Nome dell'autore: Anglistica

Keynote speaker: Professor Suzanne Raitt, College of William & Mary This international conference explores the diversity of connections, inspirations and influences in the work of modernist writer, May Sinclair (1863-1946). It will be held at the University of Nantes (France) on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th June 2020. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, May Sinclair was one of the most successful and widely known of British women novelists (Wilson, 2001). She produced over twenty novels and six collections of short stories and collaborated with many modernist writers and poets, including Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and Richard Aldington. Her life was also exceptionally rich. She took an active part in the women’s suffrage movement and published several pamphlets for women’s rights between 1908 and 1917. In the early 1910s, she got involved in medico-psychological research, and wrote half a dozen psychoanalytical research papers. In 1915, she spent two weeks near the Belgian front with an ambulance unit and her Journal of Impressions in Belgium was one of the first wartime women’s diaries published in Britain (Raitt 2000, 163). She was also the acclaimed author of two major philosophical essays on idealism (1917 and 1922) that led to her election to the Aristotelian Society. Last, she was an influential literary historian and literary critic and wrote several much-quoted articles and prefaces on the stream of consciousness, the Brontë sisters and imagist poetry. Many reviewers and critics have shown that May Sinclair’s modernism was not so much a derivation of other contemporary aesthetics but was rather a product of her idiosyncratic articulation of her many research interests and experiences. In addition, “the interdisciplinarity of Sinclair’s output […] eludes straightforward categorisation and this has arguably contributed to the traditional critical neglect of her writing” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 1). As May Sinclair is now “gaining critical legitimacy” (Raitt 2016, 23), this conference seeks to explore Sinclair’s texts and contexts and aims to shed light on her place in literary history and on her contribution to “the radical modernist challenge to traditional assumptions about what it means to be human” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 14). Papers comparing Sinclair and other writers are thus particularly welcome; suggested topics might include (but are not limited to): May Sinclair and her contemporaries: Thomas Hardy, Henry James, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Charlotte Mew, H. D., Richard Aldington, T S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Butts, Olive Moore etc. May Sinclair and modernity/the modern/modernism May Sinclair & WW1 writers May Sinclair and Victorian and late nineteenth-century authors: the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, George Meredith etc. May Sinclair and romantic poets: Shelley, Byron etc. May Sinclair and philosophy: Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza, T. H. Green, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Butler, Francis Herbert Bradley etc. May Sinclair and psychology: William James, Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Pierre Janet, Melanie Klein, Ella Sharpe, Joan Riviere, Alfred Adler, Charles Myers etc. May Sinclair and mysticism: Evelyn Underhill, the Society for Psychical Research, etc. May Sinclair and first-wave feminism Contemporary reception of May Sinclair May Sinclair and her literary legacy May Sinclair in translation May Sinclair and music May Sinclair and films or TV adaptations Proposals no longer than 350 words, together with a 200-word biography, should be sent to the conference organisers before January 15th, 2020. Conference organisers: Leslie de Bont, Université de Nantes        leslie.debont@univ-nantes.fr Isabelle Brasme, Université de Nîmes      isabellebrasme@gmail.com Florence Marie, Université de Pau            florence.marie@univ-pau.fr CFP: Networking May Sinclair / Les réseaux littéraires de May Sinclair | Université de Nantes, 18th-19th June 2020

Il giorno 13 novembre si svolgerà a Parma, presso la sede della Casa della Musica (P.le San Francesco 1) una giornata di studi dal titolo “Rooting Eco-criticism: British Romanticism and the Environment”, patrocinata dal CISR (Centro Interuniversitario di Studi Romantici). La giornata è stata organizzata dai docenti di Letteratura Inglese dell’Università di Parma, Prof.ssa Gioia Angeletti e Prof. Saglia, e coinvolge studiosi di Romanticismo inglese da varie università italiane e dall’Università di Vechta, Germania, allo scopo di riflettere su come temi cogenti della contemporaneità, quali la sostenibilità ambientale, il rispetto per il mondo naturale e animale, le preoccupazioni socio-ecologiche, fossero già sentiti e rappresentati nella letteratura inglese tra Sette e Ottocento.  

This Conference represents the conclusion of a PRIN Project (PRIN is the acronym for ‘research project of national interest’) co-funded by the Italian Ministry of University Research, whose title is: “English as a Lingua Franca in domain-specific contexts of intercultural communication: a cognitive-functional model for the analysis of ELF accommodation strategies in unequal migration contexts, digital-media virtual environments, and multicultural ELF classrooms.” Three academic Research Units are involved in this Project: the proposing Unit of the University of Salento (Principal Investigator and Unit Coordinator: Prof. Maria Grazia Guido); the Unit of the University of Roma Tre (Unit Coordinator: Prof. Lucilla Lopriore); and the Unit of the University of Verona (Unit Coordinator: Prof. Roberta Facchinetti). The Conference will enquire into the uses of ELF in domain-specific discourses that, more than others, provide evidence of an appropriation of the English language by non-native speakers who no longer perceive it as a ‘foreign’ language, but rather as a ‘lingua franca’ through which they can express their own native linguacultural uses and rhetorical repertoires, experiential schemata and, ultimately, socio-cultural identities. Such professional discourses regard ELF used in: (a) unequal migration encounters in institutional settings; (b) digital media for global communication; (c) the multilingual classroom in today’s western societies. The Conference Speakers (who are internationally recognized ELF scholars, as well as young and promising ELF researchers), starting from the assumption that non-native speakers appropriate ELF by exploiting its virtual meaning potential without conforming to native speakers’ norms of usage, will seek to examine specifically how ELF users interact among themselves, how they understand each others’ ELF variations, and what kind of problems naturally arise when one set of L1 usage and register conventions – transferred by users to their ELF variations – comes into contact, and often indeed into conflict, with another. This Conference proposes to explore the relevance of such questions to spoken, written and multimodal domain-specific communication which is of relevance particularly to multicultural settings. Since the awareness of the socio-cultural and political impact of ELF use in today’s globalized world is relatively recent, prominence will be given to the development of original Cognitive-functional Models which will put into question the established notions of cognitive and functional grammars, text linguistics and discourse pragmatics focused on native-speaker norms of English usage, in order to investigate how ELF communication can be enhanced by strategies of meaning co-construction and register hybridization accounting for ELF speakers’ different native linguacultural backgrounds, and how it can be instead hindered by failure in ELF accommodation. The ultimate aim is to open up this area of enquiry to a critical debate so as to further a fuller understanding of ELF as a crucial dimension of today’s international communication. To download the programme, please click here: PRIN Conference_4-6 December 2019_University of Salento_Programme & Topic https://prinelf2019.wixsite.com/salprin2019/committees