Zapraszamy do udziału w konferencji 8th Annual Siedlce Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature. W tym roku temat przewodni to "Hidden" meanings across the fields of literature, linguistics and culture. Wydarzenie odbędzie się w dniach 23-24.11.2023.

Konferencję organizuje IJiL UwS we współpracy z University of Balearic Islands.

7^th Annual Siedlce Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature

to be held online for the purpose of presenting unpublished research findings  

in English on November 24-25^th, 2022.

The leitmotif of the conference is:

Representation:between and beyond cyclicity and newnessin literature, language, and philosophy

Representation constitutes a particularly important concern in present-day literary, linguistic, and philosophical discourses. Amitav Ghosh has famously referred to the contemporary situation as ‘a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination’. In what ways does this crisis affect representation as both a concept and a practice?

One angle on the problem includes genre. In the context of the Anthropocene, traditional genres, including the novel, grow increasingly incapable of dealing with the complexity of the world beyond the human realms of knowledge and existence. As changing apprehensions of space, time, and character become more and more widespread, can literary texts break through their cyclical forms of representation into the newness of multiple temporal and spatial scales, as well as other-than-human forms of narrative?

Another angle on the problem of representation involves the recycling of past receptions of literature for the purpose of present-day critical, political, and social agendas. As the author-work-reader approach gives way to the pressures of post-Barthian readings of canonical texts, does such a move contribute to the crisis of representation? Or does it open up critically new spaces for representation?

The problem of representation equally concerns the ways in which the discourse-functional aspects of linguistic knowledge represent language. In particular, this relates to various forms of symbolic representation (symbols, symbolism, representations of an utterance), the representation of semantic and cultural knowledge in the mind/brain, formal and cognitive models of grammar and grammatical knowledge, meaning construction in discourse, pragmatic and discourse functional aspects of symbolic representation, mental representations (semantic frames, domains, and idealized cognitive models), the relationships between language, culture, and the mind, different forms of representation of utterances in translation, and representation of grammatical and semantic knowledge in dictionaries and other reference works.

In addition, we will be interested in considering how philosophical debates have approached the problem of representation by considering alternatives, such as expressivism and pragmatism. The Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, and the Philosophy of the Mind distance themselves from the rootlessness of representation, insisting instead on the roles of individuals in acting and expressing themselves, on the one hand, and representing their actions in the form of narratives, on the other. Can the form, content, and strategies of narratives hold the key to representation?

Suggested Research Areas

• representation as a problem of narrative and rhetorical language
• the Anthropocene and the problem of representation
• self-representation
• representation as a construction from particular subject positions
• literary theories and representation of the past
• politics of representation
• poetics of representation
• representation as the reflection of a transparent record of reality
• the loss of a referent and the crisis of representation
• the representation of science and technology in children’s literature
• models of representation in translation
• ethics of representation in translation
• theorization and representation in linguistics
• representation in discourse analysis
• text representation: linguistic and cognitive aspects
• lexicographic representations of meaning