Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in June 2022

“‘Game Over!’: U.S. Drama and Theater and the End(s) of an American Idea(l)” – 6th International Conference on American Drama and Theater
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, 1-3 June 2022
Deadline for abstracts: 15 October 2021

Conference website: https://sites.google.com/view/americandramaconfmadrid2022

The Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, co-sponsored by the Spanish universities of Cádiz and Sevilla and the University of Lorraine in France, and working in partnership with the American Theater and Drama Society (ATDS), the International Susan Glaspell Society, the Arthur Miller Society, the Eugene O’Neill Society, and RADAC (Recherches sur les arts dramatiques anglophones contemporains), is announcing a call for papers for the conference “‘Game Over!’: U.S. Drama and Theater and the End(s) of an American Idea(l) to be held from 1 to 3 June 2022 at La Cristalera, located in the accessible northern mountains of Madrid.

This 6th International Conference on American Drama and Theater will be dedicated to the study of ends and new beginnings, games and gaming, players and playing, especially during, but not limited to, the current coronavirus pandemic. The five previous conferences were held in Málaga, 2000; Málaga, 2004; Cádiz, 2009; Sevilla, 2012; and Nancy (France), 2018; topics included violence, plays and players, politics, romance and migrations in and of the theater.

The following keynote speakers have accepted to join us:

  • Linda Ben-Zvi (Professor Emeritae, Colorado State University and Tel-Aviv University)
  • Christopher Bigsby (Emeritus Professor, University of East Anglia)
  • Lauren Gunderson (Playwright and screenwriter)
  • Stephen Scott-Bottoms (Professor, University of Manchester)
  • Harvey Young (Professor, Boston University)

Those of a certain age will no doubt remember the video games back in the 1970s and 80s, or even those today, which purveyed hours of fun and excitement, whether at a local arcade (Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man) or on a console in the family den (Atari, Nintendo, Intellivison, Gameboy, and more recently Xbox and PlayStation). Every time the screen displayed the legend “Game Over!,” feelings of frustration and exhilaration conjoined: another quarter inserted, another reset button hit, and the promise of a new game and recording the highest score quickly erased all anxieties and fostered hope that, this time, the outcome would be better.

Repeated endings and renewed beginnings is a trope that lies at the heart of American optimism and, to a certain extent, U.S. drama and theater. The nation is universally known for finding ways to spin a loss into a potential new victory. Over the centuries, just the simple grafting of the word “new” onto appropriated lands (New World, New England, New York, New Mexico) or exhausted ideologies (New Deal, New Journalism, New Left, New Right, New Green Deal) reinjected the promise of a different tomorrow. Reinvention is almost a Constitutional right in America, and the U.S. stage over the years has been a privileged site on which to explore, exhibit and exercise the limits of that presumed right.

In recent years, though, cracks in American optimism have extended, and the United States in once again confronting that nihilist legend, in bold type and in glaring letters, burdened, as it were, with the task of inserting another quarter (of a trillion dollars) into the economy or again hitting reset on a (Presidential and Congressional) political agenda to right past wrongs, jibe from a deviated course, or blaze a new trail. In 2020 alone, not since the Civil War has the nation of E pluribus unum had to reckon with the reality of its more truthful motto, E pluribus duo. Lacking a coherent response to the coronavirus pandemic, watching its streets implode time and time again during the Black Lives Matter movement, tugging ceaselessly at the gossamer threads of an unraveling national fabric, the Disunited States of America – and, by extension, its drama and theater – has found itself at yet another crossroads, wondering once again if the game, this time, is really over.

But which game, and who are the players? On one level, eschatology has underwritten the American narrative since the nation’s founding, and evangelical devotion has been proffered as the sole panacea to (re)save the nation from itself. On another level, several visionaries, from Royal Tyler in The Contrast to Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton, have warned against the inevitable solvency of warring political ideologies. Regardless of which position is most tenable over time, our conference title points to the fact that as soon as one “game” ends, another one begins. Games are, by definition, won and lost, played in solitaire or with/against another person. Can America keep resetting itself and start the game anew at each crossroads it encounters? And what role does/should art play in recording those conflicts or in influencing policy? Are the players themselves – playwrights, producers, actors, audiences alike – willing or even capable of continuing to play by the same rules? How have American playwrights reacted or risen to these challenges, today and in the past? Are they still optimistic, or is the fun over, a ghost of adolescent nostalgia?

The idea of a game also suggests play (in all of it semantic variants) and, as such, experimenting, discovering, trying out new things. How, exactly, is U.S. theater and drama renewing itself, especially at a time when theater culture has been put on hold due to the pandemic, and theaters and companies from Broadway to Main Street are struggling just to survive? Video games have evolved from the telos of Pong to the multiple endings of online games, where technological advances are only partly responsible for the renewed interest from one generation of players to the next. Is innovation a thing of the past on the U.S. stage, despite its avant-gardist fascination with multimedia? Is the present pandemic forcing theater in America – from Zoomed stage readings, through plays written online in collaboration, to holding masterclasses in playwriting and acting online – to reinvent itself, to become more immersive or at least participatory in something different from improv? Could the fourth wall definitively fall?

Historically, American playwrights have taught us the enduring nature of theater and drama, especially at times when the nation has hit the “pause” button. But can the game simply resume where we had left it suspended? The shuttered English theater surely survived its bouts with the plague, popish plots, and a civil war, but what emerged onstage afterwards had little in common with the drama that preceded it. Must the U.S. theater explore new avenues, or should it rely on past modes of expression to insure its longevity? Is the fragile artistic market welcoming of new adventures and willing to give new playwrights and theater artists the space wherein to truly play? Did it ever in the past, or is nostalgia for a golden age merely revisionist in nature? All of these questions are closely linked to the idea(l) that America has somehow been endowed with many “ends,” but are they limited in number and, if so, how many “lives” in the proverbial video game has the nation already used up, and how many still remain?

Answers to these and other questions await us in Miraflores de la Sierra, Madrid, in June 2022. Individual papers or collective panels are invited to respond directly to them, or to suggest other avenues of discussion and debate linked to the study of games and gaming, players and playing, ends and new beginnings in U.S. drama and theater from any watershed period in the nation’s history.

To submit a paper, a roundtable discussion, or an already organized panel, please send abstracts of 300 words and a brief CV to gameoverconferencemadrid@gmail.com by 15 October 2021.

Please check the conference website for updated information on conference venue, accommodation, travel and registration (https://sites.google.com/view/americandramaconfmadrid2022)

Organizing committee
John S. Bak, Université de Lorraine
Alfonso Ceballos Muñoz, Universidad de Cádiz
Ramón Espejo Romero, Universidad de Sevilla
Josefa Fernández Martin, Universidad de Sevilla
Noelia Hernando Real, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

(posted 10 April 2021)


“Disaster Discourse: Representations of Catastrophe” – the 23rd Annual International Conference of the English Department of the University of Bucharest
University of Bucharest. Bucharest, 2-4 June 2022
Extended deadline for proposals: 1 May 2022

The English Department of the University of Bucharest invites proposals for the Literature and Cultural Studies section of its 23rd Annual International Conference:

Disaster Discourse: Representations of Catastrophe
To be held online, 2–4 June 2022

Keynote speakers:

Dr. Nina Mickwitz (University of the Arts London)
Dr. Rareș Moldovan (University of Cluj)
Prof. Sascha Pöhlmann (University of Innsbruck)
Prof. Nicolas Tredell (University of Sussex)

At this stage of the twenty-first century, the actuality, imagining, anticipation and recollection of a multiplicity of present, past and potential future disasters (for example, climate change, earthquake, fire, flood, famine, mass death, pandemic, war) permeate daily experience, amplified and disseminated through global media that transmit words and images almost instantly. What are the ways in which we now represent disaster verbally and in other forms that mix words with visual and aural images or eschew language, such as films, comics, video and installation art, painting and music? How might these relate to earlier representations (in, say, predigital times)? What effects might current disaster discourse have in shaping perceptions of and responses to catastrophe? Does disaster discourse exacerbate catastrophe, or can it offer catharsis and healing? Can it envisage alternatives to living in a constant state of emergency and what might such alternatives be? Many urgent and intriguing questions are raised by this discursive mode, which seems omnipresent in our current era.

Disaster studies is a growing discipline that ranges from abstract considerations of the definitions and dynamics of disaster (for example, differentiating disaster from “accident”, “natural” disaster from human-made disaster) to the formulation of approaches to disaster preparedness, mitigation, impact assessment, response and recovery and management that have immediate practical applications (see, for example, Michael K. Lindell, “Disaster Studies” (2013); Handbook of Disaster Research (2018), edited by Havidán Rodríguez, William Donner and Joseph E. Trainor; and Disaster Studies: Exploring Intersectionalities in Disaster Discourse (2020), edited by Janki Andharia).

The examination of factual and fictional representations of disaster in words and visual images makes a crucial contribution to those studies and such representations can be studied by means of the concepts and methods developed for the theorization and analysis of elite and popular literary and cultural texts—and, reciprocally, the study of such texts can modify those concepts and methods.

Seminal texts in the study of disaster discourse include Susan Sontag’s essay “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965) and Maurice Blanchot’s L’Ecriture du désastre [The Writing of the Disaster] (1980), and the twenty-first century has generated studies that focus on one or more particular periods and/or genres, such as Romanticism and Disaster (2012), edited by Jacques Khalip and David Collings; Hilary L. Chute’s Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016); America’s Disaster Culture: The Production of Natural Disasters in Literature and Pop Culture (2017), edited by Robert C. Bell and Robert M. Ficociello; Eva Horn’s The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age (2018) [originally Zukunft als Katastrophe (2014)], trans. Valentine A. Pakis; and The Experience of Disaster in Early Modern Literature, edited by Sophie Chan (forthcoming, 2022).

We invite papers that explore the modes and implications of all and any kind of disaster discourse from the present or past in verbal, visual and aural forms – such as literary fiction, genre fiction, the graphic novel, comics, poetry, documentary, film, photography, painting, sculpture, installation art, music, social media posts – examining the ways in which they are generated, the media they employ, the signifying systems they use, the imagery on which they draw, their audiences, their historical, cultural and social contexts, and the further discourses they generate.
Papers may focus upon individual works or bodies of work and may also explore more general issues around conceptualizing, defining and theorizing disaster drawn from aesthetics, ethics, literature, philosophy, psychology, political thought, science, anthropology, sociology, theology, the arts, and any other relevant discipline.
Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

➢ Definitions of disaster (e.g., differentiating it from “accident”; dividing into “natural” and “[hu]manmade”)
➢ Impacts of disaster (e.g., physical, psychological, cultural)
➢ Social dimensions of disaster (e.g., in regard to class, community, ethnicity, gender)
➢ Rhetorics of disaster (the different ways in which it is spoken and written about, e.g., the kind of imagery used, the function of clichés, the issue of whether words can ever be adequate to the disastrous event)
➢ Disaster in history and historiography (e.g., the tension between documentary sources and narrative pressures)
➢ Disaster and scientific discourse (e.g., the relationship of disaster discourse to popularized and professional scientific ideas)
➢ Disaster and agency (perpetrators, accomplices and victims of disaster)
➢ Disaster and theology (e.g., the theodicean problem of vindicating God in light of the existence of evil; the idea of disaster as divine punishment [the Biblical Flood])
➢ Mythologizing disaster (from ancient literature to modern folk myths)
➢ Disaster and emotion (e.g., shock, excitement, grief, mourning)
➢ The aesthetics of disaster (e.g., the ancient Greek idea, in Aristotle’s Poetics, of catharsis (purging); the distinction between two modes of aesthetic experience in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [1797])
➢ Remembering disaster (public and private modes of remembrance and commemoration)
➢ Disaster at one’s fingertips (the effects of the almost instant transmission, sharing and amplification of disaster news on social media)
➢ Genre and disaster (e.g., tragedy; documentary; can disaster ever be (partly) written as comedy?)
➢ Disaster in literary and popular fiction (e.g., war novels, science fiction)
➢ Panels and bubbles: disaster in comics and graphic novels
➢ The rhythms and metres of disaster: engaging with disaster in poetry
➢ Theatres of disaster: is it possible adequately to put disaster on stage; what are the ways of trying to do so?
➢ Cinemas of disaster: ways of figuring disaster on film
➢ Camera eye: still photography and disaster
➢ Discord and concord: engaging with disaster in music
➢ Disaster in popular culture
➢ Anticipating disaster
➢ Living through disaster
➢ Recovering from disaster
➢ Transcending disaster
➢ Perspectivism / point of view: looking at disaster from different angles (or from clashing positions)
➢ Interdisciplinary approaches to disaster

Conference presentations should be in English, and will be allocated 20 minutes each, plus 10 minutes for discussion. Prospective participants are invited to submit abstracts of up to 200 words. Proposals should be in .doc or .docx format, and should also include (within the same document) name and institutional affiliation, a short bio (no more than 100 words), and e-mail address. Proposals for panel discussions (to be organized by the participant) will also be considered.

A selection of papers from the conference will be published in University of Bucharest Review (ISSN 2069–8658) – listed on Erih Plus, Scopus, EBSCO (Literary Reference Centre Plus), CEEOL and Ulrichsweb. See the guidelines for contributors at https://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/.

Deadline for proposals: 1 May 2022
Please send proposals (and enquiries) to conf.eng.litcult@lls.unibuc.ro .
Conference fee: 30 euro (or 150 lei if paid in Romanian currency).

For further details and updates, see: https://engleza.lls.unibuc.ro/conferinte/ .

(Enquiries regarding the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics section of the conference, which will be running at the same time, should be sent to AICED.2022@gmail.com.)

We look forward to receiving proposals.

Organizing and Selection Committee:

Dr Alina Bottez
Dr Dragoș Manea
Dr Andrei Nae
Dr Andreea Paris-Popa
Dr Andreea Popescu
Dr Oana-Alis Zaharia

Advisory Board:

Dr Nazmi Ağıl (Koç University, Istanbul)
Prof. Bart Eeckhout (University of Antwerp)
Prof. José Manuel Estévez-Saá (University of A Coruña)
Dr Felicity Hand (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
Prof. Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow)
Prof. Thomas Leitch (University of Delaware)
Dr Chris Louttit (Radboud University, Nijmegen)
Prof. Domnica Rădulescu (Washington and Lee University, Lexington)
Prof. Kerstin Shands (Södertörn University)
Prof. Nicolas Tredell (University of Sussex)

CFP

(Posted 11 January 2022, Updated 25 April 2022)


What’s in a Name? (Ab)Use of Anglo-Saxon in English-speaking cultures and elsewhere
Padova, Italy, 6-7 June 2022
Deadline for abstracts: 20 December 2021

Since the seventeenth century, the use of the term Anglo-Saxon has been characterised by a strong identity and ideological acceptation. The nationalistic sentiment grown after British imperialism obtained legitimation in the appropriation and re- modelling of Britain’s own past, conferring on Anglo-Saxon meanings that were increasingly connected with national and racial identity (Horsman 1976, 1981; Greenberg 1982).

This fictitious idea of ancestry has exerted a special fascination on collective imagery also thanks to the cultural movement known as ‘medievalism’, a recurrent theme in British and American art which also characterises the contemporary political debate in those countries. In America, far-right (pseudo-)political groups make large use of medievalism, and, in particular, of their alleged ‘Anglo-Saxon’ origins in the attempt to back their xenophobic and racist claims, based on white supremacy.

A connection between Anglo-Saxon and whiteness has also emerged within Medieval Studies and this gave birth to firm and, sometimes, drastic reactions. In recent years, a movement formed of women researchers of non-Western origins voiced vibrant protests against the treatment they have been suffering in this academic field, which they consider racist, sexist and xenophobic. In this regard, they have identified the terms Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxonist as the most obvious expressions of this attitude.

This debate concerns the specifically ideological and extremist uses of Anglo-Saxon, but little attention has been devoted to the use of this term in all forms of communication and the semantic values it has received in history, not only in English, but also in other languages and cultures. Beyond the ideological dimension that seems to prevail in some contexts, how and to what purposes has Anglo-Saxon been employed? And to what extent does this term eventually designate an exclusive and superior racial or cultural origin?

The purpose of this conference is to investigate this phenomenon across time, languages, and media. The topics include (but are not limited to) the use of Anglo-Saxon (and its corresponding forms in other languages) in:

  • Literature
  • Journalism
  • Political discourse
  • Performative arts (theatre, cinema, TV and web series, )
  • Gaming

Please send an abstract (roughly 500 words) and a short curriculum by 20 December to Omar Khalaf omar.khalaf@unipd.it

(Posted 8 November 2021)


“Metalinguistic Markers: Emergence, Discourse, Variation” – International Conference
“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Iași, Romania, 8-9 June 2022
Aabstract submission deadline: 1 April 2022

International Conference 

Metalinguistic Markers: Emergence, Discourse, Variation
8th-9th June 2022

“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași (hybrid or online, depending on the pandemic conditions)

Conference organized within the research project “Metalinguistic Markers between Lexicon, Grammar and Discourse. A Diachronic Approach”, funded by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS/CCCDI – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-1505, within PNCDI III

Since Rey-Debove’s seminal studies (1978) on metalanguage, autonymic connotation and metalinguistic verbs, Authier-Revuz’s research (e.g. 1995) on autonymic modalization and what she calls the “boucles réflexives du dire”, or even the work of Steuckardt and Niklas-Salminen (dirs) (2005) on gloss markers, metalinguistic markers have been the subject of ongoing research in linguistics. Indeed, the metalinguistic activities that these markers refer to are an essential feature of language functioning. These activities are various operations such as reformulating, defining, naming, designating, terminological borrowing, correcting, approximating, exemplifying, or the so-called “modalisation du dire en discours second”.

Within the framework of our research project, “metalinguistic markers” are considered in a very broad sense as referring to the different illustrations of the reflexivity of natural languages, manifested by what Authier-Revuz calls « non-coïncidences du dire », whether they are phrases concerning language use (metalinguistic markers, in a narrow sense), the act of saying (meta-enunciative markers) or even discourse itself (metadiscursive markers).

Among these metalinguistic phrases, those being formed with a saying verb have been and continue to be accounted for in several works dealing with the study of these phrases, in a single language (see, for instance, Rouanne & Anscombre, 2016; Gómez-Jordana & Anscombre (eds), 2015; Modicom, 2020) or in several languages, within a comparative or a non-comparative perspective (cf., for example, Lansari, 2020; Camus et al. (dirs), 2020; Petraș (ed.), 2019). Metalinguistic markers have been especially considered in relation to the operations they mark, such as reformulating (cf., for example, Gülich & Kotschi, 1983; LeBot et al. (dirs), 2008) or approximating (cf., for example, Mihatsch, 2010; Berbinski, 2019). 

Whether they are lexemes or phrasemes, including parenthetic constructions, or even “metadiscursive comments”, markers or particles, these phrases present various degrees of lexicalization and grammaticalization / pragmaticalization, this property being reflected in the approaches dealing with their emergence (see, for example, Dostie, 2004; Vincent and Martel, 2001). More broadly, studying the way in which these expressions evolved provides elements that shed light on the relationship between lexicon, grammar and discourse (Dostie and Lefeuvre (dirs), 2017).

The conference organized by the team of the research project “Metalinguistic Markers between Lexicon, Grammar and Discourse. A Diachronic Approach” intends to question, among other things, the semantic-pragmatic functioning of metalinguistic markers in different types of discourse, their relationship to variation, as well as the mechanisms of their emergence, using oral and / or written corpora. Papers may concern one particular language or propose contrastive approaches involving two or more languages. More specifically, the works of the conference aim to provide answers to questions such as: what are the properties of the lexemes that are likely to form metalinguistic markers? How could the existence of similar syntactic configurations in different languages be explained? What are the points of resemblance/dissemblance of the mechanisms involved in their emergence in various languages? Could some universal grammaticalization models, common to several languages, be set up? What are the processes involved in the translation of these markers from one language to another? Could the translation process lead to the emergence of some new markers in the target language?, etc.

Contributions related but not limited to the following research areas and topics are welcome:

  • metalinguistic markers and types of discourse (literary, scientific, journalistic, didactic, etc.). Papers should aim at establishing connections between a particular phrase and a specific type of discourse and at identifying, where appropriate, the textual / discursive environments that trigger the emergence of a particular metadiscursive expression (cf., for example, the “opaque words” of Niklas-Salminen, 2010). Comparisons may be carried out between different types of discourse from the point of view of the use of metalinguistic markers;
  • diachronic approach of metalinguistic markers. Apart from the mechanisms of their emergence in a given language, the discussion will focus on the changes in use or frequency that metalinguistic markers can undergo in diachrony (cf., for example, Opperman-Marsaux, 2016; Steuckardt, 2015); 
  • metalinguistic markers and variation. Papers could also focus on identifying factors of variation (regional, situational, social) in the use of the markers, in both written and oral discourse; 
  • metalinguistic markers and language acquisition. Comparisons can be made between the metalinguistic operations accomplished by means of the various markers studied in different types of discourse and the metalinguistic activities involved in the process of acquisition of a given language (cf., for example, Gombert, 1990; Gomila, 2011).

Languages of communication: French and English. 

Keynote speakers:

  • Wiltrud Mihatsch, University of Tübingen
  • Laurence Rouanne, Complutense University of Madrid

References:

Authier-Revuz, Jacqueline (1995), Ces mots qui ne vont pas de soi. Boucles réflexives et non-coïncidence du dire, Paris, Larousse.
Balaţchi, Raluca-Nicoleta (à paraître), « Marqueurs (méta)discursifs et stratégies traductives : dis donc et disons à l’épreuve de la traduction littéraire », CONCORDIA DISCORS vs DISCORDIA CONCORS: Researches into Comparative Literature, Contrastive Linguistics, Cross-Cultural and Translation Strategies, 13-14/2021.
Berbinski, Sonia (2019), De l’approximation. De « à peu près » à « cam așa ceva », Berlin, Peter Lang.
Camus, Rémi, De Vogüé, Sarah, Sitri, Frédérique (dirs) (2020), Corela, HS 31 (Métalinguistiques. Frontières, passages, dissensions), https://doi.org/10.4000/corela.10907. 
Dostie, Gaétane (2004), Pragmaticalisation et marqueurs discursifs. Analyse sémantique et traitement lexicographique, Bruxelles, Editions Duculot.
Dostie, Gaétane, Lefreuvre, Florence (dirs) (2017), Lexique, grammaire, discours. Les marqueurs discursifs, Paris, Honoré Champion.
Gombert, Jean-Emile (1990), Le développement métalinguistique, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Gómez-Jordana, Sonia, Anscombre, Jean-Claude (éds) (2015), Langue française, 186 (Dire et ses marqueurs).
Gomila, Corinne (2011), Parler des mots, apprendre à lire. La circulation du métalangage dans les activités de lecture, Berne, Peter Lang. 
Gülich, Elisabeth, Kotschi, Thomas (1983), « Les marqueurs de la reformulation paraphrastique », Cahiers de linguistique française, 5, p. 305-351.
Lansari, Laure (2020), A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers. Discourse Markers of Saying in English and French, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan.
LeBot, Marie-Claude, Schuwer, Martine, Richard, Élisabeth (dirs) (2008), La reformulation. Marqueurs discursifs – Stratégies énonciatives, Rennes, Presses de l’Université de Rennes.
Mihatsch, Wiltrud (2010), „Wird man von hustensaf wie so ne art bekiff?” Approximtionsmarker in romanischen Sprachen, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann.
Modicom, Pierre-Yves (2020), « Commentaire métalinguistique et partialité du dire : enjeux de la classification opérationnelle de quelques marqueurs discursifs en allemand », Corela, HS 31 (Métalinguistiques. Frontières, passages, dissensions), https://doi.org/10.4000/corela.11266. 
Niklas-Salminen, Aïno (2010), « La définition dans le cadre de la glose spontanée », Publifarum, 11 (Autour de la définition), url: http://www.farum.it/publifarum/ezine_pdf.php?id=125, consulté le 25/11/2021.
Opperman-Marsaux, Evelyne (2016), « Dis/dites-moi, dis/dites donc : la naissance de deux marqueurs discursifs en français (XVe-XVIIIe siècles) », in Rouanne, Laurence, Anscombre, Jean-Claude (éds) (2016), Histoires de dire. Petit glossaire des marqueurs formés sur le verbe dire, Peter Lang, Bern, p. 229-247. 
Rey-Debove, Josette (1997 [1978]), Le métalangage. Étude linguistique du discours sur le langage, Paris, Armand Colin.
Rouanne, Laurence, Anscombre, Jean-Claude (éds) (2016), Histoires de dire. Petit glossaire des marqueurs formés sur le verbe dire, Peter Lang, Bern.
Steuckardt, Agnès (2015), « Histoire de quelques correctifs formés sur dire », Langue française, 186, p. 13-30. 
Steuckardt, Agnès, Niklas-Salminen, Aïno (dirs) (2005), Les marqueurs de glose, Aix-en-Provence, Publications de l’Université de Provence. 
Petraș, Cristina (éd.) (2019), Studii de lingvistică, 9/2 (Les expressions métadiscursives dans les langues romanes : aspects syntaxiques, pragmatiques et sociolinguistiques), http://studiidelingvistica.uoradea.ro/arhiva-ro-9-2-2019.html.  
Vincent, Diane, Martel, Guylaine. (2001), « Particules métadiscursives et autres modes langagières : des cas de changement linguistique », TRANEL, 34/35, p. 141-152.
Vlad, Daciana (2019), « Proposition parenthétiques à fonctionnement métaénonciatif en français et leurs équivalents roumains », in Cécile Avezard-Roger, Céline Corteel, Jan Goes et Belinda Lavieu-Gwozdz, La phrase. Carrefour linguistique et didactique, Artois Presses Université, p. 109-127.

Guidelines for contributors

Contributors are invited to submit an abstract (in French or English) of about one page, references included. The authors’ names and affiliations should be mentioned. Abstracts should be sent by April 1st, 2022 to petrasac@yahoo.com and cristina.petras@uaic.ro

A selection of the papers presented at the conference will be published by an international publisher. 

Deadlines 

  • December 10, 2021 – first call for papers 
  • January 20 2022 – second call for papers 
  • April 1st, 2022 – abstract submission deadline 
  • April 15, 2022 – notification to contributors 
  • June 8-9, 2022 – conference

Organizing committee

  • Cristina Petraș, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași
  • Sonia Berbinski, University of Bucharest / Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași
  • Daciana Vlad, Université of Oradea / Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași
  • Raluca Balațchi, Ștefan cel Mare University of Suceava / Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS_Metalinguistic markers

(Posted 9 February 2022)


INTERFACES: Representing Human and Environmental Vulnerability in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
University of Granada, Spain, 9-10 June 2022
Deadline for proposals: 20 December 2021

Since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center somberly inaugurated the new millennium, critical discourses on trauma, grieving and vulnerability have gained relevance in the academic sphere. The global dimension of these events was however based on their mediatic repercussion worldwide, rather than on the actual physical impact that they had on the world population. Throughout the following two decades of the twenty-first century, intersecting environmental, economic and technological developments into globalization are revealing a heightened awareness of a similarly global vulnerability that visibilize embodied forms of ongoing trauma, public grieving and structural oppression of precarious life forms and environmental conditions. These stand against the backdrop of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4th IR), which is ambiguously put forward as either the origin or solution of this situation. The last two years of SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic have intensified the interdependence of virtual connection and social alienation/exclusion relating techno-digital hyperconnectedness and embodied forms of existence, giving a new sense to the concept of “risk society” developed at the turn of the century (Beck 1992; Giddens 1998).

In this conference, we aim to identify and critically explore the forms of human and environmental vulnerabilities that are generated in the context of the 4th IR, including vulnerable forms of human and non-human intersubjectivity as online embodied (onlife) interfaces or “inforgs” (Maynard 2015), precarious life and working conditions resulting from the global dimension of the 4th IR, environmental forms of vulnerability in the 4th IR, the role of the pandemic in raising awareness about global vulnerability, or the hierarchical naturecultures (Haraway 2003) emerging from transhumanist ethics. This conference will focus on literary and filmic discourses that represent human and environmental vulnerabilities as the object of aesthetic spectacularization (Garland-Thomson 1997, 2017) in an information-saturated trade market, with special incidence on forms of human vulnerability based on economic and environmental precariousness (Butler 2004; 2009; Butler et al. 2016; Butler 2020) as well as disability. It will also explore the instrumentalization as a narrative prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2000) of human and ecological vulnerability as in the construction of the transhumanist ideologies underlying most of 4th IR from a posthumanist critical perspective.

Suggested topics for papers might include but are not restricted to:
• COVID19: Grieving through The Great Reset
• Onlife Vulnerable Economies and Vulnerable Embodiments
• Narrative and Digital Prosthesis
• Glitch as vulnerability in Digital Compositions
• Vulnerable Naturecultures
• Online Exposure and Spectacular Vulnerabilities
• Global Economies and Environmental Precarity
• Neoliberal Economies and Digital Precarity
• Online Transparency as a form of political and subjective vulnerability
• Liquidity and Vulnerability
• New Human and Environmental Ontologies (bioart, biotechnologies, bioethics)
• Consumerist ethics: global food and information markets
• Gendered Inforgs
• Singularity and Difference
• New risk societies: threats to democracy, threats to intimacy
• Animal vulnerability

There will be two different participation modalities:
• On-site participation at the university of Granada with a 20-minute paper plus 10-minute discussion.
• Online participation: delegates will record their presentations and upload them to the conference website, where they will be available during the celebration of the conference.

Scholars interested can submit their proposals to the email address graco.hum676@ugr.es, specifying in the email subject: Interfaces Conference. Proposals in pdf format must include the following information: 1) tentative title, 2) abstract (400-500 words including works cited), 3) the participation modality (onsite or online), and 4) a bionote (maximum 200 words, including contact details, institutional affiliation, research interests and most relevant/recent publications). This document must be entitled with the scholar’s surname and name. Example: Beck_Ulrick.pdf

Deadlines:
• Abstract Submission: Dec 20, 2021
• Notification of Acceptance: Jan 31, 2022

Registration fees:
• Onsite: 100€
• Online 75€

This conference is organized by the Research Group GRACO: Studies in Literature, Criticism and Culture (HUM676) and funded by the European Union and the Andalusian Government under Research Project “INTERFACES” (P20_00008)

(Posted 21 July 2021)


“Beginnings” – the 15th annual NFEAP summer conference
Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes, Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Oslo, Norway, 9-10 June 2022
Deadline for abstracts: 15 March 2022

We are pleased to announce the 15th annual Norwegian Forum for English for Academic Purposes summer conference, which will take place on Thursday the 9th and Friday the 10th of June 2022 at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Oslo, Norway.

The theme for the 2022 conference is Beginnings.

To write is to begin. No matter how experienced the writer, one must always begin, and begin again. And perhaps no writer – whatever their experience – is ever entirely safe from the anguishing feeling of beginning for the first time, regardless of how many times they have begun before. NFEAP this year takes the opportunity to think about all the beginnings that take place in academic writing and development – the beginning of a text, the beginning of a sentence, the beginning of a seminar, of an undergraduate degree, of an academic career. What do we, as EAP practitioners, have to say about the many beginnings of academic development, the drafts and redrafts, false starts, beginner’s luck?

We welcome work that tackles any kind of academic beginning, in relation to EAP theory and practice. We invite proposals that explore EAP concepts; EAP training methods, principles, practices and research; needs analysis, syllabus and materials design, teaching strategies and methodological issues; group/interdisciplinary teaching; critical EAP; e-learning and technology; academic identities; academic literacies; any other relevant topics. 

Plenary speakers:

Please submit your abstract of no more than 300 words by March 15th, 2022 by following this link. The standard length for presentations is 30 minutes (20 minutes for presentation, plus 10 minutes for discussion). You will be notified of the outcome of the review process by April 1st 2022.

Ann Torday Gulden Scholarship

Ann Torday Gulden has been, for many years, a tireless and vital advocate for EAP in Norway, and this scholarship is named in her honour. This annual scholarship contributes up to 5000 NOK to the expenses of an EAP teacher or researcher to come to the conference and present their work. We seek to support work that is distinctive and original and that exemplifies innovative approaches to EAP theory and practice. It is open to all, but we particularly encourage graduate students and early career researchers to apply – please check the box in the submissions form if you would like to be considered for the scholarship.

Registration

The 2000 NOK conference registration fee includes refreshments and lunch for both days of the conference and the conference dinner on Thursday evening.

Please note that the NFEAP is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

We would like to thank you in advance for your contribution to the 15th NFEAP summer conference and look forward to having the opportunity to discuss and disseminate your work.

Important dates

  • Registration opens: March 2022
  • Deadline for abstracts:  15 March 2022
  • Notification of acceptance: 1 April 2022
  • Conference programme available: mid-April 2022
  • Deadline for registration: 20 May 2022
  • NFEAP conference 2022: 9th-10th June 2022

We very much hope that NFEAP 2022 will be an in person, face to face conference, and that is what we are planning at the moment. But if increased restrictions on travel or gatherings make that impractical, we will move to an online format.

(Posted 26 January 2022)


Virginia Woolf and Ethics: 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf
Lamar University (Beaumont, TX, USA), June 9-12, 2022
Deadline for papers and panels: 31 January 2022

The 31st annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf takes as its theme “Virginia Woolf and Ethics,” and aims to promote conversation about the topic across disciplinary boundaries. We hope to explore Woolf’s engagement with specific ethical issues in her writing. These may include, but are not limited to, war and pacifism, human rights, human-animal relations, environmental ethics, bioethics, fascism, empire, patriarchy, racism, and bigotry.

The theme also suggests a reconsideration of Woolf in relation to various ethical approaches. For instance, participants may wish to read Woolf’s thought in conversation with care ethics, narrative ethics, moral psychology, moral imagination, moral luck, virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, communitarianism, liberalism, religious or spiritual ethics (Christian, Quaker, Jewish, Buddhist, Indigenous, etc.), or other moral theories or concepts. Papers might address the moral philosophy of Woolf’s milieu, including the thought of Russell, Moore, or Leslie Stephen. Participants may wish to consider Woolf’s thought with continental theorists such as Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Badiou and others who address ethical concerns.

We invite participants to consider Woolf in relation to broader ethical considerations, such as the relation of ethics to reading practices (or to literature); ethics of teaching, scholarly community, and academic life; secularism, religion, and/or mysticism in Woolf’s thinking; and reading Woolf as an ethical (or social or political) theorist.

What might a Woolfian ethic look like? How might we read Woolf’s aesthetic practices in ethical terms (eg. narrative indeterminacy and the cultivation of certain forms of attention, moral imagination, or empathy)? How does Woolf navigate competing demands of justice, individual liberty and rights, and collectivity and social responsibility, in her fiction and non-fiction?

Papers on members of the Bloomsbury Group and other associates of Virginia Woolf in relation to the conference theme are also appropriate. We welcome proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops from scholars, students, artists, and common readers from all backgrounds and fields.

Abstracts of maximum 250 words for single papers and 500 words for panels, as well as questions, should be sent to Virginia.Woolf@lamar.edu by January 31, 2022.

The conference welcomes proposals for presentations in languages other than English to foster a more open exchange at this international conference. A few caveats: the organizers ask that all abstracts and proposals be submitted in English. Also, to ensure a more effective exchange among all participants, we ask that non-English presentations be accompanied by a handout of main points in English as well as (if possible) a PowerPoint presentation in English. Note that Q&A sessions will be conducted in English as well.

Possible topics and approaches may include:

  • Ethics and reading, ethics of reading
  • Ethical scholarly community and academic life
  • Woolf as ethical/social/political theorist
  • Human-animal relations, the natural world
  • Racism, patriarchy, and bigotry
  • The ethics of biography and life writing
  • Woolfian teaching, ethics in teaching
  • War, pacifism, fascism, empire, human rights
  • Narrative practices, reading experiences
  • Empathy, regard, attention
  • Individuality and collectivity
  • Knowledge, reason, objectivity, and certainty
  • Secularism, religion, and spirituality
  • A range of moral philosophies and concepts (listed above and extending further)

(Posted 10 September 2021)


The Seventh International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (virtually)
Ahwaz, Iran, 11-12 June 2022

The Conference Secretariat,
Ahwaz 61335-4619 Iran

(+98) 61-32931199
(+98) 61-32931198
(+98) 916-5088772 (Watts App Number)

Website: WWW.LLLD.IR

Email: info@pahi.ir

The Seventh International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (virtually) is organized by different universities and research centers and will be conducted virtually.

The conference will be dedicated to current issues of linguistics, languages, dialects, literature and translation.

Academics and university lecturers are cordially invited to present their research regarding current issues of linguistics, languages, dialects, literature and translation in English, Arabic or Persian.

The full papers of the conference will be published as the book of conference (provided with International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and according to the Governmental Approval (The Ministry), and also will be indexed in CIVILICA (however, the book of abstracts will be published too).

(Posted 17 November 2022)


“Body Building / Building the Body in Literature” Conference.
OVALE, Junior Research Group (Sorbonne Université), Paris, France. 11 June 2022.
Deadline for abstracts: 15th April 2022.

Abstract : 400 words + mini bio-bibliography
Deadline : 15th April 2022
Notification of acceptance : end of April
Contact : laboratoire.ovale@gmail.com.

If the term bodybuilding as it is commonly used today refers to the development of muscles for competitive and aesthetic purposes, ‘bodybuilders’ were originally workers in automobile factories in charge of constructing the vehicle’s body at the end of the 19th century. The idea of bodybuilding would then pass from the world of automobile manufacturing to often extreme strengthening of muscles. First cast as a part of freak shows showcasing muscle men or strong men weightlifting for entertainment, the discipline gained popularity after the Second World war – especially in the United States – and now takes on a new level in the social media era in which looks and appearance play a central role. The very term bodybuilding implies that one’s body is not a given but part of a process, as it is being constructed and worked on. All in all, it is the product of efforts steered towards the cult of a muscled body whose  aesthetic cannot help but remind us of the Ancient Greek ideal physique (kalos kagathos). This body – especially the masculine or male one – becomes the centerpiece of a spectacle or a show. If the competitive disciplineof bodybuilding is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about this word, the interpretation of the term is open to more than one aspect regarding the body: the literary body, the body of the text, the body politic, the corpus, etc. The idea of bodybuilding questions the construction of body and bodies. We will thus speak about body building, separating the terms to better confront them and open them up to various interpretations.

The idea of body building is a multi-faceted  and cross-disciplinary one. If the body is indeed its central tenet, the concept does invite one to play with the boundaries of what defines a body and to (re)consider one’s situation in relation to it. Precariousness, vulnerability, which can go as far as dismemberment and destruction can be lines of thought to ponder over the body. Yet one can reflect upon it in the light of its rematerialization, be it metaphorical by means of literature, or practical by means of technology and science (from cosmetics to prosthetics). All in all, transformed or frozen, constructed, deconstructed, or de-constructed, the body becomes a continual process, always transitioning towards something else, gestating, always in the making

Axes of research

Writing the body in literature 

How to write, describe and stage the body in literary works? Evoking bodies is certainly a pivotal challenge for writers: though silent and invisible on the page, conveying its image can become somewhat of a Sisyphean enterprise. Constantly metamorphosing, the protean body as an object of writing seems difficult to inscribe in the body of the text as much as in the general corpus. The description of body or bodies does however seem to be a literary staple within the scope of the readers’ expectations. From the character’s accoutrements ? to the (sometimes erotic) catalogue of its features or from the individual to the crowd, the writer’s building of a body questions the idea of embodiment. Be that as it may, this presence / absence of the body in literature is still challenged in theatre, a genre which births the text as incarnated through the body, its voice and its presence.

Building the body in literature 

The body is constructed and reconstructed in poetry – the blazon in the Renaissance voicing the writer’s adoration for it – or in novels – the realist novel being first among them. However, the first science-fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is certainly the one which first anticipates transhumanist and eugenicist issues at the heart of mid-20th century dystopias as well as speculative fictions which present their readers with hybrid bodies. Noticeably, contemporary and postmodern literature gives unparalleled tools to writers for them to model the body after unique expressions of new subjectivities. Be it sick, in pain, atrophied, ageing, misshapen or on the contrary healthy, unimpaired, strong, lively, the building of the body then operates within the same mechanical logic that is behind body building. When mankind becomes in charge of its own (re)birth and own identity, body building questions the embodiment of gender and sexuality in the flesh.

Building the body politic in literature

Indeed, literature does not limit itself to the writing and representation of physical bodies being built: it also shows how the body is built and modelled through ideological and sociohistorical dynamics. Thus, Foucault defines the body as a biopolitical matter, set at the crossroads between knowledge, power and desire. In his wake, Body Studies strive to demonstrate the way power dynamics determine the body and its representation, particularly its social, gendered, racial and sexual fabric. As such, the way literary discourse is part of this biopolitical building of the body is at the centre of our reflections. A space to navigate and challenge dogmas and norms, literature becomes a playing field for a transgressive (re)building(s) of the body. Reflecting on body politics also means reinterpreting the phrase ‘body building’ in its urban and civic meanings.

Literature as body

One must consider a final meaning to the idea behind the phrase ‘body building’: the building of the literary body of work, that is to say the body of the text itself. Stemming from the working body of the writer, texts constitute their own body in a singular manner that is worth exploring. How does one build a literary body, from the first drafts to the final publication? How to define and delineate the body of the text, starting with its unique textual and material aspects? The materiality or even corporeality of the written corpus is indeed at the core of those questions.

Cross-disciplinary aspects

The –ing ending to the verb to build instructs us to consider the construction or deconstruction of the body as a continuous process. Building the body or bodies is then a matter of development unfolding in time. The topic of bodybuilding invites itself to the interpretation of transformations involved in the process of the corporeal construction rather than to the final result, to the gestation as a whole rather than the event of the birth.

If OVALE is particularly interested in literature, the concept of  bodybuilding resonates with other art forms and enables the development of a dialog between them, hinging around a few cross-disciplinary issues.

  • Sculpture always seems to have played a pivotal role in the construction of bodies, however disincarnated they may be. The body is modelized, idealized, frozen in a 3D construction; and goes from researching the most perfect model in the tradition of Ancient Greece to pared-down, sinewy sculptures whereby the body is seen as desegregating (Giacometti)
  • Performances or happenings also come to mind, as they only exist through the body of their performers: they are using their body to make the artistic event come forward. Similarly, the reconstruction of one’s own body through artistic happenings is something of interest, for example in carnivals, drag queens and kings performances, freaks shows and cross-dressing. The building and rebuilding of the body are thus at the very centre of issues of individual and social identities.

In our contemporary times especially, photography and cinema put debates about the gaze laid on the body to the forefront, as it is built through frames and shots. The choice of the gaze, be it female or male, interrogates the settings of how spectacle builds and monstrates the body: its is shown, unveiled, sometimes concealed. Last but not least, building also refers to the city and its buildings, or rather its constructions (works). Again, the grammar behind the deverbal noun ‘building’ implies that those buildings are always part of a process and never cease to transmute. What is the body of a building? How does individuals’ bodies make one with that of the city?

Editorial committee

Line Cottegnies,
Frédéric Regard,
Alexis Tadié,
Alice Clabaut,
Marie Duic &
Quitterie de Beauregard

Bibliography 

Abirached R., La Crise du personnage dans le théâtre moderne. Paris : Grasset, coll. Tel, 1994.
Artaud A., Le Théâtre et son double. Paris : Gallimard, 1985.
Bakhtine, Mikhaïl. L’oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance. Paris : Gallimard, 2008.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge : Polity Press, 2013.
Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1993.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York : Routledge, 1993
———. Gender Trouble. New York ; Londres : Routledge, 1999.
Cregan K., The Theatre of the Body: Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early-Modern London. Turnhout : Brepols Publishers, 2009.
Corbin, Alain. Courtine, Jean-Jacques et G. Vigarello, Georges. Histoire du corps, Paris, Seuil, 2006
Doyle, Laura. Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1994.
Fahy T. R., King K., Peering Behind the Curtain: Disability, Illness, and the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theater. New York ; Londres : Routledge, 2016.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body : Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Première édition. New York : Basic Books, 2000.
Fintz, Claude. ‘Les imaginaires des corps dans la relation littéraire’. Littérature n° 153, no. 1 (2009) : 114–31.
Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la sexualité, tome 1 : La Volonté de savoir. Paris : Gallimard, 1994.
———. La Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France. Paris : Le Seuil, 2004.
Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1987.
Grotowski J., Vers un théâtre pauvre. Lausanne : La Cité, 1971.
Haraway, Donna J. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81. New York ; Londres : Routledge, 1991.
Hillman, David, and Ulrika Maude. The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Jouvet L., Le Comédien désincarné. Paris : Flammarion, 1954.
Kristeva, Julia. Pouvoirs de l’horreur : essai sur l’abjection. Collection ‘Tel quel’. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1980.
Lanser, Susan S. ‘Sexing the Narrative: Propriety, Desire, and the Engendering of Narratology’. Narrative 3, no. 1 (1995 ): 85–94.
Laqueur Thomas, La fabrique du sexe. Essai sur le corps et le genre en Occident, Paris, Gallimard, 1992 (éd. orig. : New York, 1990).
Le Breton, David. Signes d’identité. Tatouages, piercings et autres marques corporelles, Paris, Éditions Métailié, 2002.
Markotić, Nicole. Disability in Film and Literature. Jefferson : McFarland, 2016.
Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In Feminism and Film Theory, Constance Penley., 57–68. New York : Routledge, 1988.
O’Quinn,. Daniel et Tadié, Alexis, Sporting cultures, 1650-1850, University of Toronto Press, 2018.
Pluchard, François. L’Art corporel, Paris, Limage 2, 1983.
Préjean Marc, Sexes et pouvoir. La construction sociale des corps et des émotions, Montréal, Les presses de l’université de Montréal, 1994.
Salzman E. and Desi T., The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008.
Schwarzenegger, Arnold. The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding: The Bible of Bodybuilding, Fully Updated and Revised. New York : S&S International, 1999.
Stone, Sandy. ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto’. In Body Guards : The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Julia Epstein et Kristina Staub. New York : Routledge, 1991
Vigarello, Georges. Le sentiment de soi: histoire de la perception du corps, XVIe-XXe siècle, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2014
Vigarello, Georges. Histoire de la beauté: le corps et l’art d’embellir de la Renaissance à nos jours, Paris, Seuil, 2004

(Posted 6 June 2022)


Religious Totalitarianism, Utopic and Dystopic Inclusive/Exclusive Communities
Sapienza Symposium, Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies,Rome, Italy, 16-17 June 2022
Deadline for proposals 15 March 2022

Social integration is a process through which societies can promote their values, institutions, and relations. It helps people to engage in social, economic, cultural, and political life which are grounded on dignity, equality, and equity. Through social integration, governments foster societies that are safe, just, and stable. In these types of societies, there is no space for discrimination or violence, but everything is based on solidarity, security, and participation of all people, including disadvantaged and vulnerable groups. Social inclusion is a process through which equal rights for all are ensured. Each individual has his/her own right to achieve his/her own full potential despite his/her background.  Social inclusion helps people to actively participate in all aspects of life; i.e., economic, social, civic, or political activities. “An inclusive society is a society that over-rides differences of race, gender, class, generation, and geography, and ensures inclusion, equality of opportunity as well as capability of all members of the society to determine an agreed set of social institutions that govern social interaction” (Expert Group Meeting on Promoting Social Integration, Helsinki, July 2008). The World Summit for Social Development (Copenhagen 1995) defines an inclusive society as a “society for all in which every individual, each with rights and responsibilities, has an active role to play”. To have an inclusive society, religious diversity, social justice, freedom of thoughts, and care for vulnerable and disadvantaged groups must be respected. By embracing religious diversity, racial diversity, and various groups of people, tolerance will be increased in the society and inequality will be reduced. People have the right to education, to political participation, and above all to take part in a political process. In an inclusive society, each individual can engage in the process by which society is managed, ordered, and represented.

Moreover, each individual has the right to basic education, public space, facilities, and information. An inclusive society respects diversity and cultural pluralism. By respecting diversity, an inclusive society avoids labeling, categorizing, and classifying people.

While an inclusive society respects diversity and multiculturalism, exclusive society values specific groups, cultures, races, or languages. In an exclusive society, people do not have the right to actively participate in social activities or to have the right to speak. People might even lose their access to education, decent work, land, or any other kind of opportunities. Dreams of inclusive communities have proven attractive to many people from politicians to sociologists to psychologists to writers and religious visionaries. While inclusive societies embrace all religions, some regimes consider one religion as the only truth and the whole community faces territorialization of faith and each individual cannot practice what he believes in. Religion plays a myriad of roles in shaping a community; utopian communities in which a religion unifies all people and sets peace among them or a dystopian community where the regime sets its oppressive rules by claiming to follow Holy books.

Some novels, deal with religion and its dystopic misuse which leads to exclusive societies; one can mention Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Besides dystopic novels, there are some utopic novels which focus on religion and building an inclusive society, among those novels one can mention Robin Jenkin’s The Missionaries (1957), Iain Banks’ Culture series, Tobias Jones’ Utopian Dreams (2007), and David Bramwell’s The No9 Bus to Utopia (2014). In our upcoming conference, we intend to focus on these dystopic and utopic novels which mainly focus on the effect of religion in creating inclusive/exclusive communities. We are largely affected by politics, religion, and ideologies. While feminism, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and sociology studies, on these and similar novels, are flourishing, the examination of religion and its importance to creating inclusive/exclusive communities is being neglected. In our conference, we intend to focus on the role of literature, language, and media in portraying dystopic and utopic inclusive/exclusive communities with an eye on the role of religion. The conference aims at populating this specific area of studies by attracting contributions that analyze, from the point of view of religion, the texts and media which deal with creating inclusive/exclusive communities.

We invite graduate & postgraduate students interested in these issues to join us in the reconsideration of any of the following:

  • Religion and comparative literature
  • Dystopic and utopic literature and religion
  • Inclusive/exclusive communities in movies, and tv series
  • Literature as a means of creating inclusive communities
  • Social media and inclusive/exclusive communities
  • Language, religion, and inclusive/exclusive communities
  • Etc

Papers are welcomed from but are not limited to:

  • World Literature
  • Cultural Studies
  • Translation studies
  • Linguistics
  • Religious studies
  • Political studies
  • Media studies
  • Comparative studies

Proposals for each individual paper should be approx. 300 words long. Please send also a 200- word bio for each participant. Please send your proposal by 15th March 2022 to: inclusiveexclusivesociety2022@gmail.com
Each presentation should not exceed 15 minutes followed by 5 minutes of Q and A.

The registration fee for each participant would be 60 Euros.

The keynote speakers of the event are:

  • Elena Lamberti: Associate Professor in Anglo-American literature, Università di Bologna
  • Daniel    A.    Finch-Race    FHEA:     Assistant     Professor     in     Geography     (RTDa ‘Green’),  Università di Bologna

(Posted 15 December 2021)


Coaching-oriented Online Resources for Autonomous Learning
University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague, Czech Republic, 16 – 17 June 2022
Extended deadline for submissions: 25 May 2022

We cordially invite you to join the international conference CORALL – Coaching-oriented Online Resources for Autonomous Learning. The conference will take place in person at the School of Business UCT Prague, 16 -17 June 2022. This meeting of scholars, researchers, and educators will offer a unique opportunity to discuss the current trends in collaborative interdisciplinary learning and teaching

Keynotes:

  • Prof. David Little, Trinity College Dublin
  • Lenka Zouhar Ludvíková, PhD., Mendel University Brno

We are inviting participants to submit papers on the following topics: • Approaches to learner autonomy

  • Autonomous learning skills in online environments
  • Collaborative autonomy
  • Coaching-oriented language learning
  • Assessment and learner autonomy

Registration: You can register and/or submit abstracts for a 15-minute presentation (180 – 200 words) including a short academic bio (80 – 100 words) via the following REGISTRATION FORM

Deadline for submissions: 25 May 2022

The conference is part of the Erasmus + CORALL – Coaching-oriented Online Resources for Autonomous Learning 2019-1-HU01-KA203-061070 project which covers the conference fee.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference website.

Venue:

University of Chemistry and Technology, Building A, Technická 5, Prague 6, Czech Republic.

Contact: 

  • Magda Matušková (magda.matuskova@vscht.cz)
  • Hana Pavelková (hana.pavelkova@vscht.cz)
  • Martin Štefl (martin.stefl@vscht.cz)

(Posted 21 June 2022)


Learn To Change – International Symposium On Participatory Pedagogy
University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague, Czech Republic. 16 June 2022,
Extended deadline for submissions: 25 May 2022

We cordially invite you to join the international symposium LEARN TO CHANGE – INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PARTICIPATORY PEDAGOGY. The symposium will take place in person at the School of Business UCT Prague, 16 June 2022. This meeting of scholars, researchers, and educators will offer a unique opportunity to discuss the current trends in participatory pedagogy and collaborative interdisciplinary learning and teaching. 

Keynote: Daniel Libertin (C3 Prague, Creative Code and Content Agency) 

We are inviting participants to submit papers on the following topics: 

  • Participatory Pedagogy 
  • Digital storytelling and sustainability pedagogies 
  • Digital collaborative pedagogies for the Covid era and beyond 
  • Learner-centred and participatory approaches to fostering sustainability competencies Multidisciplinary co-creation networks 
  • Collaborative digital storytelling for sustainable change 

Registration: You can register and/or submit abstracts for a 15-minute presentation (180–200 words) including a short academic bio (80–100 words) via the following REGISTRATION FORM

Deadline for submissions: 25 May 2022 

The symposium is part of the Erasmus + Learn to Change – Collaborative Digital Storytelling for Sustainable Change 2020-1-FI01-KA226-HE-092760 project which covers the conference fee. For more details about the symposium, please follow: Learn to Change Symposium website

Venue: University of Chemistry and Technology, Building A, Technická 5, Prague 6, Czech Republic. 

Contact

  • Magda Matušková (magda.matuskova@vscht.cz) 
  • Hana Pavelková (hana.pavelkova@vscht.cz) 
  • Martin Štefl (martin.stefl@vscht.cz)

(Posted 21 April 2022)


Shakespeare, Austen and audiovisual translation: the classics translated on screen
Roma, Italy, 30 June – 2 July 2022
Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2022

Jane Austen and Shakespeare are twin icons whose afterlives have been declined in strikingly similar ways, something particularly evident in the proliferation of film and television adaptations of their novels and plays (Wifall 2010), which have allowed us to explore fruitfully the ‘‘intersecting cultural legacies’’  of this “unique duo” (Wells 2010).

If the scope, diversity and originality of Shakespearean adaptations is one of a kind, virtually creating a distinct sub-topic within film studies (Keyishian 2000), the generally more ‘direct’ (with notable exceptions) transpositions from Jane Austen and other multifariously adapted classic authors, especially from the nineteenth century (from Dickens to Tolstoy, from Hardy to Maupassant), arguably equal the bard’s in filmic popularity and have also spawned a plethora of academic research in the field of adaptation studies.  Jane Austen’s characters, for example, have been appropriated in every medium, from cinema, to TV, to graphic novels and video games so that “at this point in the twenty-first century [they] have exceeded the boundaries of her novels and have become modern types or ideals, and her titles, phrases, and haunts have become part of the public sphere” (Garber 2003: 208).

While adaptation and intersemiotic studies about the classics on screen have been flourishing (see for example several essays in Leitch 2017), audiovisual translation (AVT) has comparatively neglected adapted classics, arguably preferring to focus on contemporary TV series, video games and films of all times not necessarily referred to an illustrious hypotext.

AVT incursions into adapted literature, however, include studies on popular TV series such as Sherlock (Rodríguez Domínguez & Silvia Martínez Martínez 2015), Detective Montalbano (Bruti&Ranzato 2019, Dore 2017, Taffarel 2012) and The Game of Thrones (Hayes 2021, Iberg 2017, Rivera Trigueros & del Mar Sanchez 2019); the subtitling and/or dubbing of adaptations from the novels by Jane Austen (Bianchi 2016, Sandrelli 2019), Emily Brontë (Almeida et at. 2019), Miguel de Cervantes (Ariza 2018), Charles Dickens (LIang 2020), Henryk Sienkiewicz (Woźniak 2017); from the plays by William Shakespeare (Anselmi 1999, Díaz Cintas 1995, Dwi Hastuti 2015, Ranzato 2011, Sellent Arús 1997, Soncini 2002 and 2008) and their rewritings, commentaries or children’s adaptations (Bruti & Vignozzi 2016, Minutella 2016); and from contemporary classics from The Great Gatsby (Gilic 2020, Vula 2018) to For Whom the Bell Tolls (Zanotti 2019), Little Women (Bruti & Vignozzi 2021) and Harry Potter (Dewi 2016, Liang 2018).

This conference aims at populating this specific area of studies by attracting contributions which analyse, from the point of view of AVT, the audiovisual texts that relate to the words, the language and the characterisations that inspired them, those penned by the most adapted authors such as Shakespeare and Austen, and those featured in the classics of all times and cultures.

We thus encourage AVT analyses of films/TV/video games:

  • based on the plays by William Shakespeare;
  • based on the novels by Jane Austen;
  • based on the novels and short stories which have attracted the attention of directors and writers over the years, including but not limited to: Louisa M. Alcott, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan-Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, M. Forster, Henry James, John le Carré, C.S, Lewis, Ian McEwan, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, J.K. Rowling, Mary Shelley, John Steinbeck, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, William Makepeace Thackeray, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, to mention just a few of those authors whose individual works have benefited from multiple readings;
  • based on the plays by popular playwrights, including but not limited to: Alan Ayckbourn, J.M. Barrie, Noël Coward, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Terence Rattigan, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, to mention just a few English-speaking authors who are both widely adapted and some of them adapters for the cinema;
  • based on the works by classic and contemporary classic authors from all over the world as adapted in their respective languages and into English, including but not limited to: Isabel Allende, Honoré de Balzac, Georges Bernanos, Michail Bulgàkov, Andrea Camilleri, Anton Čechov, Miguel de Cervantes, Fëdor Dostoevskij, Alexandre Dumas, Elena Ferrante, Gustave Flaubert, Gabriel García Márquez, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Guanzhong, Sadegh Hedayat, Victor Hugo, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Alessandro Manzoni, Guy de Maupassant, Houshang Moradi Kermani, Haruki Murakami, Alberto Savinio, Arthur Schnitzler, Leonardo Sciascia, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Georges Simenon, Stendhal, Lev Tolstòj, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Wu Cheng’en, Émile Zola, to mention just some of the most cinematographically popular authors.

We welcome proposals from the following areas of study:

  • subtitling
  • dubbing
  • voiceover
  • subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH);
  • audio description;
  • accessibility and new technologies in AVT;
  • censorship and ideological manipulation in AVT;
  • AVT as a pedagogical tool for language teaching and learning;
  • gender studies in AVT;
  • reception and perception studies in AVT;
  • historical and genetic studies in AVT;
  • all linguistic approaches to AVT with special relevance to the analysis of standard and nonstandard language varieties.

References

Almeida, Paula Ramalho, Sara Cerqueira Pascoal, and Suzana Noronha Cunha. 2019. “Wuthering Heights on the Screen: Exploring the Relations Between Film Adapatation and Subtitling.” POLISSEMA – Revista De Letras Do ISCAP 11: 215–243.
Anselmi, Michela. 1999. “Metamorfosi di un Testo: Transposizione e Doppiaggio di Much ado about nothing nel film di Kenneth Branagh.” In Quaderni di Doppiagio 2, edited by Bruno Paolo Astori, 15-52. Finale Ligure: Voci nell’ Ombra.
Ariza, Mercedes. 2018. “Donkey Xote Cabalga Distinto en España y en Italia: Reflexiones Sobre la Intertextualidad Audiovisual.” Journal of Literary Education 1: 58-78. DOI: https://ojs.uv.es/index.php/JLE/article/view/12252.
Bianchi, Francesca. 2016. “Subtitling Jane Austen: Pride & Prejudice by Joe Wright.” In Pride and Prejudice: A Bicentennial Bricolage, edited by Caterina Colomba. Udine: Forum.
Bruti, Silvia, and Gianmarco Vignozzi. 2016. “Voices from the Anglo-Saxon World: Accents and Dialects Across Film Genres.” Status Quaestionis 11. North and South: British Dialects in Fictional Dialogue, edited by Irene Ranzato, 42-74.
Bruti, Silvia, and Irene Ranzato. 2019. “Italian Dialetti in Audiovisual Translation: Perspectives on Three Quality TV Series.” In Ragusa e Montalbano: Voci del territorio in traduzione audiovisiva, edited by Massimo Sturiale, Giuseppe Traina, and Maurizio Zignale, 341-364. Ragusa: Fondazione Cesare e Doris Zipelli-Euno Edizioni.
Bruti, Silvia, and Gianmarco Vignozzi. 2021. “The Representation of Spoken Discourse in Little Women: A Journey through its Original and Dubbed Adaptations.” Textus 34 (1): 23-46.
Dewi, Indry Caesarria. 2016. “Audiovisual Translation of English Idioms in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Movie: An Analysis of English to Indonesian Subtitles.” Passage 4 (1): 56-69.
Díaz Cintas, Jorge. 1995. “El subtitulado de Hamlet al castellano.” Sendebar 6: 147-158.
Dore, Margherita. 2017. “Subtitling Catarella: Camilleri’s Humour Travels to the UK and the USA.” In Translation Studies and Translation Practice: Proceedings of the second international Translata Conference, 2014, edited by Stauder Zybatow and Michael Ustaszewski, 43-51. Peter Lang.
Dwi Hastuti, Endang. 2015. “An Analysis on Subtitling of Romeo and Juliet Movie.” Register 8 (1): 57-80.
Garber, Marjorie. 2003. The Jane Austen Syndrome. London/ New York: Routledge.
Gilic, Refika Zuhal. 2020. A Descriptive Study of AVT Under Skopos Theory: The Film Adaptation of Great Gatsby (2013 version) and Its Cultural Reflections in Translations From English to Turkish. Ankara: Gece Publishing.
Hayes, Lydia. 2021. “Bastard of the North or Kingg uv th’ Nohrth? /ˈbɑː.stəd/ /frɒm/ /də/ /nɔːθ/ or /kɪŋg/ /ɪn/ /də/ /nɒːθ/.” In The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts, edited by Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato. London/ New York: Routledge.
Iberg, Sofia. 2018. “A Game of Languages: The Use of Subtitles for Invented Languages in Game of Thrones.” In Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation, edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti, 184-200. London/ New York: Routledge.
Keyishian, Harry. 2000. “Shakespeare and Movie Genre: the Case of Hamlet.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, 72–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leitch, Thomas. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Liang, Lisi. 2018. “Subtitling Harry Potter’s Fantastic World: Linguistic and Cultural Transfer from Britain to China in a Subtitled Children’s Film.” Transletters. International Journal of Translation and Interpreting 2: 89-113.
Liang, Lisi. 2020. “Reshaping History: Cultural and Temporal Transfer in a Heritage Film Oliver Twist (2005).” Journal of Audiovisual Translation 3 (1): 26-49.
Minutella, Vincenza. 2016. “British Dialects in Animated Films: The Case of Gnomeo & Juliet and its Creative Italian Dubbing.” Status Quaestionis 11. North and South: British Dialects in Fictional Dialogue, edited by Irene Ranzato, 222-259.
Ranzato, Irene. 2011. “Manipulating the Classics: Film Dubbing as an Extreme Form of Rewriting.” In Challenges for the 21st Century: Dilemmas, Ambiguities, Directions, edited by Richard Ambrosini, Stefania Nuccorini, and Franca Ruggieri, 573-581. Roma: Edizioni Q.
Rivera Trigueros, Irene, and María del Mar Sánchez-Pérez. 2019. “Conquering the Iron Throne: Using Classcraft to Forster Students’ Motivation in the EFL Classroom.” Teaching English with Technology 20 (2): 3-22.
Rodríguez Domínguez, Ana, and Silvia Martínez Martínez. 2015. “Irony in Sherlock (BBC, 2010): From Literary to Audiovisual Translation.” In Bestseller – Yesterday and Today: A Look from the Margin to the Center of Literary Studies, edited by Albrecht Classen and Eva Parra-Membrives, 159-171. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto.
Sandrelli, Annalisa. 2019. “Conversational routines in Jane Austen’s film and TV adaptations: A challenge for Italian dubbing.” In Worlds of Words: Complexity, Creativity, and Conventionality in English Language, Literature and Culture, volume I on Language, edited by Veronica Bonsignori, Gloria Cappelli, and Elisa Mattiello, 175-186. Pisa: Pisa University Press.
Sellent Arús, Joan. 1997. “Shakespeare Doblat: Molt Soroll per Res, de Kenneth Branagh.” Congrés Intemacional sobre Traducció, Bellaterra, UAB. Vol. 2, 267-279. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Soncini, Sara. 2002. “Shakespeare and Its Dubble: Cultural Negotiations in Italian Audio-visual Transfers of Henry V.” Textus English Studies in Italy 15 (1): 163–86.
Soncini, Sara. 2008. “Re-locating Shakespeare: Cultural Negotiations in Italian Dubbed Versions of Romeo and Juliet.” In Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions, edited by Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel, 235-248. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Taffarel, Margherita. 2012. “Un’analisi Descrittiva della Traduzione dei Dialoghi dei Personaggi di Andrea Camilleri in Castigliano.” inTRAlinea. Special Issue: The Translation of Dialects in Multimedia II, edited by Giovanni Nadiani and Chris Rundle.
Vula, Elsa. 2018. “The Implementation of Textual Coherence on the Albanian Subtitles of Great Gatsby Film.” European Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies 3 (4): 131-144.
Wells, Juliette. 2010. “From Schlockspeare to Austenpop.” Shakespeare 6 (4): 446-462.
Witfal, Rachel. 2010. “Introduction: Jane Austen and William Shakespeare –Twin icons?” Shakespeare 6 (4): 403-409.
Woźniak, Monika. 2017. “Lingua Latina su Labbra Americane: Il Dialogo Cinematografico di Quo Vadis Hollywoodiano.” In Quo Vadis la Prima Opera Transmediale. Atti del convegno 14-15 novembre 2016, edited by Elisabetta Gagetti and Monika Woźniak, 177-191. Rome: Accademia Polacca delle Scienze.
Zanotti, Serenella. 2018. “Archival Resources and Uncertainties in Film Retranslation Research.” Status Quaestionis 15. Exploring Audiovisual Retranslation, edited by Margherita Dore, 60-85.

  • Deadline for abstracts (300/400 words + short biosketch): 31 January 2022
  • Notification of acceptance: 28 February 2022
  • Steering committee: Irene Ranzato & Luca Valleriani
  • Scientific Committee: Francesca Bianchi, Jorge Díaz Cintas, Eva Espasa Borrás, Agata Hołobut, Vincenza Minutella, Donatella Montini, Monika Woźniak, Serenella Zanotti
  • Organising Committee: Margherita Dore, Davide Passa, Giovanni Raffa, Irene Ranzato, Luca Valleriani
  • Contact: avtclassics.sapienza@gmail.com
  • Website: https://web.uniroma1.it/seai/?q=it/node/4037

(Posted 25 October 2021)


“Visual Storytelling: From the Mural to the Digital” – International Conference
University of Aveiro (Portugal), 30 June – 1 July 2022
Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2022

International Conference
Visual Storytelling:  From the Mural to the Digital
University of Aveiro (Portugal), 30 June – 1 July 2022
https://www.iscap.pt/cei/VS/index.html

Organized by the Centre for Languages, Literatures and Cultures (CLLC), University of Aveiro, and the Centre for Intercultural Studies, Porto Accounting and Business School, Porto Polytechnic (CEI-ISCAP, P.PORTO)

We now live in a predominantly visual culture. Whether it be computer operating systems, with their visual equivalents for what for most of us are largely incomprehensible processing or algorithmic functions, or the wordless assembly procedures for an IKEA flatpack, we tend to take in the world and process it through images. This is not to deny the longevity and remarkable inheritance of oral traditions – only to say that the cave paintings and ancient runes have been there from the start too. Indeed, what does it mean to talk of “imagery” in writing except to suggest that the function of these verbal usages is to invite pictures in the head, pictures that may have a greater vitality than the words themselves. Conversely, when it comes to images, Eco claims, we are in the presence of macroscopic blocks of texts, whose verbal equivalent is not a simple word but a description, an entire speech, or even a whole book. 

Within this framework, visual culture is recurrently used as an epithet to describe our contemporary condition, deeply immersed in the world of images. Contemporary urban landscapes have become communicational ecosystems of visual languages made up of graffiti, street-art, advertising, signs, and propaganda. The central role of audiovisual technologies and media are one possible explanation for this state of affairs, along with the growing aestheticization of everyday life via social media, and a frustration with established avenues to expression and presence. Images and visual communication are the ideal means to construct narratives and confer symbolic meanings to the world, something well-understood by power brokers everywhere, from religions to authoritarian regimes, from people who want to sell things to us to people who want to tell things to us. 

The art of written storytelling from early literatures to the present day has been well covered in studies from the field of narratology. What this conference proposes is to participate in the current global conversation on storytelling through image from the modern period to the present and on into the future. 

Digital cultures are carrying us forward at a dizzying pace, and some of the anchorage provided by the written and spoken word may be loosening rapidly. Nicholas Mirzoeff speaks of a visualization of existence, already claiming before the end of the 20th Century that “modern life takes place onscreen […] seeing is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life” (An Introduction to Visual Culture. Routledge, 1999). 

But visual storytelling is not the invention of the present, nor of Europe. From the vivid graffiti found in Pompeii to the scroll narratives in Rajasthan known as Phad paintings, visual figurations of popular culture have always conferred symbolic meanings on the experiences and values ​​shared by  communities. The history of the graphic novel acknowledges forebears such as Hogarth’s series of narrative paintings in the 18thC. One might go on to reference the slideshow and silent cinema, both of which are (or are approaching) over 100 years old.  Victorian genre painting could also be cited, in which artists would attempt to encapsulate by detail and suggestion a dense narrative in a single canvas. Masque, ballet and mime could also be mentioned as forms of expression which use body and movement to convey a story in 3D space. But, it may be argued, it is in the 20th century that the image came into its own. Cheaper and more ubiquitous forms of photography, followed by the possibility of making home movies, and now of making them available for everyone to see, have followed upon greater technical sophistication in mechanical reproduction of the image, as Walter Benjamin noted so paradigmatically, changing the quantity of images we process and the nature of our reaction to them. If you add to this the penetration of the home by television since 1945 and the subsequent penetration of hearth and hand by the personal computer and the smartphone, we have a society which might feel (erroneously of course) that “it has seen it all”, or at least that it has all been made available to be seen if only we had enough life.

In the contemporary iteration of storytelling exemplified by video games the conceptualisation of narrative flared up into a wholesale revisiting of our relationship to stories, particularly when structured by the rules and challenges inherent in game progression. Even if the combat sequence of this controversy has given way to more of a puzzle-solving sequence, the issue of the significance of narrative remains distributed throughout video game studies like a health bar in constant need of attention.

The presumption behind the cryptic set of illustrations for descaling your coffee machine are that anyone anywhere can decode contemporary sign systems. The utopian elimination of writing may be further evidenced in the global sharing of popular culture references which are overwhelmingly visual. Even The Lord of the Rings is now more Peter Jackson’s construction of Tolkien the philologist’s text for most people; and arguably so now is any written text once it is transformed into a movie. Lolita is as much Sue Lyons’s sunglasses as it is Nabokov’s prose.

At the same time, local cultural variations and rerouting of these shared visualities both draw on and resist the presence of largely Western imageries and imaginaries. From Brazilian Hugo Canuto’s launching off Jack Kirby’s Avengers illustrations to animate the syncretic curating of West African mythologies in his Contos dos Orixás graphic novels, to the use of Indian pictographic traditions to tell the story of the abduction of Sita in Samhita Arni and Moyna Chitrakar’s Sita’s Ramayana, to the large number of children’s books which tell the stories of indigenous peoples with recourse to their traditions of line and colour palette, the availability of distinctive variants is larger than we might think in any medium we care to consider.

When we speak of visual culture and visual storytelling, we are referring to a system made up from a combination of universes and sub-universes, with their agents, objects and specific processes of production, dissemination, and reception. It is not a static system, but one whose constant renewal results from the rate at which its agents and technological processes change. It is also a worldview, a particular way of perceiving and portraying reality, that is not only connected to forms of seeing, but also to modes of representation which appeal to different languages, cognitive levels and sensory models. We may even admit the existence of diverse visual microcultures that correspond not so much to different social groups as to different moments of social life, aesthetic and ideological proposals, interests and intentions, which present alternative, though not necessarily antagonistic, ways of seeing and representing the world. 

It is therefore proposed to hold an international conference on Visual Storytelling to continue the conversation on how the forms and techniques of artistic, technical and commercial production are evolving from primordial instances to modern articulations of visual narrative expression. Visually narrated stories are embedded in networks of political, economic, ideological and social circumstances, far too often hardly detectable, even by those who draw, paint, photograph or write (and live) under their influence. They have also been reinvented as profitable cultural symbols of territories dominated by tourism and globalization, very distant from their origins. Whatever we look at involves affect, according to James Elkins. How this affect is evoked, gestured to or animated must be of interest to analysis if we are not to be carried along by the multiple narrative forms proposed to us, invited by us and forced onto us.

Papers are accordingly invited on specific aspects of the following topics, in rough chronological order:

  • Stage and live performance narratives
  • Visual storytelling in traditional arts and crafts
  • Storytelling in the plastic arts
  • Narrating the landscape: from recording travel to the age of Instagram
  • Museums, physical and virtual 
  • Photographic narrative forms
  • Cinema – from the silent days to modern digital and CGI forms
  • Graphic Novels 
  • Comic Books and comic strips
  • Cartoons
  • Children’s books
  • Television – entertainment, news media and the use of the image
  • Music videos – narrating the song
  • Storytelling in advertising and marketing
  • The campaign video
  • Visual Narratives on/of the city: graffiti and street art
  • Video Game narratives
  • YouTube and online filmmaking
  • Graphic fan fiction
  • The business of visual storytelling

We welcome submissions in English, by the 31st March 2022, to be sent to Professors David Callahan (callahan@ua.pt) and Clara Sarmento (clarasarmento@gmail.com) with the following information:

  • Title;
  • Author(s), institutional affiliation, contact email(s);
  • Conference topic (see list above);
  • Abstract (200 words);
  • Bionote (100 words).

Registration fees:

  • 100 euros – employed academics 
  • 50 euros – graduate students
  • Registration is free for members of CLLC, U.Aveiro and CEI, ISCAP-P.PORTO

Confirmed keynote speakers:

  • Hanna Musiol, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim 
  • Miguel Sicart, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

(Posted 27 January 2022)