Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities

Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies

and

University of the Balearic Islands

Faculty of Philosophy and Art

would like to kindly invite all scholars from across the Humanities to take part in the

7th Annual Siedlce Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature

to be held online for the purpose of presenting unpublished research findings  

in English on November 24-25th, 2022.

The leitmotif of the conference is:

Representation:

between and beyond cyclicity and newness

in literature, language, and philosophy

Representation constitutes a particularly important concern in present-day literary, linguistic, and philosophical discourses. Amitav Ghosh has famously referred to the contemporary situation as ‘a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination’. In what ways does this crisis affect representation as both a concept and a practice?

One angle on the problem includes genre. In the context of the Anthropocene, traditional genres, including the novel, grow increasingly incapable of dealing with the complexity of the world beyond the human realms of knowledge and existence. As changing apprehensions of space, time, and character become more and more widespread, can literary texts break through their cyclical forms of representation into the newness of multiple temporal and spatial scales, as well as other-than-human forms of narrative?

Another angle on the problem of representation involves the recycling of past receptions of literature for the purpose of present-day critical, political, and social agendas. As the author-work-reader approach gives way to the pressures of post-Barthian readings of canonical texts, does such a move contribute to the crisis of representation? Or does it open up critically new spaces for representation?

The problem of representation equally concerns the ways in which the discourse-functional aspects of linguistic knowledge represent language. In particular, this relates to various forms of symbolic representation (symbols, symbolism, representations of an utterance), the representation of semantic and cultural knowledge in the mind/brain, formal and cognitive models of grammar and grammatical knowledge, meaning construction in discourse, pragmatic and discourse functional aspects of symbolic representation, mental representations (semantic frames, domains, and idealized cognitive models), the relationships between language, culture, and the mind, different forms of representation of utterances in translation, and representation of grammatical and semantic knowledge in dictionaries and other reference works.

In addition, we will be interested in considering how philosophical debates have approached the problem of representation by considering alternatives, such as expressivism and pragmatism. The Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, and the Philosophy of the Mind distance themselves from the rootlessness of representation, insisting instead on the roles of individuals in acting and expressing themselves, on the one hand, and representing their actions in the form of narratives, on the other. Can the form, content, and strategies of narratives hold the key to representation?

Suggested Research Areas

-      representation as a problem of narrative and rhetorical language

-      the Anthropocene and the problem of representation

-      self-representation

-      representation as a construction from particular subject positions

-      literary theories and representation of the past

-      politics of representation

-      poetics of representation

-      representation as the reflection of a transparent record of reality

-      the loss of a referent and the crisis of representation

-      the representation of science and technology in children’s literature

-      models of representation in translation

-      ethics of representation in translation

-      theorization and representation in linguistics

-      representation in discourse analysis

-      text representation: linguistic and cognitive aspects

-      lexicographic representations of meaning

Plenary Speakers

Salhia Ben-Messahel, University of Toulon

Maria Bloch-Trojnar, The John Paul II Catholic Univeristy of Lublin

The conference will be a virtual event. The organizing committee will do their best to ensure that all participants have the IT support they need to access the conference.

Oral Sessions

Each presentation will be scheduled for a 20-minute slot, followed by a 10-minute discussion.

Abstract Submission

An abstract of 200-300 words (including a bibliography) should be submitted by November 1st, 2022 in .doc or .docx format via e-mail to katarzyna.kozak@uph.edu.pl. Your abstract must be accompanied by the following information: name of the author, title of the paper, affiliation, academic degree, research area, and a biographical note of 60-80 words in length. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by November 5th, 2022.

The registration form will be available soon on our official site. If you wish to receive an invoice, please tick off the Invoice Box in the registration form.

Conference Fee

All participants are requested to return the registration form and pay the conference fee by November 10th, 2022. The fee is 50 EUR or 230 PLN.

Publication

After the conference, the articles will be published in a peer-reviewed volume. The texts will need to be submitted by February 15th, 2023 to katarzyna.kozak@uph.edu.pl.  Further information concerning publication as well as submission guidelines will be available soon on the conference website.