2025 ICLA Congress: 'Language Contact in Literature: Europe’
ICLA Congress (https://icla2025-seoul.kr/en) will be held in Seoul from July 28th to August 1st 2025.
Organizers :
Eugenia Kelbert and Marianna Deganutti (Slovak Academy of Sciences)
Proposals must be submitted by the 7th January 2025 through the ICLA website (https://icla2025-seoul.kr/en/abstract-submissions/abstract-submissions).
—
The newly established ICLA Research Committee on Language Contact in Literature: Europe (LCLE) intends to revisit translation, literary multilingualism and related fields as sites of linguistic contact and change within the literary realm. We thus reconsider literature with a focus on the multiple ways in which languages interact and influence each other when they come into contact, both at the level of individual speakers and that of linguistic communities. A number of scholars have proposed to apply a contact linguistics paradigm to translation (Kotze 2020; Malamatidou 2016); this Committee’s goal is to reinvent this approach for the global literary context (e.g. Hassan 2022). As many contemporary scholars of comparative literature (e.g. Yildiz 2012, Gramling 2016) recognize, the traditional focus on national literatures is insufficient to capture the global dimensions of the literary process. We therefore propose language contact in literature as a unified framework that can encompass and facilitate dialogue across several fields: the study of literary translation, multilingual and translingual literature, minor and borderland literature, influence across language boundaries, postcolonial literature, international literary movements and potentially others. Our aim is to identify and distinguish the diverse elements that contribute to literary language contact in its various guises, including linguistic and sociological factors, techniques and processes, as well as aesthetic and stylistic considerations. At the same time, we aspire to understand how different settings of language contact relate to one another, how they interact and what distinguishes them. To achieve these purposes, linguistics offers valuable theoretical support.
We invite original research papers that address the following areas and topics:
- The notion of language contact and how it can be productively applied to literature
- The array of elements/factors involved in a language contact in literature framework and their modulations
- The stylistics of language contact
- Manifest and latent multilingualism as an expression of language contact
- Translation as language contact
- What linguistic theories and approaches can contribute additional perspectives and nuance to the study of literary language contact
- The role of the author’s linguistic background and of the reader
- Potential challenges and limitations, notably in terms of particular language pairs, integrating and reconciling existing terminologies and extending the approach beyond the European context
- Specific case studies on literary translation, multilingual and translingual literature, minor and borderland literature, influence across language boundaries, postcolonial literature or international literary movements
- Additional areas in literary study where a language contact framework may apply