cfp.english.upenn.edu

FACING PRESENT, PAST AND FUTURE

4TH INTERNATIONAL BAAHE CONFERENCE

1-3 December 2011

University College Brussels, Belgium

The Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE) is organising its fourth international conference from 1 to 3 December 2011 at the Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel (University College Brussels), Belgium. Celebrating the association’s 30th anniversary, the interdisciplinary conference Facing Present, Past and Future aims to map the various ways researchers deal with the challenges they are faced with in the research fields of English Linguistics, English Literature, Translation and Interpretation Studies and ELT. Approaches and topics for papers include but are not limited to the suggestions below. Note that contributions that explore interfaces between these disciplines are particularly encouraged.

Literature

- Facing the Other: historical representations of otherness in literatures in English
- Representations of time and Janus’ double-facedness in literature: theoretical approaches (narratological, psychoanalytic, impact of ritual, forms of commemoration vs. forgetting, …)
- Authorial and narratorial reflections on one's own time/age and its relation to the literary and cultural past and future - whence and whither this present?
- Theory today: current problems and challenges of literary theory (incl. trauma studies, autobiography and autoperformance)
- Literature and canon: canon formation, genre mixing, …
- Historicist approaches to literature
- Stylistics /use of imagery, figures of speech: defacing the other (forms of satire), deformation (different forms of prosopopeia); interrelations between literature and painting (contemporary and other)
- Facing the Continent: British and Irish literature in a European context (e.g. reception and/or translation of British and Irish authors)

Translation and Interpretation Studies

- Facing the tradition: role of translations in the development of a literary tradition or canon
- Facing the news: role of transediting in the spread of news in a globalised world
- Facing the unknown: new challenges in Translation and Interpretation Studies (e.g. machine translation)
- Facing the interpreter: role of the interpreter as a neutral conveyor of messages, a(n intercultural) mediator or an involved party in establishing effective communication in various settings

Linguistics

- Face and politeness from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective
- The concepts of face and politeness: from an anglocentric to a global perspective
- The tenses from a synchronic and diachronic perspective
- Resolving old dichotomies by building interfaces: present, past and future approaches to reconciling disciplines and paradigms (e.g. semantics and pragmatics)
- Past, present and future in corpus linguistics: from small-scale written corpora over large multi-media corpora to…?
- Conceptualisations and representations of the notion of ‘time’ in English (possibly in contrast with other languages)
- Diachronic and synchronic approaches to the study of intersubjectivity

ELT

- Face-to-face communication in ELT: from traditional classroom discourse to innovative virtual communication
- Facing each other and facing the other: research on teacher-student interaction and on student-student interaction and collaboration in the classroom both of native speakers of English and of learners of English as a foreign language (e.g. face-to-face communication, (a)synchronous communication via/in electronic environments, chat room conversations between students, peer feedback in its different guises, teacher feedback and student uptake, collaborative learning, …).
- Saving and representing face in different forms of student-student interaction and teacher-student communication both in speech and in writing (e.g. politeness strategies, intercultural perspectives).
- Corpus-based approaches to ELT: facing “authentic” language use as an innovative turn
- Facing non-native varieties of English in the classroom
- CLIL: the way forward for ELT?

Submission of abstracts

Abstracts of up to 500 words (excluding bibliography) should be submitted through the conference website (www.hubrussel.be/baahe2011) before 1 July 2011. Care should be taken that authors’ names or affiliations are not mentioned in the abstract. Abstracts should be in .doc or .txt format. Authors are allowed to submit a maximum of two abstracts if at least one of these is co-authored. Proposals for posters are equally welcome. All submitted abstracts will be peer-reviewed.

Accepted paper presentations will be allocated 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion.

Notification of acceptance: mid-July 2011.

Selected proceedings will be published in the international, peer-reviewed journal English Text Construction.

Further information

Much information will be made available on the conference website: www.hubrussel.be/baahe2011. For any further enquiries please get in touch with the organising committee at: baahe2011@hubrussel.be.

Important dates

First call for papers: 20 March 2011
Second call for papers: 1 June 2011
Submission of abstracts: by 1 July 2011
Notification of acceptance: mid-July 2011
Provisional programme: September 2011
Early-bird registration: mid-July 2011 to 15 October 2011
Late registration: by 15 November 2011
Conference opening: 1 December 2011

Venue

The conference will be hosted at the city campus of the University College Brussels (Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel), situated in the historical centre of Brussels and within walking distance of Brussels Central Railway Station, which has convenient train connections to and from Brussels Airport, London, Paris and other major European cities. Further information can be found on http://www.hubrussel.be/eCache/IEE/13/250.html.