of writing, and the mediatization of texts emerging from those spaces represent an important area of study for contemporary poetics, which must be aware of the singular nature of the developments we are witnessing in literary discourse. As it enters into the space of e-literature, poetics becomes cognizant of its new possibilities, becoming, as Barrett Watten writes using the formula of Rosalind Krauss, a poetics whose textual field is expanding into the visual, digital and many other dimensions. We are eager to invite those interested to discuss several fundamental questions that arise from these changes. Firstly, what new descriptive tasks are appearing before the poetics as it analyzes texts (techsts?) of this type, how can it carry out its duties of basic or preliminary classification and systematization of literature; perhaps it is time to relinquish these systematizing tasks? Secondly, how does poetics cope with the need to name literary entities that are no less new, how does it grasp them conceptually, in order to make a thorough study of new manifestations of literature, hitherto not anticipated by poetics. Thirdly, what kind of new metapoetological reflection emerges from these experiences, what does poetics as an apparatus for analyzing literature become in the world of new media, how does its ontology change, and what kinds of comprehensive transformations is it undergoing as a field of knowledge?

Articles accepted for publication will be translated into Polish by qualified translators and published simultaneously in both language versions. Please send texts by 31 January 2016 to one of the following e-mail addresses: forumpoetyki@gmail.com; forumofpoetics@gmail.com.