CFP: Special Issue on Moral Perfectionism

Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies
CFP Special issue on Emersonian Moral Perfectionism

Guest Editor: Paul Deb (University of Oxford)

Deadline for abstracts (max. 300 words): 14 July 2023
Notification of acceptance: 31 July 2023
Deadline for articles (6,000-8,000 words, including notes): 30 November 2023
Planned publication of issue: December 2024

In the Introduction to his Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Cavell fantasises
about ‘a place in the mind where the good books are in conversation’ (p. 4). By ‘good
books’ he means of course that diverse set of texts spanning the range of Western
culture that he lists immediately afterwards as sharing in the moral outlook he calls
Emersonian Moral Perfectionism—an outlook which he increasingly came to
appreciate as central to his thinking.

In this special issue, we want to explore the nature and scope of this outlook by
activating or inhabiting Cavell's fantasy—providing the place or occasion for that
conversation’s imaginary interplay of voices by inviting the following contributions:

• critical engagements with Cavell’s perfectionist understanding of individual texts;
• perfectionist readings of the texts that Cavell lists, but for which he did not give an
  extended account (e.g., Pascal’s Pensées, Dickens’ Hard Times, etc.);
• perfectionist readings of other texts (by the same authors or otherwise) which thus
  could be considered as sharing in that outlook.

As Cavell admits, sometimes it is only a fragment of a particular work that is
pertinent to the issue of perfectionism, so contributions which are able to elaborate
such fragments over the length of a journal article are also welcomed.

And since the features which constitute a text’s belonging to the perfectionist
tradition are as open-ended as the texts which constitute that belonging, contributors
are invited in the course of their discussions to confirm, modify, or contradict any of
those candidate features which Cavell derived from Plato’s Republic (listed at the
start of Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome and repeated at the end of Cities of
Words) as representative of perfectionism.

In short, we would like to imagine this special issue as a fantastical Cavellian
dinner party, in which the subject of moral perfectionism provides its august and
varied guests with a congenial topic of conversation; one on which each has their own
view, and one from which we might—thanks to the efforts of our host—draw
continuing intellectual and spiritual sustenance.

Abstracts (max. 300 words) should be sent to the editor at paul.deb@new.ox.ac.uk by
14 July 2023.