Under the Auspices of the Doctoral School in Letters, Arts and Humanities,
University of Sfax
The Research Unit in Discourse Analysis (GRAD),
at the faculty of Letters and Humanities, Sfax
Organizes, on the 19th February, 2015, a conference on
The literature/linguistics interface: A synergy or a syndrome?
As linguistics has developed into a sound discipline, the question of its relation to other disciplines, including literature, naturally arises. The literature/linguistics interface has long been the interest of many linguists and literary critics. Those interested in developing the connections between linguistics and literature have advanced two main claims:
1/ Language is the medium of literature, and the more we know about the medium, the more we know about literature.
2/ Since the writer formulates his style by choosing specific linguistic features, the critic may understand the writer or the work or both by discovering patterns in the linguistic choices made consciously or unconsciously by the writer.
Consequently, new disciplines emerged to mediate between the disciplines of linguistics and literary criticism, applying the methods and insights of linguistics to traditional problems in literary analysis. Among these disciplines, there is stylistics which is also called linguistic criticism (Fowler 1986) or literary linguistics (Fabb et al. 1987).
As a result, literature has been explored in a more systematic and sophisticated way. Furthermore, many applications of linguistics have attempted to take into consideration the specificity of literature. Even more, the development of linguistics has contributed to the emergence of new views towards the notion of literariness.
However, the linguistic approaches to literature have undergone difficulties of practicality and disapproval. Consequently, within this controversial context, many questions arise, many issues need to be revised and many arguments for or against the applications of linguistics to literature need to be presented and supported:
- What are the different contributions of linguistics to literature?
- How does linguistics take into account the specificity of literature or the specificity of the literary work under study (or does it)?
- What types of interpreted meanings result from the linguistic studies of literature?
- What are the limits of a linguistic study of literature?
- What is the effect of the linguistic studies on the notion of literariness?
- The literary work: Is it the focus or the corpus?
Presentations may be related but not limited to:
- Stylistics Literary criticism
- Structuralist poetics Critical theory
- Literary pragmatics Poetics
- Literary semantics Narratology
- Pragmatic stylistics
- Cognitive poetics
- Cognitive narratology
- Cognitive stylistics
- Critical discourse stylistics
Your papers can be presented in English, French or Arabic. You are kindly invited to submit your abstracts (300 words maximum) via e-mail to Awatef Boubakri, the conference coordinator, at lit.ling2014@gmail.com
Deadline for submission: 31th August, 2014. Notification of acceptance: 30th September, 2014