31.1339, Calls: Ling & Literature/France

Tue Apr 14 01:59:05 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1339. Mon Apr 13 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.1339, Calls: Ling & Literature/France

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Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 21:58:12
From: R. L. Victoria Pöhls [plit.conference at gmail.com]
Subject: Powerful Literary Fiction Texts II. A Stylistic, Empirical and Performance-based Approach

Full Title: Powerful Literary Fiction Texts II. A Stylistic, Empirical and Performance-based Approach 
Short Title: P-LIT II 

Date: 28-Oct-2020 - 30-Oct-2020
Location: Paris, France 
Contact Person: R. L. Victoria Pöhls
Meeting Email: victoria.poehls at ae.mpg.de
Web Site: https://p-lit.org 

Linguistic Field(s): Ling & Literature 

Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 03-May-2020 

Meeting Description:

Bringing together literary studies, stylistics and linguistics, empirical
aesthetics and oral performance.

Works of prose fiction include pieces of writing that are prone to provide
both emotional and cognitive pleasure because they are made of “language at
its most distilled and most powerful” (Rita Dove). Yet these passages too
often escape an analysis that combines close reading with, on the one hand,
the reading aloud of the text – so that it can be experienced to the full by
the audience – and, on the other hand, a study of the text’s potential effects
on readers – hereby advancing a hypothesis of readers’ impressions and of the
linguistic features responsible for them. This international conference series
invites contributors to select and explore prose extracts through such a mixed
approach. 

As questions have reached us: We would like to reassure you that we have not
cancelled the conference. Your safety remains our utmost priority and we will
continue to monitor government advice and travel restrictions introduced in
response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but our current plan is to still hold the
conference as announced.

We nevertheless appreciate the fact that recent developments may have placed a
great deal of strain on many of us, personally and professionally, and have
therefore decided to extend the deadline for abstracts to May 3, 2020.

We are looking forward to welcome many of you to our conference in Paris!

Keynote Speakers: 
Sandrine Sorlin, Professor of English language and linguistics (University
Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3)
Raymond A. Mar, Professor of Psychology (York University, Toronto)

Call for Papers: 

Each excerpt – be it a set of phrases or sentences, a paragraph or a longer
extract – will thus be orally performed and examined as a textual composition
likely to elicit specific responses on the readers’ part. Questions dealt with
in the presentations can include: 

 - How does the text capture the readers’ attention or interest? 
 - How does it provide aesthetic appeal and trigger powerful positive,
negative or mixed emotions? 
 - Which other effects apart from eliciting strong emotions can render prose
fiction powerful? 
 - Which role do emotions play in these other kinds of effects (e. g.
persuasion, behaviour and personality change)?
 - Is the impact closely bound to the time of reading or are some effects
created to stick with the reader for longer? And then: How can this be linked
to specific stylistic features? 

The compelling effects such pieces of text provide are usually due to:
 - The relationship between the part and the whole: the way the selected
excerpt articulates with the rest of the narrative it is taken from, its
specific function and purport within the respective work of fiction.
 - The chosen piece of text itself: although the powerful effect produced in a
reader is partly due to his or her subjectivity, we assume it also results
from the way the author’s language organises and conveys the cognitive
realities of real or fictitious experience. 

The presentation format thus involves four successive stages:
 - A brief introductory presentation of the story from which the chosen
extract is taken, and of the excerpt’s function or purport within the rest of
the narrative. 
 - The reading aloud of the extract: thanks to this oral performance, the text
will be experienced by the audience as ‘living’ material embodied through
human voice. 
 - A close reading aiming to discover the text’s mechanisms. If all linguistic
choices are potentially meaningful (Leech & Short 2007: 27), which are the
‘powerful’ ones, responsible for the audience’s reactions? 

Tools pertaining to the field of literary linguistics may be helpful to
identify the effectual stylistic features: lexical choices and coinages;
syntactic choices, including tense and aspect; figures of speech and other
stylistic devices, such as ellipses, rhythm, sounds, et cetera.

The explicit highlighting of the hypothesised connection between the
identified linguistic features and the effects they have on readers.

Contributors are especially welcome to present empirical research on reader
perception of specific textual phenomena or stylistic features, but testable
hypotheses are also suitable.

Any kind of fictional literary prose or drama text may be considered,
irrespective of subgenre, literary tradition, or intended audience. However,
poetry, historical non-fiction texts, and translation analyses are
unfortunately not suitable. 

Submission guidelines: 
Please submit a short bio (not longer than 50 words) including your name and
institutional affiliation, and a completely anonymised file consisting of the
abstract (up to 300 words, excluding references; unpublished work) and the
literary excerpt(s) under study (up to 350 words).

If the selected excerpts are not in English, we kindly ask contributors to
base their presentation on an English translation (preferably a professional
one) that allows following the argument of the paper.

Please send the two files to the following e-mail address:
plit.conference at gmail.com

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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1339	
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