Call for papers

Literature

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) BIO
  • Professor Eve Patten (Trinity College Dublin) BIO
  • Associate Professor Ana-Karina Schneider (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu) BIO
  • Hugo Hamilton (Irish novelist) BIO
Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics and language acquisition

Research from various theoretical perspectives are welcome on topics in phonetics and phonology, morphology, lexicology semantics/ pragmatics, syntax and language acquisition. Aside from disciplinary approaches, this year we especially encourage inter-disciplinary perspectives that explore the complexities of human language from biological, psychological, historical, cultural, educational, etc. perspectives.

Internet linguistics

This section welcomes papers with a general approach to Internet linguistics, id est, a discourse analysis of sorts of the linguistic displays, patterns and behaviours within communication via the Internet, but mainly the cultural sociolinguistic perspective, where text (language, discourse and semiotic architecture) both signals and negotiates individual or group identities as well as covertly regulating communities of digital communication practice. The latter is a relatively recent paradigm as prompted by the fact that ideological affiliations and reciprocity have come to bear critically on digital communication behaviour, especially in the Social Network Sites. On the one hand, by and large, group identities have become hybrid, nebulous, fluid, tribal, particularly under the impact of integrated digital actions. On the other hand, increasingly ideologized virtual communities (see echo-chambers) have been having the opposite effect of coalescing and temporarily homogenising varied individuals opting to converse within these exclusive virtual liminal spaces. And since technology affordances have enabled individuals to explore, exercise and express their identity repertoires in a threefold capacity: online content users, consumers and creators, the aspects abovementioned will additionally lend themselves to a multidisciplinary approach that may variably include elements from semantics, pragmatics, semiotics and social psychology.

Keynote speaker: 

  • Prof. dr. Lieven Buysse (KU Leuven Campus Brussels, Belgium)
Round table “Ulysses in Transmission”

2022 marked the centennial of Ulysses, as well as the publication of a new translation into Romanian. This round table 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 and ends on 30 April 2023.
  • Meals and trip: please fill in the form.

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.

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.

Programme

  You can find the conference programme here.

  Download the book of abstracts.

Keynote speakers - Literature

Prof. Ros Ballaster
University of Oxford

Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford and professorial fellow at Mansfield College. Ros is a literary historian with a particular interest in the history of narrative and performance. She has published monographs and many articles on the ‘rise’ of the novel exploring the significance of romance fiction, women’s writing (Seductive Forms, 1992), and the oriental tale (Fabulous Orients. 2005). She edited Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for Penguin Classics (1995).  In recent years her research interest has turned to the interaction of the Georgian (eighteenth-century) theatre and the novel and her book Fictions of Presence in the eighteenth-century Theatre and Novel was published by Boydell Press in August 2020. Her current project extends her thinking about ‘presence’ in art through an investigation into our search to make past worlds tangible again in contemporary narrative forms, particularly those designed to provide immersive, long-serial experiences to the consumer. She is exploring contemporary intermedial treatments of the eighteenth century on the stage, page and screen with the working hypothesis that the ‘long’ eighteenth century (from the latter half of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth) is increasingly shaped in contemporary print, screen and stage as a form of speculative fiction: a world beyond our known one, a place of world-making and shape-shifting between media and social forms.

Prof. Eve Patten
Trinity College Dublin

Eve Patten is Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin. A scholar in modern Irish and British literature, she is editor of a volume of essays, Irish Literature in Transition, 1940-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and author of a monograph on representations of Ireland’s revolutionary decade in English writing, Ireland, Revolution, and the English Modernist Imagination (Oxford University, 2022). She is currently co-PI on the HEA Shared Island research project ‘Ireland’s Border Culture: Literature, Arts, and Policy’; and co-editor of Dublin Tales, forthcoming from Oxford in 2023. She worked for the British Council in Romania in the early 1990s, drawing on her experience to explore the Bucharest-set novels of wartime author Olivia Manning in a monograph entitled Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War (Cork UP, 2012).

Assoc. Prof. Ana-Karina Schneider
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu

Ana-Karina Schneider is Associate Professor of English Literature at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania, holding a PhD in critical theory and Faulkner studies from Lucian Blaga University (2005), and a Diploma in American Studies from Smith College, USA (2004). Her publications include the
monographs Critical Perspectives in the Late Twentieth Century. William Faulkner: A Case Study (2006), Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction (2015), and Understanding Anne Enright (2020), as well as textbooks and study guides for classroom use. She has published articles and chapters on the contemporary British novel, the critical reception of various British and American writers in Romania, literary translation, reading practices, and English Studies in the Romanian higher education. Dr. Schneider is Editor-in-Chief of American, British and Canadian Studies.

Hugo Hamilton
Irish novelist

Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of The Speckled People – a memoir of his childhood in Dublin, growing up with a German mother, speaking German and Irish at home, and prohibited by his revolutionary Irish father from speaking English, the language of the street. This ‘language war’ and the formative questions of identity and silence have been the focus of his acclaimed memoirs, novels and plays. Described by Anne Enright as a writer who ‘loves the spaces between things: his characters live, not just between cultures or between languages, but between the past and the future.’ His work has won many international awards including the French Prix Femina Etranger, the DAAD scholarship in Berlin, and the prestigious Bundesverdienstkreutz, awarded by the German state for his understanding of cultural diversity. Hamilton is a member of the Aosdana arts body in Ireland and lives in Dublin.

His memoir The Speckled People was translated into 20 languages and adapted for the stage in a production for the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and published as a stage play by Methuen. His latest novel – The Pages – (based on the life of the author Joseph Roth) was published by 4th Estate in London and Knopf in the USA.

Keynote speaker - Linguistics

Prof. Lieven Buysse
KU Leuven, Brussels

Lieven Buysse is Professor of Linguistics at KU Leuven, where he teaches a.o. English Linguistics, British Culture, and Language & Technology. His research interests are mainly in the fields of contrastive and interlanguage pragmatics, and he is the Reviews Editor of the journal Corpus Pragmatics. Since 2017 he has been Campus Dean of the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven’s Brussels Campus, and has held positions in various academic associations, such as currently that of Secretary-General of CIUTI and President of the European Network for Public Service Interpreting & Translation.

Organisers

Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University, in partnership with:

The Romanian Society for English and American Studies (RSEAS)

The European Society for the Study of English (ESSE)

Organising Committee:

  • Dr. Carmen Borbely
  • Dr. Petronia Petrar
  • Dr. Adriana Todea
  • Dr. Alex Ciorogar
  • Paul Paraschiv, PhD student

Babeș-Bolyai University

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Faculty of Letters

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Locations

Useful links:

The conference will take place at the Faculty of Letters, 31 Horea Street, Cluj-Napoca, 400202.

You can find nearby accommodation at booking.com or airbnb.com

Or consult the list below (mostly within walking distance of the Faculty of Letters):

Upon request, we can book a limited number of rooms at the University Hotel (not very far from the Faculty of Letters, close to very convenient public transport and offering better fees).