Constructions of Identity 11 - Transmission

Department of English Language and Literature

Babeș-Bolyai University (Romania)

Conference dates: 18-20 May 2023

Conference venue: Faculty of Letters, 31 Horea St., Cluj-Napoca

Conference website: Transmission: Constructions of Identity XI – Event Landing Page (ubbcluj.ro)

Extended deadline for proposals: 10 April 2023

In a book published in English in 2015, the German media theorist and philosopher Sybille Krämer attempts to provide a model for transmission that preserves the possibility of community without succumbing to notions of communication as the imposition of sameness (Medium, Messenger, Transmission. An Approach to Media Philosophy). As Krämer insists, it is essential to safeguard the difference that emerges during the process of transmission, defined as “an external, corporeal, and material process that can be conceived as a kind of embodiment” which is “also associated with a ‘disembodiment’ – namely, the way in which media ‘become invisible’ in their (interference-free) usage” (75). Transmission “lets appear”, or makes difference perceptible, and as such renders culture and community possible, in Nancean terms, as loci of both connection and separation. As Krämer and many others point out, transmission does not amount to neutral repetition of information, but implies “creativity,” distortion and noise, which means transformation is just as important as reiteration. Krämer’s model successfully reminds us that transmission, through the persistence of the medium – whose materiality, even if self-effacing, never ceases to intrude – makes the world “appear.” This may never have been so clear as at the time of the Covid pandemic, of social media, fake news and (perhaps crucially) climate crisis.

In the age of viral dissemination (digital, informational, biological), transmission can outstep the bounds of direct, unilinear flows between some fixed points of departure and destination. (Dis)articulated across complex, tangled and unstable nets, the multiscalar trajectories of transmission can drift across the micro- and the macroscopic, or the local and the planetary, as seen in the transference of plastic molecules into the human bloodstream or in the even vaster phenomenon of ocean plastification. Transmission, conveyed as both transference and transformation, is also a commonplace literary scenario in contemporary fictions that tap into what Marco Caracciolo calls the fragile yet dynamic “mesh” of interconnected human and nonhuman realities (Narrating the Mesh. Form and Story in the Anthropocene, 2021). With its attendant anxieties of loss and retrieval, transmission – which, etymologically speaking, is a process of sending forth and putting across – has always been a feature of literature’s intersections and enmeshments with the technosocial and the biopolitical. Not least, narrative transmission, especially in its literary instantiations, can also relay a possibility to better grasp the ethics of difference that should guide our way across the predicaments of today’s world.

 We welcome proposals for papers and sessions addressing any aspect of our conference theme. Possible topics include:

• mediality, intermediality, liminality, exchange and the production of difference;
• communication, noise, entropy, interference, distortion: the dissemination of information, disinformation, knowledge;
• contagion, immunity, community, purity, security: the individual body and the body politic; literature and biopolitics;
• ecosystemic communication, environmental propagation, interspecies contiguity: transmission in the age of climate change;
• literature and medical discourses: discourses of infection, hygiene, contamination, origins; epidemics, pandemics and culture;
• circulation and recirculation of ideas: cultural transmission from manuscripts to social media;
• technologies of storage, archiving, recording; forms of cultural memory in the age of flow and virtualisation; 
• authorship and dispersal: collaborative texts, joint authorship, participatory writing; from texts to co-texts, paratexts, metatexts;
• citations, borrowings, influences, interpretation, reception; precession and succession in literary history: copies, originals, (af)filiations, genealogies
• transmission, dissemination & transformation; interlinguistic, intercultural traffic & contact zones; transnational literature;
• linguistic/cultural hybridization: hybrid texts, genre hybridity; from discourses of hybridity to worlding/planetarity;
• translation and adaptation.

Confirmed keynote speakers

Professor Ros Ballaster (University of Oxford)

Professor Eve Patten (Trinity College Dublin)

Associate Professor Ana-Karina Schneider (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu)

Hugo Hamilton (Irish novelist)

Round table: “Ulysses in Transmission:” 2022 marked the centennial of Ulysses, as well as the publication of a new translation into Romanian. This roundtable aims to bring together Joyce scholars, translators and translation specialists, to discuss various aspects of the novel in translation, the novel and its translations etc.

Confirmed participants:

Professor Mircea Mihăieș (Universitatea de Vest, Timișoara)

Professor Patrick McGuinness (University of Oxford)

Hugo Hamilton (Irish novelist)

Dr. Rareș Moldovan (Babeș-Bolyai University, translator of the new Romanian edition)

Dr. Erika Mihalycsa (Babeș-Bolyai University, editor of the new translation)

Dr. Adriana Șerban (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3)

Armağan Ekici, independent scholar and translator of Ulysses into Turkish

 Proposals

For individual 20-minute papers, 150-word abstracts and a short bio note should be submitted to Dr. Petronia Petrar (petronia.petrar@ubbcluj.ro) and Dr. Carmen Borbely (carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro). Extended deadline: 10 April 2023.

For tentative panels, please send a title and a 100-word description of the topic, along with details of the chair.

For fully formed panels, please send 150-word abstracts for each paper, accompanied by details of the proposed topic, the chair and the speakers.

Registration

The participants will be notified of their proposal’s acceptance by 15 April 2023 at the latest.

Registration link: https://plati.ubbcluj.ro/en/Event/Details/155.

Registration starts on 20 March 2023.

Conference registration fee

90 euro; 50 euro for postgraduate students and young researchers (under 26).

There will be an additional optional fee of 30 euro for a final dinner (to be paid on arrival).

Publication plans: selected papers will be published in either a special issue of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai, seria Philologia (2024), or a conference volume. Publication details will be available on the conference website.