CONFERENCE PROGRAMME > KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Keynote speakers

 

https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/staff/marcalexander/

 

 https://www.univ-lyon3.fr/jobert-manuel

https://climas.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/membres/54-lapaire-jean-remi-professeur-linguistique-anglaise

“Sensing and doing meaning: the power of ‘ception’ and ‘intersemiotic’ translation in art and language education.”

The visual-kinetic properties of posture, gesture and gaze expression (McNeill 2005) are ideally suited to orchestrate the “intersemiotic translation” (Jakobson 1959) of rich and complex cultural material. As this is done, physical models of literary analysis, creative writing and artistic appreciation may be developed that release the full “interpretive potential” (Lapaire 2019) of participants, in a joint cognitive, dramaturgical and translational sense. In this presentation, I will put forward strong semiotic, cognitive and educational arguments for “resemiotising” (O’Halloran 2016) essays, novels and paintings as meaningful bodily displays. I will provide graphic illustrations of some recent “living art initiatives” in Italy (Sutri), Britain (The National Gallery, London) and the USA (“Creative recreations: challenging people in self-quarantine to recreate their favourite works of art,” The Getty Museum, LA). All these initiatives may be viewed as a resurrection of the old “tableau vivant” technique, which was immensely popular across Europe among the leisured classes in the 18th and 19th centuries. I will try to explain why master paintings can be so easily reframed and recreated by (professionals and amateurs alike) as spectacular bodily performances in a variety of formats and settings. I will also try to understand why we so easily accept the transformation of spoken or written narratives into musical or choreographic pieces, as attested by McGregor and Hans Zimmer’s ballet triptych Woolf Works (2015), which was composed for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. I will finally present my own experimental workshops with graduate students of art and literature. I will argue throughout that designing dynamic, imagistic representations of complex meaning configurations involves a process of iconic, metonymic and metaphoric compression, which feeds communal forms of “caption” (Talmy 2000) and “performative reflexivity” (Turner 1988). I will close with a brief assessment of reception: how students physically and mentally engage in (or disengage from) visuo-kinetic strategies of resemiotisation. A summary of the results obtained through anonymous questionnaires and reflective journaling (among 420 graduate students, over a period ranging from 2014 to 2019) will be given.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/people/violeta.sotirova

The Representation of Experience in Modernist Fiction

This paper explores the holistic nature of character experience in Modernist fiction and how this is represented stylistically. I argue that the report of action, typically assigned to the narrator as external observer and reporter, acquires a subjective dimension that can position it as part of free indirect style. Physical experience is inextricably interwoven with thought, feeling and perception across Modernist texts, thus ceasing to be reported as if from outside and instead appearing as if it is a mimetic representation of an aspect of the character’s consciousness. While the majority of scholars treat free indirect style as discourse, the Modernist examples challenge the dichotomy between objective external report and subjective inner speech by weaving together all aspects of experience into a subjective representation. Such an analysis might lead to a new category of consciousness representation – the experience of action – and is in line with concurrent developments in phenomenology.

References:

Dillon, G. and Kirchhoff, F. (1976) ‘On the form and function of free indirect style’, PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 1: 431–440.

Banfield, A. (1978) ‘The Formal Coherence of Represented Speech and Thought’, Poetics and Theory of Literature, 3(2): 289-314.

Semino, E. and Short, M. (2004) Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge.

Rundquist, E. (2017) Free Indirect Style in Modernism: Representations of Consciousness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Sotirova, V. (2013) Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study. London: Palgrave.

Poellner, P. (2007) ‘Consciousness in the World: Husserlian Phenomenology and Externalism’, in Leiter, B. and Rosen, M. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, pp. 409-460. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

https://professormichaeltoolan.wordpress.com/

Punctuating direct speech and the marking of voice in narrative fiction

In the reporting of direct speech in fictional narratives, the use of a simple introductory dash and the avoidance both of speech marks and of a framing clause (before the reported speech or parenthetically), has been around for a long time, with Joyce and Hemingway among many noted practitioners among English-using writers (alongside many Europeans, prompting some British critics to dub the use of dashes a ‘Continental’ style). But what of direct speech in novels and stories where neither dashes nor speech marks are used, and framing or inquit clauses are sparse? There seems to be a small surge in the adoption of this option by contemporary writers in English, often presenting the reader with an extra challenge, to keep track of who is speaking and where one speaker ceases and another takes over. Especially if the narrative is in present tense, so that distinguishing the narrator’s voice from one character or another can be extra demanding. Why are writers doing this? What are the benefits that all this taxing of the reader might yield, to justify the extra effort imposed on us? What do we get, or what happens to us as readers, when we have to keep figuring out who is speaking now?

I will present extracts from two wonderful recent novels, Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand and Damon Galgut’s The Promise, while mulling over these questions.