Organised by Dr. Esme Winter-Froemel (Romance Linguistics, University of Tübingen), Dr. Angelika Zirker (English Literary Studies, University of Tübingen)

Wordplay is a specific case of language use that can be found both in everyday communication and in literary texts. It can fulfil a range of functions: it can be entertaining and comical, it can conceal taboo (in double entendre, for instance), and in literary texts it also influences and supports figural characterisation. On yet another level, however, in these contexts of usage, wordplay also serves as a means to reflect on language and communication. Wordplay thus reveals surprising alternative readings -- e.g., Two hunters meet. Both dead. / Tout auteur dramatique est responsable de ses actes. -- and emphasises the phonetic similarity of linguistic signs that also points towards relations on the level of content (e.g. Don’t just book it. Thomas Cook it. / Knorr, j’adore). In this way, wordplay reflects on language itself; it is therefore one means of displaying linguistic awareness.

The metalinguistic reflection of wordplay is hence directed both at the recipient and, simultaneously, expresses this kind of reflection on the speaker’s side. The production of unexpected relations between linguistic units often has a comical effect and can be read as a sign of wit, e.g. in advertisements. In literary texts wordplay furthermore illustrates double communication -- within the text but also between author and recipient -- and does so more effectively than many other stylistic devices in that it breaks through mimesis and becomes auto-referential. Because of its artistic character and its function of metalinguistic reflection, wordplay is a genuine interface phenomenon that reveals characteristics of literary language in everyday communication and that also opens up the possibility to analyse literary texts from a linguistic perspective.

Based on these reflections and an interdisciplinary project on wordplay that combines linguistics and literary studies, this conference aims at the study of wordplay from an interdisciplinary perspective that involves linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric and media studies in different languages, philologies and contexts.

We would like to look at wordplay in everyday communication and in aesthetic / literary texts.  Fields of research may include:

- wordplay and metalinguistic reflection
- a systematic approach to wordplay, its forms and functions
- roles of wordplay in different genres
- wordplay in various periods
- wordplay in the works of specific authors
- wordplay and translation
- multilingual wordplay
- multimedial wordplay

The conference will be preceded by a workshop on Wednesday afternoon, involving both students and academics (in German). Participants of the conference are invited to join the workshop as well. Throughout the workshop and the conference, participants from practical contexts of wordplay, i.e. comedians, authors, etc. will present their work and be interviewed.

Please send an abstract of 250 to 300 words in English or French to <esme.winter-froemel@uni-tuebingen.de> and <angelika.zirker@uni-tuebingen.de> by April 30, 2012.

- 30 April 2012: Submission deadline for abstracts
- 31 May 2012: Notification of acceptance
- 6 March 2013: Workshop
- 7-8 March 2013: Conference
- 31 October 2013: Submission deadline for full papers

Heidi Aschenberg (Universität Tübingen), Matthias Bauer (Universität Tübingen), Hans-Martin Gauger (Universität Freiburg), Johannes Kabatek (Universität Tübingen), Peter Koch (Universität Tübingen), Burkhard Niederhoff (Universität Bochum), Margit Peterfy (Universität Mainz), Britta Stolterfoht (Universität Tübingen), Richard Waltereit (University of Newcastle upon Tyne)

(posted 14 February 2012)

Writing and dramatising the body : violence, discordance and reconfiguration in English-language literature and drama
Université Charles de Gaulle, Lille 3, France  -  21-22 March 2013
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2012

A conference organisez by CECILLE (Centre d'Études en Civilisations, Langues et Littératures Étrangères), Université Lille 3, France.

Should violence be considered as one of the experiences the body undergoes in literature or as an ordeal which elicits the very question of what this body is a body which is mapped in language and speech. As a result of the violence that it undergoes, inflicts or self-inflicts, the body grapples with something which is not simply outside itself: it discovers its own foreignness, its own discordance. It rebelliously slips through the categories in which one attempts to contain it, but it also defies the biological body to which it cannot be reduced. What does a body do when, for no apparent reason, it breaks, splits, is pulled asunder, petrified? What happens when the part usurps the whole or the whole body is reduced to nothing, mere refuse? What occurs when the human body encounters the inhuman and becomes an animal, machine, automaton or doll? If an organism 'functions', the body on the other hand experiences suffering or jouissance, the two sometimes sharing a disturbing intimacy. Could the body also be essentially defined as that which holds together no matter what?

Clearly then the focus should move beyond the body as it is represented in the text to an understanding of how this affects the actual representation, and, more generally, writing and reading. What use are words for a body which cannot escape symbolisation but which nevertheless remains resistant and foreign to it? Is it possible that by endlessly imagining, inventing and reconfiguring, writing in turn violates the body or is writing, on the contrary, capable of accounting for the otherness which inhabits the body? As a site of difference, is not the text one entry to the enigma which the body constitues? And as it is also a fabric, a canvas, a mesh, is not the text in a position, if need be, to stand in for a failing body threatened by dislocation and collapse? Some parts of the body are particularly solicited by the act of writing and that of reading: the hand, the eye, the ear. We could consider precisely how each of these elements shapes the text from the moment that one accepts to no longer reduce it to a semantic configuration. The body which is brought into play can do without a real stage, but it can also come into being by treading the boards. One might attempt to think (of) the body in terms of presence and absence and, when it comes to theatrical production, of the erasure or the assertion of the body in its own materiality. Aside from the specificites which might distinguish fiction, drama and poetry, the question of genre/gender comes to the fore in the emphasis laid on an eroticised, sexualised, gendered body, which violence prods with particular force: the political and aesthetic issues at stake in the construction and representation of the gendered body are therefore also of chief interest.

These angles of approach are, of course, non-exhaustive and we would welcome papers dealing with these and other issues. Proposals for papers (preferably in English) of 300-500 words should be sent before 15 January 2012, together with ashort CV, to:

- Alexandra Poulain <alexandra.poulain@univ-lille3.fr)>,
- Fiona McCann <fionamccann@univ-lille3.fr>,
- and Pascale Tollance <pascale.tollance@univ-lille3.fr>.

(posted 5 September 2011)

An international conference organized by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone) with the support of the Société de Stylistique Anglaise (SSA)

This interdisciplinary international conference, the second  section of the project 'Ethics & Rhetoric' within EMMA's line of research 'Ethics of Alterity', will focus on language and ethics in literary genres that depict encounters with alterity.

The situations in which the subject is faced with different or alien beings will be studied namely in novels belonging to the genre of utopia/dystopia, science fiction, fantasy, etc., as the so-called 'genre literature' embodies a heuristic model that dramatises and exacerbates encounters with alterity, featuring exotic, subhuman or posthuman beings that defy human knowledge (in SF and fantasy especially). Genre literature has often been regarded as an entertaining or escapist field that does not lend itself to ethical and poetical reflections, limiting itself to a hollow and servile repetition of the genre codes.

Nevertheless, theoreticians of these genres that have not been sufficiently studied highlight their defamiliarizing power through which things can be 'seen'. This process of defamiliarization is often associated with the stylistic, poetic and ethical force inherent in fiction, but in its attempt at meta-conceptualizing the relationship between language and reality, genre literature seems to problematize and enhance these phenomena by making them more easily perceivable. Thus not resting content with merely questioning the mechanism of estrangement, genre literature explores the confines of readability and the break-point between the readerly and the writerly.

In their desire to represent the Other in all its complexity, writers are indeed confronted with an ethical and poetical aporia: how to describe what escapes Humanity in Human language? In the eyes of its critics, Science Fiction (SF) seems to lean towards the side of the readerly. On the border between total defamiliarization and cognition (Darko Suvin speaks of 'cognitive estrangement'), SF seems to embody a genre that cannot afford to lose its readers. That may be the reason why extra-terrestrial languages are often filtered by English -- crushing down linguistic difference under the weight of a single language that everybody can understand -- as in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle in which the creole form of English is ironed out through translation. How to represent a world in which the classical pronominal references (she/he) are not relevant anymore since ontology no longer relies on binary distinctions (as in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin)? Yet certain SF or dystopia writers do manage to stretch out language and readability in their description of an alien situation (Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker might be the best example here). But fantasy can perhaps be construed as the most subversive genre in that matter as it wallows in undecidability and interpretative wavering. In its attempt to reconcile the inexpressible, what is without a name, and the speakable or visible, according to Rosemary Jackson, fantasy delimits a zone of non-signification where the Other cannot be reduced to the self. Should we thus conclude that reaching the breaking point of intelligibility can guarantee the birth of the other in its radical alterity?

Todorov brought to light the difficulty of apprehending alterity in schemes other than the ones we are familiar with, questioning the possibility of mapping the other's radical difference. The narratives about the Aztecs are among the first illustrations of this tendency to project pre-conceived expectations onto the other: 'One would seek to transpose it into a familiar cognitive scheme in order to make it understandable and thereby at least partially acceptable' (Tzvetan Todorov, Les Morales de l'histoire, Paris, Grasset, 1991, p. 41, our translation). Can reducing alterity to the categories of the same or resorting to the other as a foil to reinforce the self (the other being then everything the self is not) be said to be part of the more conservative trend in SF as opposed to more subversive trends of the genre (what Broderick calls allographers along Terry Dowling's coinage 'xenographies') or of fantasy?

Are we condemned to a certain ethno -- or anthropo-centrism -- an accusation that is launched against the socio-constructionists that contend that our beliefs, desires or intentions are mediated by shared social and normative conventions that have been learnt and internalized in the specific discourse community we belong to -- or can the other be 'known' to a certain extent while preserving its radical difference? Do tropes have a heuristic power able to change our conception of the world and of others? Is there such a thing as 'rhetorical ethics' that could give us access to the other? If, according to Broderick, zeugma and syllepses are characteristic of the poetics of SF, what relationships do these tropes of fusion entertain between self and other? How effective are other figures of speech in their depiction of the Other? Can they be said to be a product of an all-powerful Reason reducing alterity to the same? In La Raison classificatoire, for example, Patrick Tort indeed recalls that the two major classifying systems of human thoughts rely on metaphor and metonymy. Or, on the other hand, can tropes be said to ensure a speculative and prospective exploration, producing 'scandalous or non-sense effects' (Rosolato) that are capable of upsetting the classifications through which we have been trained to perceive the world? Can stylistic problems like focalisation or reported speech -- that are often a privileged way to access the other's conceptual schemes -- be seen as anthropocentric blows dealt to alterity? Can the other be sketched out through lexical and syntactic inventiveness without its portrait being entirely tamed or harnessed?

The focus on this conference will thus be on the linguistic and poetic means writers resort to in their description of others (rather than be merely thematic). The point is to bring under scrutiny how fiction succeeds (or fails) in its discursive mapping of otherness and what the dialogue it imagines with the other teaches us on language and the human self. What will be explored are the limits of language and the linguistic strategies that are displayed by genre literature to get around this predicament.

This interdisciplinary international conference wishes to attract both literary critics, linguists and stylisticians working on the literature of the English-speaking countries from the 19th to the 21st centuries.

- linguistic representation of alterity
- tropological ethics
- stylistics and genre
- intelligibility and linguistic experimentation
- the speakable / unspeakable
- representation of cognitive structures through focalisation, reported speech, pronominal identification, etc.

- Maylis Rospide <maylis.rospide@univ-montp3.fr>
- and Sandrine Sorlin <sandrine.sorlin@univ-montp3.fr>

(posted 22 March 2012)

In the field of Anglophone studies in France and elsewhere, Lacanian theory remains an omnipresent marginality. Like Freud, Lacan is amply cited in current critical papers, but generally as a 'peppering' element, rarely as a fully assumed structuring theory of reading. It is to those who are engaged in a process of reading and deciphering subjectivity from within a Lacanian critical orientation that this call is primarily addressed. As an emanation from a research group interested in questions of gender and sexual identity, this conference will be particularly attentive to the intersection between the arts and women and to the implications of the Lacanian formulas of sexuation and the concepts of love, desire, and jouissance. In other words, it will take as its key text, Seminar XX : Encore (1972-1973), translated into English by Bruce Fink in 1992, and explored from diverse perspectives in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan's Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality (Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink, editors, 2002). Other noteworthy readings of Lacanian perspectives on sexuality appear in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Jean-Michel Rabaté, dir., 2003).

Like all of the seminars, Seminar XX is generally written using the roman numerals XX, letters that jump out at Anglophone eyes to form a hurdle, an obstacle to overcome, but perhaps, in the negating function of the X, they also appear to anticipate the barring of the universal of Woman. And, as the written sign for a couple of kisses sent off to the addressee, they open the way to the enigmatic chapter entitled "A love letter."

The interface between cultural analysis and Lacanian theory has been given renewed impetus, notably through the writing of Slavoj Zizek which moves freely between theoretical exposition and analysis of cultural objects:  in this respect, one might usefully consider Enjoy Your Symptom: Lacan In Hollywood and Out (1992) along with such articles as those reprinted in "Part II: Woman" of The Zizek Reader (Wright and Wright, eds., 1999) which deal more specifically with sexual theory. Another prominent Lacanian cultural analyst, Joan Copjec, author of "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason" in Read My Desire (1995) can also be accredited with Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (2002), an impressive work of combined theoretical explication and analysis of the visual arts, in which the author questions the 'feminine' in radically productive ways.

Concerning Lacanian literary analysis, sustained readings are relatively few and do not generally engage with the later Lacan, but I would mention without hesitation an example from outside the domaine of Anglophone studies, namely Ginette Michaux's De Sophocle à Proust, de Nerval à Boulgakov: essai de psychanalyse lacanienne (2008) which provides not only convincing and subtle Lacanian readings of literary texts, but also a method and purpose to the perilous enterprise of reading psychoanalytically, which is to say, a reading which attempts to bring to light the logic of desire.

The goal of this conference will therefore be to focus on sexed subjectivity, in particular on the side of the feminine, in relation to desire, love, and jouissance in the sphere of Anglophone literary and visual arts. A critical approach in dialogue with the theoretical perspectives opened up through the growing body of commentary on Lacan‚s later work will be privileged as will close engagement with the letter of the written or visual text.

The invited keynote speaker is Joan Copjec (Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature and Media Study, and Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University of Buffalo).

This one-day international conference organized by the Gender Studies branch of C.R.I.T. (Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et Transculturelles) will take place on Friday, March 22, 2013.

(posted 9 February 2012)

Interlanguage is both a space for transition and a frontier marking the difference between two territories which it separates while bringing them together in a relationship of exchange and interaction, and interlanguage plays a fundamental role in the dynamics that underpin the construction of identity. What some have called "language marshlands" (Coste 1989) were originally conceived as being an intermediary system between the source language and the target language, as a system which every language learner had to pass through during the process of language acquisition.

In literature, from the 1980s onwards, the notion of interlingualism was applied to examples of linguistic hybridisation within the same syntactic unit with a view to highlighting the tension that arises and also the possibility of engendering a language that was "other" (Bruce-Novoa). The problematical role of interlanguage in the identity building process is therefore an invitation to rethink identity, far from essentialist confines and within a dynamic and evolving perspective wherein the constitutive instability of the concept is paradoxically transformed into a springboard towards a redefinition of the subject (Kramsch 2009).

The reflection that we would like to initiate is set within the wider framework of the questioning surrounding multilingualism both as an advantage and as a handicap in a subject's construction process. While it is true that plurilingualism was long disapproved by the scientific medical community which viewed this phenomenon simply as a source of diverse pathologies, or even of mental retardation, developments in thinking spread by globalisation and the accompanying new economic order now see this as a not inconsiderable added value in international exchanges.

Today, school plays an important role in this process. It is a special place for the construction of interlanguages. It is a place where the most diverse languages and cultures meet and it is also a field for observing what is at stake in psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic terms when languages and cultures have contact. The evolution of the notion of interlanguage towards that of "translanguage" (Creese and Blackledge, 2010) bears witness to the current currency of this notion.

One of the aims of this conference is to initiate a transatlantic dialogue by helping to foster exchanges between American and European specialists in these fields. Bringing together all these papers will therefore allow us to make a critical assessment of the linguistic policies carried out by the American government over the past twenty years and to reflect on the way potential challenges faced by Europe in the 21st century might be handled in the light of American experience.

We welcome papers which focus on a complementary examination of the two geographical zones but we would also encourage researchers from different cultural fields to add to the debate by contributing their specific knowledge in the fields of education, cultural studies and literature.
A fuller version of the call for papers and a few bibliographic details are available on-line at these addresses:
http://climas.u-bordeaux3.fr or http://eee.aquitaine.cnrs.fr

A 250 word summary of your proposal with a short biography and bibliography should be sent to Françoise Bonnet, Stephanie Durrans and Moya Jones at the following address: <multilinguisme@u-bordeaux3.fr>
Deadline: 1 September 2012.
Papers given at the conference will be published after selection by a reading committee.

Keynote speakers: Professor J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Research Professor, UC Irvine, and Professor Ronald Hutton, Bristol University.

(posted 30 June 2011)