Call for Chapters: "Teaching Chuck Palahniuk: The Treasures of Transgression in the Age of Trump and Beyond"

While much has been written about Chuck Palahniuk and his body of work, due in part to his nearly book-a-year publication schedule, next to nothing has been written about when, where and how it is necessary to teach Palahniuk. Beyond answering whether Palahniuk’s work is and continues to be worth of teaching, it is essential to investigate how teaching Palahniuk’s work impacts the discursive dynamic of the classroom interactions and creates new opportunities for scholarship by both the faculty member and his or her students. Despite early critical success with Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, and Choke, Palahniuk’s novels are increasingly dismissed for the very transgressive content that makes them essential pedagogical tools in the Age of Trump where “truth isn’t truth” and tribalism is stoked with claims of “fake news.”

Vernon Press invites chapter proposals for the collected work, Teaching Chuck Palahniuk: The Treasures of Transgression in the Age of Trump and Beyond, edited by Christopher Burlingame. We aim to amplify scholarly voices who take various approaches to address what can students learn about writing, literature, and society by reading and analyzing Palahniuk's texts. The collection will discuss the value of teaching Palahniuk, innovations and various disciplinary contexts for teaching his works, and reflections on some of those pedagogical opportunities. Through its multi-faceted discussion of Palahniuk and pedagogy, this collection will ask how can we legitimize efforts to bring his work onto syllabi and into the classroom where it can enhance student engagement, create new avenues for inter-disciplinary scholarship, and re-invigorate an expansion of the canon? How can adding Palahniuk to one’s syllabus provide diverse frameworks for incorporating and interpreting Palahniuk’s writing across disciplines? How can offering post-mortems from faculty members who have found the “guts” to teach Palahniuk offer insight into what students have gained and stand to gain from a more intensive Palahniuk pedagogy?

We welcome innovative scholarly work on topics related to teaching Palahniuk in disciplines other than literary studies and how it has the potential to complicate the idea of canon for the respective discipline, as well as submissions relating to having taught works other than Fight Club in varying contexts.

Please submit a chapter proposal of 300-500 words to Christopher Burlingame (cburlingame@mtaloy.edu). Final chapter lengths will be 6,000-8,000 words.

Deadline for proposal submissions: November 1, 2020. Acceptance will be notified by November 21, 2020.

Final chapter submission: February 7, 2021.