Enculturation, a Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, announces the launch of Intermezzo, a series dedicated to publishing long essays – between 20,000 and 80,000 words – that are too long for journal publication, but too short to be a monograph. Intermezzo fills a current gap within scholarly writing by allowing writers to express themselves outside of the constraints of formal academic publishing. Intermezzo asks writers to not only consider a variety of topics from within and without academia, but to be creative in doing so. Authors are encouraged to experiment with form, style, content, and approach in order to break down the barrier between the scholarly and the creative. Authors are also encouraged to contribute to existing conversations and to create new ones.
Intermezzo essays, published as ebooks, will broadly address topics of academic and general audience interest. Longform or Longreads essays have proliferated in recent years across blogs and online magazine outlets as writers create new spaces for thought. While some scholarly presses have begun to consider the extended essay as part of their overall publishing, scholarly writing, overall, still lacks enough venues for this type of writing. Intermezzo contributes to this nascent movement by providing new spaces for scholarly writing that the academic journal and monograph cannot accommodate.
Intermezzo essays are meant to be provocative, intelligent, and not bound to standards traditionally associated with “academic writing.” While essays may be academic regarding subject matter or audience, they are free to explore the nature of digital essay writing and the various logics associated with such writing - personal, associative, fragmentary, networked, non-linear, visual, and other rhetorical gestures not normally appreciated in traditional, academic publishing. Intermezzo essays are meant to be speculative, exploratory, and a mix of the informal and the formal. Essays may come from a variety of disciplinary approaches or may mix approaches.
Intermezzo is meant to be a venue where writers can produce scholarly work in unique ways, outside of institutional or disciplinary expectation, and it takes advantage of digital media as a platform for both content and distribution of timely topics.
Intermezzo essays will:
- Be published as open source texts
- Be freely available for download
- Undergo peer review
- Take advantage of online distribution in order to publish projects quickly and efficiently
- Be designed for desktop and mobile digital reading platforms
- Be professionally designed
- Be assigned an ISBN number in order to provide authors professional credibility and further accessibility to global audiences
Enculturation Intermezzo is now accepting proposals or completed essays for review.
Please send all queries or work to Series Editor:
Series Editor
Jeff Rice, University of Kentucky
j.rice@uky.edu
Series Associate Editors
Casey Boyle, University of Utah
Jim Brown, University of Wisconsin
Series Editorial Board
Eli C. Goldblatt, Temple University
Debra Hawhee, Pennsylvania State University
Byron Hawk, University of South Carolina
Cynthia Haynes, Clemson University
Christa Olson, University of Wisconsin
Paul Prior, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Blake Scott, University of Central Florida
Scott Wible, University of Maryland