CALL FOR ART SUBMISSIONS

ELLIPSIS

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Send in your art by April 8th!

The Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism is seeking art submissions for for its 2024 issue to be published in the spring. Artists should either be current undergraduates or recent graduates submitting undergraduate work. Submissions are open to any medium and should be related (however directly or indirectly) to the theme of Ellipsis. For this issue, work from undergraduates of any institution will be accepted.

Please send in your work with the subject line “Art-Ellipsis-2024” to [email protected] by April 1st 8th. Please include your name, the title(s) of your work, and your institution and year of graduation in the body of the email.

Below is the call for writing submissions for the issue to give you an idea of the kind of writing your work will be published alongside.

We look forward to seeing your work!

“It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.”

 — Miles Davis

“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” 

— Ernest Hemingway

This forthcoming issue will explore the theme of ELLIPSIS. We look forward to receiving pieces that explore and challenge the meaning of ellipsis and any words or themes associated with it. 

The grammatical sign of the ellipsis […] marks either an omission or a pause. But a pause is its own kind of omission, noting the absence of speech. An ellipsis marks the presence of waiting. 

In mathematics, an ellipsis indicates the unstated elements in a list or sum. We only need to know the beginning or end of a sequence; the ellipsis takes care of the middle. 

In the solar system, our planets revolve on an orbit that forms not a circle, but an ellipse, a shape with two focal points from which the sum of the two distances to the focal points is constant. An ellipse is thus a loop, an endless interplay of the leaving and the return. We all live in the sway of these planetary ellipses, and yet the seeming eternality of this loop is nevertheless disrupted by forces of climate change and humanity’s “progress” toward the stars. 

The ellipsis can be an end, an aposiopesis, or a trailing off, harboring within it tones of dread, anticipation, reluctance, and expectancy. Ellipsis can mean: elision, erasure, silence, the unsayable, suspense, caesura, stutter, and lapse. It can be the symbol of “loading”: of metamorphosis, process, change. 

Even when unmarked by grammatical signs, ellipsis characterizes many aspects of our being. Whether in Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot or Ramis’ film Groundhog Day, the sense of waiting for change as an endless state of repetition characterizes many of the most existentially profound works of our time. In The Exterminating Angel (dir. Luis Buñuel), a group of friends find themselves unable to leave after attending a lavish dinner party, passing days in inexplicable captivity as their more savage instincts emerge. This feeling of waiting manifests as ennui in Dazed and Confused (dir. Richard Linklater), in which a group of high school students drive aimlessly around after their last day of school, going through the motions of hazing incoming freshmen and attending parties as they attempt to find meaning in their adolescent suburban rituals. Ellipses are also present in music: rock bands notably utilize pauses in their songs, such as in “Hard to Explain” by The Strokes and “Out of Touch” by Daryl Hall & John Oates. Indeed, John Cage’s three-movement composition “4’33” is made up entirely of silence, as the audience waits for either the beginning or the end. The dōtaku, a Japanese invention of the Yayoi period, is a clapperless bell: unlike other bells, the dōtaku’s thin walls would not have allowed it to resonate, therefore designating it as a more ritualistic ornament. The experience of anticipating sound, and receiving nothing in return, is another instance of ellipses as it emerges in less explicit contexts.

While ellipses in literature are often used more liberally, they often appear more densely in moments of intentional psychological ordering. In Hera Lindsay Bird’s poem “Having Already Walked Out On Everybody I Ever Said I Loved,” she reckons with the legacy of an emotional experience: “Once upon a time I used to feel like…………huh / But then I started to feel a little more like…………………………….uhuh”. In “Frank Sinatra has a Cold,” Gay Talese includes a paragraph full of ellipses at the culmination of her stunning, thorough profile of Sinatra, demonstrating an inability to create a unified image of him through witnessing the trappings of his celebrity. 

For this issue of the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, we invite you to ask: who waits? Who waits, and to hear what? What is left unsaid, omitted, ellipsed, eclipsed? 

Feel free to explore, challenge, or complicate any of these ideas. We prioritize literary criticism submissions, but we welcome other forms of criticism as well.