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Quick and playful journals?[]
Dear all,
I'm new here. Thank you very much for co-creating this wiki!
I've got a question -- or, rather, two. My style tends to be too playful for the academia; I can try and get rid of such mannerisms as "the esteemed reader will notice", but overall it just sounds somewhat journalistic. To be honest, I'd like to keep it that way. Are there any journals in Comp.Lit./Theory/American studies which are okay with this? I do believe that the quality of my research is serious enough.:)
Also: who, in your regard, is the quickest decision-maker among Comp.Lit./Theory/American studies journals?
Thank you very much!
Alexandra
- Alexandra, I think you will find that that almost all scholarly journals will balk at this kind of stylistic flourish. Reviewers often seize on these qualities as evidence they are dealing with a non-professional (e.g., a junior graduate student) and will accordingly not attend closely to the substance of the work. This is the case even in theory journals, where you sometimes do find essays in a more baroque style -- however, those essays are almost all invited contributions from established scholars. You may succeed at finding a venue whose stylistic expectations are more fluid, but (especially in the fields you mention) I'd say that those journals, mostly student-run online publications, are not going to be of much value on a c.v. My advice would be to do the best you can to bring your style in line with the expectations of major journals in the field. The journal Comparative Literature is a pretty good place to look for guidance. And, of course, you should run your work by your advisor(s) and see what they think is an appropriate venue for it and what kind of stylistic advice they might have.
- To put this a different way -- a way that, perhaps, more accurately reflects the current state of conversations in literary studies -- if your intention is for your research to open doors for you professionally, you'd probably be best off trying to translate your findings into the lingua franca of the field. If, on the other hand, you mainly want to get your ideas "out there" into the hands of sympathetic readers, you might consider publishing it online in any of the widely-read literary blogs. This is especially relevant if your ideas pertain to current texts or issues currently in the news.
Scope / community name[]
Please see Talk:Humanities_Journals_Wiki#Scope_.2F_community_name. --Piotrus (talk) 03:37, March 9, 2017 (UTC)