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LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURAL POLICIES

THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY
 

Craiova, October 27-29, 2023

 

            In his last book, Memory, History, Forgetting (2000), on the very last page, Paul Ricoeur, aged 87, wrote a little poem that stated “Beneath history, memory and forgetting/ Beneath memory and forgetting, life”. These seem indeed to be the poles between which our existence unfolds, the need to remember and the reluctance to forget, which sometimes changes into the need to forget in order to move on. Everything that we know about ourselves and our world has been shaped by this strange dialectics memory-forgetting, by the need to record everything, by the competing stories told by artefacts and historiography, by mainstream, official History and personal recollections. A “geography of memory” would attempt to map out a relatively trustful record of what we are, relying upon mementos and memory-invested objects, upon what Pierre de Nola called “lieux de memoire” and on people’s stories and experiences of the past. Since modernism and postmodernism have already exposed both memory and history for their ultimate unreliability and most often, ideological agenda, for their textuality and gap-filling preference, new ways of approaching, recording, integrating and projecting the past have to be devised.

            Proposals for papers addressing but not limited to the following topics are most welcome: traumatic places and healing spaces; sites of memory/ “lieux de mémoire”; souvenirs, mementos & aide-memoires: objects as repositories of memory; erased histories and spaces of memory recuperation; traces, clues, secretive spaces; means of recording the past; translating reminiscences into history; mapping the becoming; linguistic landscape and memory; multilingualism. Proposals are invited in one of the following fields/sections:

• American literature
• Commonwealth literature
• Cultural studies
• Linguistics and semiotics
• Applied linguistics
• Approaches to discourse and text analysis
• Translation studies
• Educational studies / ESL/EFL Language Teaching

Confirmed keynote speakers

• Elisabetta Marino, Tor Vergata University of Rome (Italy)
• Nicola Galloway, University of Glasgow (UK)
• Małgorzata Karczewska, University of Zielona Góra (Poland)
• Lilijana Burcar, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

Workshop

"Mapping Traditions of Sacred India" – workshop organised by Mihaela Gligor, The Romanian Academy Cluj-Napoca, "George Barițiu" Institute of History/ Cluj Centre of Indian Studies, Babeș Bolyai University. This workshop aims to celebrate 75 years since the conclusion of the diplomatic relations between India and Romania and 10 years since the Agreement on Extended Partnership between India and Romania was signed.

 

Submission instructions

Proposals (maximum 200 words) for 20-minute papers, included in the Registration form attached to this call, can be sent to the organisers at llcpconference2023@gmail.com by 10 September 2023. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 20 September 2023.

The languages of the conference are English and German.

 

Conference fees

- face-to-face participants presenting papers: 300 RON / 60 EUR

- online participants presenting papers: 150 RON/ 30 EUR

- attendance without presentation: 150 RON/ 30 EUR

 

A selection of papers will be published after the conference. The fee does not include travel expenses, accommodation and the social programme (to be announced).

 

Venue: University of Craiova Main Building, 13 A.I. Cuza Street

 

Further information    

A second circular will be emailed to those who have returned the preliminary registration form.