Monumentality: Tours & Detours (special issue) -- Textshop Experiments

Special Issue: Monumentality: Tours & Detours

Textshop Experiments is an open access journal that aims to extend the work of Greg Ulmer and to foster experimental works that invent, operate in, or analyze the apparatus of Electracy.  We welcome innovative and hybrid works in new media and original scholarship on reading and writing, rhetoric, and culture. 

Memorials and monuments aim to configure and shape the public’s understanding of their history and national identity. Traditionally, monuments and memorials recognize sacrifices and symbolize mourning. While these narratives are in part also shaped by its role in the tourist industry and the spectacle, the tourist’s experience itself is a model of (re)-invention, a way to loosen constructed narratives and question and reexamine individual and collective values.

For Gregory L. Ulmer, the Internet is the ideal civic space, an unlimited plaza for participatory democracy. In this space, electracy is able to intervene tourism by rewriting narratives of commemoration and mourning.  Ulmer provides models in both Electronic Monuments and EmerAgency, as well as in Florida Research Ensemble (FRE) projects, such as his “Minute Man Monument Tour.”

For this issue, the editors seek traditional and audio/video essays and related digital projects that explore tourism as a trope for this invention process.  While we are accepting submissions, proposals, and queries on more traditional scholarly articles, we are especially interested in projects that intervene in various online platforms.  Topics and formats are open, and artists and scholars alike can address a range of ideas from national or local monuments to what Ulmer refers to as “unremarkable disasters,” those events that are unnoticed but that have a strong impact in the social, political, and economic lives of millions of citizens (e.g., gun violence, car accidents, and domestic abuse).

Submission files and preliminary queries should be sent to the editors at: ulmertextshop@gmail.com.  Please provide your name, institutional affiliation, and a short bio in the text of the email.  Submissions are due August 1, 2016.