2024

Call for Abstracts Textus issue 2/2025 – Literature The Voices of Water: Intermedial and Multimodal Blue Eco-Stories   Guest co-editors: Gilberta Golinelli (Bologna University) Maddalena Pennacchia (Roma Tre University) Niklas Salmose (Linnaeus University, Vaxjio, Sweden – Center of Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, Sweden) Copy Editor: Gaia Amrita Whitright (Roma Tre University)   What does water tell us of its story? How many stories are there in the voices of water? And how can we learn to listen to its many languages and eventually ‘speak’ them? There have been in the past artists and writers who have tried to listen to the voices of the rain, the sea, rivers and lakes. But was it really the voices of water they were listening to? Or was it just their own? And how did they transform it into a communicative object that could be shared by other fellow beings. “The nymphs are departed” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922) with a nostalgic take on the polluted Thames, as if centuries, and not just one, had passed from Wordsworth’s sublime exaltation of “the roar of waters, torrents, streams / Innumerable, roaring with one voice’ (Prelude, 1805). And that was before any discussion concerning climate changes and unprecedented droughts, before we knew of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, before the Dutch Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Paul Crutzen, gave a name and a visibility to the concept of Anthropocene (2000), before we ever heard the word Solastalgia (G. Albrecht, 2005), before the sustainable development goals were even conceived. Is there a possible genealogy of old and multifaceted blue eco-stories? And if it exists, does it contain values and perspectives that can be worthy of transformation and reintegration into today’ and tomorrow’s society? What of writers who in their literary works try to listen to the voices of water today? How do they interact, if they do, with science reports and evidences? What multimodal and intermedial strategies do they explore to host and welcome the voices of water and their own? Can their work facilitate the process of societal changes so necessary to the survival of future generations? Some, like Carla Benedetti (2022), think so. With the help of a powerful leverage: empathy. This volume invites papers dealing with old and new eco-stories of water, how they are fashioned and communicated multimodally and intermedially, and what they can do for us.   Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: · Textual, figurative, and multimodal representations of old and new eco-stories of water and their intermedial relation. · Nostalgia, pastoral and environmental discourses: between fiction and scientific knowledge. · Literary critical approaches and ocean/blue cultural studies. · Gender, genre(s) and genealogies of blue storytelling. · Empathy, social impact and transformative power of blue-eco-stories. · Issues of gender, nature, and aquatic environment. Social changes and changing constructions of aquatic environment. · The rhetoric of water: questioning and re-fashioning aquatic environments   Keywords: blue ecocriticism, water, anthropocene, solastalgia, climate changes, resilience, transformation, humanities and science relation, empathy, intermediality, multimodality, language ecology (with specific reference to the aquatic environment), fiction and literary texts.   References: Albrecht, Glenn, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2019 Benedetti, Carla, La letteratura ci salverà dall’estinzione, Torino, Einaudi, 2021 Bruhn Jørgen, Schirrmacher Beate, Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media, New York, Routledge, 2022. Bruhn, Jørgen and Niklas Salmose, Intermedial Ecocriticism, Lanham, Lexington Books 2023 Dobbin, Sidney I., Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative, New York, Routledge, 2021 Ellestrom, Lars, Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, Palgrave, 2010 Hogan Colm, Patrick et al (eds), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotions, Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2022. Salmose, Niklas (ed.), Contemporary Nostalgia, special issue of Humanities, 2019 [available at https://www.mdpi.com/books/reprint/1568-contemporary-nostalgia] Submission of abstracts and timeline Please send abstracts to: gilberta.golinelli2@unibo.it, maddalena.pennacchia@uniroma3.it and niklas.salmose@lnu.se   Timeline Deadline for abstracts submission (400 words plus references): 15 September 2024. Please put as subject line “Textus Literature Issue 2/2025 – abstract submission” Notification to authors: 30 September 2024 Deadline for submission of first draft of article (maximum 7500 words including references): 31 December 2024 Request for revisions following peer review: 15 February 2025 Deadline for final version of article: 15 April 2025

Call for abstracts Textus issue 1/2025 – Language The Breeding Grounds of Conflict:Discourses of War, Discrimination, Protest, and Disinformation   Guest co-editors: Bronwen Hughes (Parthenope University of Naples) Margaret Rasulo (University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli) Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University/University of Vienna) Copy Editor: Laura Ann McLean (University of Turin) Sticks and stones will break my bones, and words will always hurt me. Although the word ‘conflict’ brings international warfare readily to mind, disagreements can occur at any level or setting. By adopting a broader definition of the term, other fissiparous contexts and circumstances are called into play. Stripped of its many connotative features, conflict entails the duality of opposing factions, the ‘taking of sides’, the perception of an enemy, and the apportioning of interest. Our era is witnessing a surge of opinions, actions, and beliefs of a conflictual nature. The manifold contexts in which conflict arises range from overt hostile manifestations of dissent to covert hate-inducing tactics. The daily exposure to a myriad of viral inoculations of animosity which contaminate our personal and professional identity impacts upon our ever-diminishing resilience as human beings, leading to vulnerability and permeability. In the presence of a persistent feeling of defencelessness when faced with conflict, alarming levels of negative emotional expenditure are likely to emerge, with an ensuing sense of fear, coupled with other adverse feelings of anxiety, anger and frustration. Linked to cultural and collective trauma, fear is indeed the emotional force that shapes human agency as well as attitudes. In conflict-steeped contexts, individuals are confronted with a lingering perception of threat brought about by social disruption and division. In political settings, fear is at its pinnacle when it strives to divide the world into “good” and “bad” citizens, thus legitimizing politics of exclusion, dramatization and emotionalization (Wodak, 2015). In the spirit of the survival of the fittest, in such dire circumstances, rather than stifling divergencies through resolutory actions, we tend to react by taking the emotional turn, prompting either the avoidance or the instigation of conflict (Bramsen et al. 2014; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). Thus, despite the much-needed call for a ceasefire across all breeding grounds of conflict, worldwide evidence points to the normalization (Wodak 2015) of hostile patterns and propaganda without counter remedies or calls for action. Be it open or proxy warfare, online/offline hate speech, climate injustice or economic disparity, the sheer callousness of conflictual behaviour – whether ideational, ideological, or emotional – erodes the very fabric of society and leads to widespread polarization. Conflict is by its very nature complex, and the recent global pandemic with its attendant move to online platforms has added new layers of difficulty. Online environments are intrinsically conducive to the proliferation of conflictual discourses often linked to the viral spreading of disinformation. Indeed, information warfare abounds on social media sites, and is often blamed for intensifying societal polarization by creating echo chambers (E. Bakshy et al., 2015). For political, social, religious, or economic reasons, these filters tend to prevent people from being exposed to evidence-based information (Del Vicario et al. 2016), resulting in the blurring of social boundaries dangerous common ground which not only excludes the ‘other’, as an individual or perspective, but also breeds conflict. The phenomenon known as context collapse, inherent to the architecture of social media, and consisting in the blurring of social boundaries between the private and the public, or the personal and the professional, only serves to aggravate the problem (Davis and Jurgenson 2014). When every interaction is addressed to a multiple audience and the distinctiveness of context collapses, the platform takes over and controls the only gateway to/for information. Language does participate in the worldview of conflicts, and discursive representations of antagonism may serve to exacerbate or ameliorate situations of unacceptable strife. One such dynamic is the Us and Them division (van Dijk, 1998) that reproduces positive self-presentation and negative other- presentation (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001). This view of the world not only mobilizes conflict to initiate or stifle necessary social action, such as passing vital legislation to solve climate change or immigration, but also legitimizes attacks on existing institutions and the rule of law. Extensive exposure to the dynamics of conflict and contingent factors therefore provides significant insights into the role of language and discourse in understanding and addressing such issues. Whatever the context of usage, discourses of conflict, due to their insidious nature can, and often do, go undetected. Lack of awareness, in turn, leads to collateral damage stemming from asymmetries of power, opposing interests and reduced social capital. Conflict, as emerges from the above discussion, is a phenomenon of such complexity and breadth, that it cannot be fully understood within the boundaries of a single discipline and needs to be addressed from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Contributions to this issue of Textus will therefore extend the debate by raising the levels of critical awareness and providing understanding of the multiple ways in which hostile systems perpetuate themselves to the grave detriment of the basic needs of individuals and groups. Possible areas of research include but are not limited to the following: · Discourses of Nationalism · Gender Identity Representation · Political discourse · Health discourse · Immigration · Physical and sexual aggression, from individual violence to mass aggression, including genocide and terrorism. · The dynamics and evolution of conflict and resolution. · Peace research · Religion and anger · Gender and anger · Ethnicity, marginalization and anger · Isolation and competition · (Im)politeness theory · Geo-political fields of tension · Hate speech and xenophobia, racism, disability, sexism, discrimination · The representation of identity in traditional and new media · Institutional discourse and identity representation · Identities and conflict in translation · Identity construction in postcolonial settings · Language, gender identity and sexuality · National/nationalist identity construction · Language, identity and disability · Language, identity and ethnicity · Language, identity and ageism · Language, identity and religion · Linguistic identity construction: native/L1 vs. non-native/L2 · Identity in academic, professional and specialized domains.   Selected methods and approaches should