ANDA International Conference 2020
Trento, 1-2 October 2020
CALL FOR PAPERS
Title: Always Connect: Transdisciplinarity and Intercultural Contact in Literary Discourse
Organizing committee: Maria Micaela Coppola, Francesca Di Blasio, Greta Perletti, Emanuel Stelzer
ANDA Conference 2020 focuses on the philosophical and scientific debate on cultural contact by investigating multidisciplinary approaches to literatures in English. Subjects and cultures are mutually involved in complex and protean dynamics. Investigating the critical implications of these dynamics through multidisciplinary perspectives to literary studies and bridging the gap between apparently divergent approaches is nowadays an increasingly sought cultural and scholarly practice. Literature and its interactions with science, medicine, technologies, artificial intelligence and other disciplines in the humanities – such as history, anthropology, the visual and multimedia arts and music – are at the core of many potential and multifaceted investigations, originating within literary discourse itself. A multidisciplinary perspective is therefore essential to the representation and analysis of cultural phenomena as evidenced by the rich bibliography available.
The main theoretical frame of the conference is meant to be broad and yet specific: it spans the range of perspectives from cultural and postcolonial studies to anthropological, historical and philosophical reflections on cultural difference; it also includes theoretical views on the role of literature and the arts in cultural interactions (of cooperation and conflict) in an age of “superdiversity”. Through these multifarious multidisciplinary approaches, literature can be seen as a complex and dynamic system, in which issues of cross-cultural contact can be tackled from different theoretical and methodological points of view.
Proposals analysing texts, genres, genders, cultures, disciplines, media, and theories in literary studies are thus welcome. Topics may also include:
- Multi/inter/trans/disciplinary approaches to Literature, Postcolonial, Ecocritical and Partnership Studies
- Migrating in and across cultures and/or literatures
- Superdiverse texts, communities, practices
- Transgression in literary discourse
- Dialogue among apparently diverging approaches or texts (i.e. the humanities and sciences, narratology and medicine, etc.)
- Synchronic and diachronic diversities
- Questioning literary canons
- Literary paradoxes, contact zones, inter/trans/culturation
Selected Bibliography:
Appadurai, A., The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, New York, Verso, 2013.
Arnaut, K. et al., Language and Superdiversity, London and New York, Routledge, 2016.
Blommaert, J., Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity, London and New York, Routledge, 2013.
Braidotti, R. and Gilroy, P. (eds), Conflicting Humanities, London, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Brewster, A., Coppola, M.M., Di Blasio, F., Francesconi, S. (eds), Across Cultures, Languages, and Literatures, Textus. English Studies in Italy, Volume XXXII, No. 2, May-August 2019.
Cilliers, P., Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems, New York, Routledge, 1998.
Coppola, M.M., Di Blasio, F., Francesconi, S. (eds), Contact Zones: Cultural, Linguistic, and Literary Connections in English, Trento, Editrice UniTn, Collana Labirinti 179, 2019.
Coveney, P. and Highfield, R., Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World, New York, Fawcett Columbine, 1995.
DeLoughrey, E. and Handley, G.B. (eds), Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, Oxford-New York, Oxford U.P., 2011.
Duchêne, A. and Heller, M. (eds), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, Abingdon, Routledge, 2012.
Eisler, R., The Chalice and the Blade, San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1987.
Gibson, J., “Introduction”, in N. Carroll and J. Gibson(eds), Narrative, Emotion, and Insight, University Park, Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State U.P., 2011, pp. 1-8.
Gilroy, P., Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line, London, Allen Lane, 2000.
Gilroy, P., After Empire, Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, Routledge, Abingdon, 2004.
Klein, J.T., Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice, Detroit, Michigan, Wayne State Press, 1990.
Kohn, M. and McBride, K., Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations, Oxford, O.U.P., 2011.
Newell, W.H., “The State of the Field: Interdisciplinary Theory”. Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies, no. 31, 2013, pp. 22-43.
Thieme, J., Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Vertovec, S., New Complexities of Cohesion in Britain: Superdiversity, Transnationalism and Civil-Integration, Oxford, University of Oxford, COMPAS, 2007.
White, H., The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, Johns Hopkins U.P., Baltimore, 2010.