[Gala-l] Call for Papers - TEXTU(R)ALITIES: SEMIOTICS, BODIES, TEXTS

[Rodrigo Borba]

*CALL FOR PAPERS*



*SPECIAL ISSUE*

*TEXTU(R)ALITIES: SEMIOTICS, BODIES, TEXTS*





 Emilio Amideo (University of Naples “L’Orientale”)

Rodrigo Borba (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)





In the last couple of decades, our embodied actions with others have become
uncircumscribed and the materiality of social life filtered through texts
and other semiotic modes that bind people together while keeping them
apart. Such a phenomenon has been bolstered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The
need for distancing measures and isolation has intensified processes of
semiotization that significantly affect how we relate to and communicate
with others and ourselves. The ways individuals work, study, exercise,
love, party, have sex, protest, etc. have all been reshaped and their
relationships with their surroundings have turned even more textually
grounded. Such a context necessitates a rethinking of seemingly
well-defined phenomena such as corporeality and matter and their
relationship with both virtual and physical environments. Making sense of
the information we receive through our embodied interaction with our
surroundings is not only shaped by a bodily memory of certain stimuli, but
also by the way we culturally and socially contextualize those experiences
(Di Benedetto 2010: 71-72).

This unprecedented enmeshment of knowledge, bodies, and texts is the focus
of this special issue. Of particular interest to our purposes is an
interdisciplinary rethinking of the ways individuals phenomenologically and
semiotically experience their surroundings through a variety of texts,
producing new social and (inter)subjective textures along the way. For the
purposes of this special issue, this double-bind is captured by the notion
of “textu(r)alities” whereby the idea of texture as something that can be
*apprehended* through the senses recalls the capacity to create texts and
narratives to make sense, literally, of that experience. Tellingly, “to
apprehend” in English means “to seize, either physically or mentally”
(Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary 2021) therefore highlighting the
interconnectedness of thought, action, and embodiment through the idea of
grasping with the mind and/or the hand.

At this juncture, we invite submissions that aim to tackle the various
dimensions of the central questions of the special issue:



·       How do individuals find ways to seize (physically, mentally,
subjectively, affectively) ever-changing and elusive surroundings and, in
turn, how do these surroundings shape individuals’ capacity to make sense
of themselves in the world?

·       How do the interweaving and crisscrossing of bodies, texts, and
several modes of meaning-making in highly semiotised societies forge
textures that bind people together?

·       How do cracks in well-established textures appear and disappear?

·       How does the textual warp and weft of social life get established
and changed?

·       How does matter contribute to (re)shaping semiotic practices and
narrative processes?

·       How do bodies inhabit or challenge the “social skin”?



Broad in scope, these questions are framed to encompass the ways bodies,
minds, and texts get interwoven in people’s daily undertakings with others
and themselves. The terms ‘text’ and ‘texture’ derive from the Latin stem
*texere* (for ‘to weave’), suggesting the idea of weaving together
individual threads to form larger units that take the form of a network, a
patchwork, a structure. Texture is precisely what makes a text a semantic
unit, through linguistic (or multimodal) features that give it cohesion and
coherence and it is also what structures discourse in its different forms:
narratives, prayers, sonnets, operating instructions, news, formal
correspondence, conversation, films, and so on (Halliday and Hasan 1976:
326). Discourse, in turn, originates from contextualized and embodied
experiences. Through the co-articulation of their discreet components, text
and body shape meaning-making practices enabling us to think about texture
as something stemming out of our phenomenological interaction with our
surroundings, through our body’s interaction with other bodies, or in
general with other objects. In other words, texts help moor bodies to the
surroundings that, in turn, (in)form both bodies and texts. Tethering
bodies to their surroundings is inherently a phenomenological and semiotic
process. As individuals orient to signs-in-the-world, such signs (re)orient
their being with others and their understanding of themselves and the
contexts in which they act.

Bodies, minds, and texts, of course, are, to different extents, the main
concern of (socio)linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians,
psychologists, queer theorists, philosophers, and literary scholars (to
name but a few) who we invite to submit a *300-word abstract* to be
considered for inclusion in the special issue. Submissions should also
include a *100-words bio* and directly address the questions above. They
should be sent to Emilio Amideo (eamideo at unior.it) and Rodrigo Borba (
rodrigoborba at letras.ufrj.br) no later than *September 15th, 2022*.



*Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Borba*

PPG Interdisciplinar em Linguística Aplicada
<http://www.poslaplicada.letras.ufrj.br/pt/>

Co-editor Gender & Language <https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/GL>

Núcleo de Estudos em Discursos e Sociedade - NUDES
<http://www.nudes.letras.ufrj.br/>

Publicações <https://ufrj.academia.edu/RBorba>

Currículo Lattes  <http://lattes.cnpq.br/4245787890844219>

Orcid <https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4348-1812>
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