cfp.english.upenn.edu

The Hwa Kang International Conference on English Language and Literature is an annual conference organized by the Department of English Language and Literature at Chinese Culture University to encourage intellectual exchanges and academic dialogues between scholars in Taiwan and around the world. In 2013 the conference theme will be Exploring Discourse: Trends and Applications in Language and Literature. The conference organizers want to explore the idea of “discourse” as we find it in the fields of linguistics, language teaching, literature and cultural studies, and in the study of language, communication and texts.

Literature & Cultural Studies

“Discourse” has long been a common term in literary studies, where it can have various meanings including genre-related ones such as “narrative discourse.” Michel Foucault, however, has helped us rethink the concept of “discourse” in terms of its social, political, and cultural formations. For Foucault various discourses (e.g. the discourse of medicine or of history) are expressions of power, and in “every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers.” (“The Discourse on Language,” 1972) Literature and its related cultural practices are types of discursive formations that have been manipulated, analyzed, questioned, and subverted by scholars in literary and cultural studies. We would like to invite original abstracts that deal with theories of discourse, interpretations of literature and related discursive formations, textual analyses involving stylistics and discourse analysis, interrogations of the institutions of literature and literary studies, applications in the teaching of literature, and other approaches that concern literature and discourse.

Subject areas might include but are not limited to the following topics:
1. Literature as discourse
2. Discourse and power
3. Discourse and knowledge
4. Discourse and subjectivity
5. Discourse and ethnicity
6. Discourse and gender
7. Discourse and institutions
8. Discourse and the canon
9. Discourse and history
10. Discourse and rhetoric
11. Discourse and translation
12. Discourse and literary education
13. Interdiscursivity
14. Others

Linguistics & Language Teaching

Different kinds of discourse and their analysis have been topics of interest in the past few decades. The focus of this conference will be on advances and research results in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and applied discourse. We welcome papers which present empirical studies of discourse analysis and are based on theoretical approaches, including those of speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversational analysis, and variation analysis. We also welcome submissions which take discourse as a framework used to interpret rhetoric, culture, collaborative practices, power, identity, diversity, etc. We also hope that this conference can help language teachers to incorporate an awareness of discourse in their teaching, which would only be enhanced by such a perspective.

Possible subject areas include, but are not restricted to, the following:
1. Discourse analysis
2. Genre analysis
3. Text analysis
4. Conversational analysis
5. Variation analysis
6. Pragmatics
7. Speech act theory
8. Interactional sociolinguistics
9. Ethnography of communication
10. Socio-cognitive dimension of discourse
11. Discourse and identity
12. Discourse community
13. Discourse and technology
14. Corpus-based analysis
15. Contrastive rhetoric
16. Discourse and English teaching
17. Second language acquisition
18. Second language writing
19. Dialogic learning
20. Multiple assessment
21. Others

Important Deadlines

Conference Date: May 4, 2013
Submission of abstracts: January 31, 2013
Notification of acceptance of abstracts: March 8, 2013

Submission Guidelines

1. We accept papers written either in English or in Chinese. No full-paper submission is required.
2. Each submission should include the following information and items:
(a) Name of the contributor in both Chinese and English, professional affiliation, current position, mailing address, office and home phone numbers, and email address. List the above items on the Contributor Data Form that may be downloaded from the conference website.
(b) An abstract of 350-500 words along with a list of 3-6 keywords for abstracts in English. An additional English abstract with English keywords for abstracts written in Chinese (No more than 500 characters and 6 keywords).
3. Submissions must be sent electronically as e-mail attachments to the following email address: eng_conf@pccu.edu.tw
4. All abstracts will be subject to a blind review process by two reviewers.
5. Hwa Kang English Journal welcomes the full text of the conference presentations. Vol. 19 No. 2 is scheduled to be published in Oct. 2013. Please visit the journal website for further information: https://sites.google.com/a/pccu.edu.tw/hkej/

Contact Us

Please write to eng_conf@pccu.edu.tw or call Ms. Erika Chin at 02-28610511 ext. 23705 for further information.
Please use the following address for written correspondence:
The Committee for the 2013 Hwa Kang English Conference
Department of English Language and Literature
Chinese Culture University
55 Hwakang Rd., Yangmingshan
Taipei, 11114, Taiwan, R. O. C.