[CFP] “Moving texts: mediations and transculturations” 12-14 July 2017, Portugal

International Conference
“Moving texts: mediations and transculturations”
12-14 July 2017
Complexo Pedagógico – Universidade de Aveiro
Portugal

Intercultural contact has, for some decades now, offered pervasive yet complex opportunities for study. This line of work aspires to identify and understand flows of information, fashions and power relations and to lend coherence to the processes inscribed in the concepts of diffusion, influence, mediation, centre and periphery, colonized and colonizer, uniformity and heterogeneity, foreignization and domestication, originality and copy, us and others. The cultural shiftings that Romanticism linked to the Nation were reconsidered in the more cosmopolitan Modernist movement and, especially after the outbreak of WWII, were reinvented in the planetary resonances present in the ideas of universalism and, more recently, globalization.

This International Conference, Moving texts: mediations and transculturations, picks up this line of research in seeking to trigger discussion of interlinguistic and intercultural dialogues from different viewpoints, be they linguistic, cultural or literary, and to encourage the intertwining of disciplines. We anticipate that this interdisciplinarity will prove fruitful, especially since the most recent theoretical developments in this area have highlighted mobility and the sharing of concepts and methodologies.

Thus, for example, when considering texts and their trajectories, researchers have stressed the value of viewing the text as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon as well as the benefits of inquiring into recontextualizations and reconstructions of meaning. Such processes of resignification, when seen from the viewpoint of cultural and literary transpositions, arise from complex interactions amongst different languages and cultural spaces. This complexity is further accentuated by the fact that each cultural space is the result of successive hybridizations. Since the late seventies, translation studies, too, has turned to the interplay between translation and culture and to the analysis of processes of re-creation, on a path towards building interdisciplinary alliances with linguistics, literary and cultural studies. Lastly we should mention the view of translation as inseparably associated with interlinguistic and intercultural communication. Another aim of this conference is to discuss questions connected with language acquisition and/or linguistic variation in multilingual and multicultural contexts, whose theoretical and empirical underpinnings are mobilised by a complex network of linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and sociocultural areas of research/disciplines.

Following the same line of thought, the poster sessions constitute an opportunity for the younger researchers and those in the initial stages of their research to showcase the results of their empirical studies and/or present their work in progress.