36.405, Confs: General Linguistics; Ling & Literature; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics / Italy

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-405. Fri Jan 31 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.405, Confs: General Linguistics; Ling & Literature; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics / Italy

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Date: 31-Jan-2025
From: Simone Causa [s.causa at unior.it]
Subject: (FR)ACTUALITIES Fragments in the Present Time: an Interdisciplinary Reflection on Linguistics, Literature, Identity, and narratives of Modernity


CFP - (FR)ACTUALITIES Fragments in the Present Time: an
Interdisciplinary Reflection on Linguistics, Literature, Identity, and
narratives of Modernity

Date: 01-Dec-2025 - 03-Dec-2025
Location: Naples, Italy

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Ling & Literature;
Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
The dynamic relationship between modern times and fragmentation offers
a way to explore connections between individuals and communities,
specificity and universality, in today’s complex reality. The
relationship between the contemporary and fragmentation can be
observed from two perspectives: the fragment intended as a
self-sufficient entity or as a part of a larger, more complex reality.
The first perspective aligns with the etymological dimension of the
word ‘fragment’, encapsulating the notion of rupture, which
characterizes both its genesis and its state of autonomy and/or
isolation. As such, the fragment emerges from the collapse of the
reality it reflects, emulating its debris (Blanchot 1980).
The second perspective suggests a constant dialectical relationship
between fragments and their whole. Despite its partial nature, the
fragment finds its meaning in relation to the context while
maintaining a balance between independence and relationality. This
duality reflects the human condition, where the desire for totality
coexists with the recognition of life’s inherent incompleteness
(Derrida 2014).
In contemporary society, these perspectives find varied expressions
across an array of macro themes. Capitalist and neoliberal systems
influence identities, shaping both individuals and collectives (Harvey
2005). Contemporary dynamics of fragmentation include privatization,
individualism, marginalization, and the creation of "wasted lives"
(Bauman 2004).
While the interconnectivity fostered by Web 2.0 has intensified
globalization and positioned individual identities within layered
networks that span geographical, digital, and literary spaces, the
divide between digital and analogue grows increasingly blurred,
resulting in an "onlife" reality where the online and offline merge
inseparably (Floridi 2015).
The postmodern fragmentation of identity mirrors these contradictory
forces. As algorithms push for coherent identity representations,
reducing subjects into cohesive, commodifiable entities, the self
remains inescapably fragmented and shaped by context (Fisher 2022). In
this "age of fragmentation" (Lifton 1999), new reflections are being
produced on the hybrid relationship between the human and non-human,
nature and culture, emphasizing the agency of matter—even in its
smallest, or toxic, or viral forms (Latour 2014).
In literature, fragmentation—whether conceived as a trace of lost
unity or as a configuration of autonomous parts forming a new
whole—responds to the complexity of contemporary reality, caught
between disintegration and a desire for renewed connections.
Fragmentation is featured both in contemporary prose, through the
rejection of conventional narrative forms, and poetry, whose
fragmentary nature uniquely articulates the ruptures of the present.
Literary expressions of the fragment allow for representations and
interpretations of increasingly fragmented identities in a time of
challenges to their integrity and ability to produce meaning (Deleuze
and Guattari 2013).  In addition to reflecting a shattered world
through fragments, the literary realm also proposes new ways of
inhabiting and understanding it, balancing rupture with the potential
for reconstruction. This implicit fragmentation may often become a
deliberate structural choice.
The dismissal of unity – be it temporal, spatial, or narrative – can
suggest a worldview that is both chaotic and unstable, signaling a
break from hegemonic discourses or even offering readers a method to
embrace the uncertainty of reality (Caracciolo 2022). Such dynamics
are particularly evident – either internally or externally – in the
spatial, temporal or cultural dislocation of texts through
intralingual, interlingual, intrasemiotic, or intersemiotic
translation practices (Dam, Brøgger, and Zethsen 2019).
As far as contemporary practices are concerned, fragments also
interact with concepts of text and intertextuality, where each
literary work exists in dialogue with others, enriched by traces and
citations (Kristeva 2017, Genette 2014). In literature, texts,
conceptualized as textus (Barthes 2002), represent a dense network of
references—fragments that derive meaning relationally and
pluralistically. Similarly, in linguistics, the fragment serves as a
mosaic piece, elucidating complex links between texts and contexts.
Many reflections on intertextuality, often regarded as a key criterion
for defining textuality (de Beaugrande e Dressler 1981), have their
roots in philology. This discipline, through its study of sources, has
explored texts as repositories of collective memory.
The interaction of texts extends to multimodal communication,
combining words, images, sounds, and digital-native resources (Jewitt
2014, Esposito and KhosraviNik 2023). Phenomena such as ‘remediation’
and intermediality weave traditional and digital media together
(Bolter and Grusin 1999).
Morevoer, just like texts, words are produced by the continuous
tensions that exist between lexical unity and the necessary
fragmentation of their constituents, namely the discrete, productive
combinatorial units that form minimal pairs of phonological segments
and syntactic-semantic content (Jackendoff 2003, Haspelmath 2020).
Word fragments combine to form new linguistic entities, such as
neologisms (Pruvost and Sablayrolles 2019). Fragmentation is also
intrinsic to linguistic repertoires, which are shaped by bilingualism,
language varieties, and social identities (Eckert 1989, Burnett 2023,
Appel and Muysken 2006).
The Department of Literary, Linguistic, and Comparative Studies at the
University of Naples “L’Orientale” is happy to present the XIII
Graduate Conference and invites contributions that explore how the
postmodern subject—torn between individual identity and the necessity
of forging relationships with the multifaceted sociocultural realities
of the contemporary era navigates (or drifts on) the fragments of
various dimensions of the present. Interdisciplinary approaches are
encouraged within, but not limited to, the following thematic areas:
• fragment as form/practice/strategy: contemporary narrative, poetry,
and essays, diaristic, memorial, and epistolary literature, aphoristic
writing, translation practices;
• contemporary reworkings of the fragment: AI driven tools and
automation, combinatory literature, hypertextual and digital
literature, multimodality, intermediality;
• fragmentation and identity: postcolonial literature, migration
literature gender literature, postmodern literature, metamodern
literature language variation and varieties, linguistic contact,
multilingualism;
• environmentalism and fragmentation: ecocriticism, ecopoetry,
speculative fiction, the human–non-human relationship, ecolinguistics;
• fragment as a unit of meaning: philology, iconotextuality,
intertextuality, lexical creativity, lexicology, phonological,
morphosyntactic, and semantic fragments.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Submission should include:
• Author(s) name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information
• Title of the presentation
• Abstract using APA style for references (400 words, excluding
references)
• A short essential bibliography (max. 10 titles)
• Short bio-note (100 words)
Proposals should be submitted in PDF format to
gradconf2025.unior at gmail.com by April 15, 2025. The file name should
follow this format: Surname_Name_gc25.pdf. Presentations should last
no longer than 20 minutes.
Acceptance notifications will be sent by May 15, 2025. Selected papers
will be considered for publication. Presentations may be delivered in
Italian or English.
IMPORTANT DATES
• Abstract submission deadline: April 15, 2025
• Notification of acceptance: May 15, 2025
• Graduate conference: December 1–3, 2025
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Giuseppe Balirano, Sergio Corrado, Federico Corradi, Alberto Manco,
Roberto Mondola
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Jolanda Balzano, Simone Causa, Rita Cesaro, Pasquale Concilio, Carmela
Esposito, Gesjana Halili, Chiara Iovene, Maria Grazia Massimo,
Cristina Resmini, Matilde Soliani, Zongyuan Wang, Gaia Zaccaro
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Appel R. & Muysken P. (2006), Language contact and bilingualism,
Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam.
Armiero M. (2021), Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Bauman Z. (2004), Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity,
Oxford.
Barthes R. (2002), Le plaisir du texte, Éditions du Seuil, Paris.
Beaugrande R.-A. (de) & Dressler W. U. (1981), Einführung in die
Textlinguistik. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Blanchot M. (1980), L’écriture du désastre, Gallimard, Paris.
Bolter J. D. & Grusin R. (1999), Remediation: Understanding new media,
MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Bryson J. S. (2002), Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction, The
University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Burnett H. (2023), Meaning, identity, and interaction: Sociolinguistic
variation and change in game-theoretic pragmatics, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Caracciolo M. (2022), Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty:
Narrating Unstable Futures, Bloomsbury Academic, New York.
Dam H., Brøgger M. & Zethsen K. (2019), Moving boundaries in
translation studies, Routledge, Abingdon/New York.
Deleuze G. & Guattari F. (2013), Mille plateaux, Minuit, Paris.
Derrida J. (2014), L’écriture et la différence, Points, Paris.
Eckert P. (1989), Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity
in the high school, Teachers College Press, New York.
Esposito E. & KhosraviNik M. (2023), “Digital distribution processes
and new research tools in SM-CDS”, in M. KhosraviNik (ed.), Social
media and society: Integrating the digital with the social in digital
discourse, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 15–37.
Fisher E. (2022), Algorithms and subjectivity: The subversion of
critical knowledge, Routledge, London.
Floridi L. (2015), The onlife manifesto: Being human in a
hyperconnected era, Springer, Cham.
Genette G. (2014), Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré,
Éditions du Seuil, Paris.
Harvey D. (2005), A brief history of neoliberalism, Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Haspelmath M. (2020), The morph as a minimal linguistic form,
Morphology, 30, pp. 117–134.
Jackendoff R. (2003), Foundations of language – Brain, meaning,
grammar, evolution, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Jewitt C. (2014), “An introduction to multimodality”, in C. Jewitt
(ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis, Routledge,
London, pp. 15–30.
Kristeva J. (2017), Sēmeiōtikē; recherches pour une sémanalyse,
Points, Paris.
Latour B. (2014), Agency at the time of the Anthropocene, New Literary
History, 45, pp. 1–18.
Lifton R. J. (1999), The protean self: Human resilience in an age of
fragmentation, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Pruvost J. & Sablayrolles J.-F. (2019), Les néologismes (« Que
sais-je? »), Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.



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