Nome dell'autore: Anglistica

Call for Papers The multitalented woman of letters, writer of fiction, and theoretician Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935) very early –and deeply—marked the field of fantastic literature. Many of her works, like those gathered in the collection *Hauntings* or such as “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady”, make use of a background immersed in the supernatural, be it real or suggested, to deal with questions that are recurrent in her work. Art works (sculptures, portraits, music) or the *genius loci* (often the spirit of Renaissance or Eighteenth Century Italy, but also Greek and Roman Antiquity, or the great Jacobean houses in England), often provide in-between, liminal spaces that border on the present and the past, broken into by a fascination with the historic that disrupts all topographical and temporal landmarks. Readers familiar with Vernon Lee’s theoretical texts have identified narrative patterns such as the Apollonian being overwhelmed by the Dionysiac, or the frontier between past and present or between people being abolished. This conference hopes to ask, if we consider the fantastic as the irruption of the supernatural in everyday life, how can we then assess and understand Lee’s fantastic fiction when her own texts and theory suggest a complex, fundamentally psychological process, rather than supernatural phenomena as described in classic ghost stories? It is possible to argue that Lee’s chosen theoretical posture on the fantastic reveals itself when empathy is evoked by a work of art, a portrait, a natural place or a building which arouses a feeling of “hauntedness”. Yet at the core of so many ghost stories (some too, by Lee), there is the assumption that the powerful personalities of the past can be endowed with a supernatural existence being willed to do so by the dissatisfied living. So how should one interpret Lee’s fantastic texts? This conference would like to interrogate Lee’s position on, and place within fantastic literature. We would also welcome broader comparisons between Vernon Lee and other writers who shared similar geographical, historical or artistic predilections. Lee’s decadent and cruel celebration of the Renaissance may situate her within the “New Romance” movement whicb boomed in the late 19th century and is exemplified by another woman of letters, Marie Corelli. There may also be the inevitable parallels with Oscar Wilde, or resemblances drawn between Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft’s ancient drama having cast a curse on the initial protagonist’s descendants. Perhaps the resurgence and the revival of art works or of gods and goddesses from Antiquity may connect Vernon Lee with a literary galaxy gathering authors like Prosper Mérimée, Arthur Machen, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Wilhelm Jensen, Robert W. Chambers, Théophile Gautier and many others, while the fascination of Renaissance portraits or haunted portraits is reminiscent of Robert Browning, of Walter Pater’s meditations on Mona Lisa, not to mention, to different degrees, novelists like Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and James Branch Cabell, all of whom endowed old portraits suggestive of some great tragedy with quasi supernatural powers. We invite papers in French or in English. Please send you 300-word abstract and short personal resume no later that 14 April 2022 to Pr. Marc ROLLAND garryowen@wanadoo.fr Pr Marc Rolland, Professor at the Université Littoral Côte d’Opale, recently published *Epouser la déesse, Essais sur la femme, le surnaturel et l’hyperbole*, éditions Shaker Verlag, 2021 <http://shaker.de/de/content/catalogue/index.asp?ID=8&ISBN=978-3-8440-7730-8> . We are delighted to announce that the annual event of the International Vernon Lee Society, co-organiser of the conference, is scheduled during this conference most aptly taking place in Vernon Lee’s own birthplace. Conference website: AAP: Vernon Lee et le fantastique, Boulogne-sur-Mer, 13-14 Octobre 2022  

Informal language learning inside and beyond the classroom: New perspectives Online conference (Zoom platform), 12 November 2021 Università di Pavia With the constant expansion of L2 learning affordances, traditional language learning shades into informal language acquisition and novel combinations of formal and informal learning emerge. This change in linguistic landscape dramatically affects English but also involves other L2s, calling for ‘a new model of what constitutes a linguistic environment for learning’ (Arnbjörnsdóttir, Ingvarsdóttir 2018). The conference will explore informal learning as it arises in a variety of settings, as those created in schools and universities through CLIL and EMI, and beyond when accessing traditional and new media in online and mobile environments. Conference website: https://studiumanistici.unipv.it/?pagina=p&titolo=ling-Attivita Conference attendance is free upon registration at https://forms.gle/ockq RVg5mb7sgQJj6 Deadline for registration: 31 October 2021 Scientific and organizing committee: Maria Pavesi*, Maicol Formentelli*, Elisa Ghia°, Fabrizio Maggi*, Cristina Mariotti* *Università di Pavia °Università per Stranieri di Siena Contact email: maicol.formentelli@unipv.it

ONLINE COLLOQUIUM ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS  Legal Communication on Covid-19   A Linguistic and Discursive Approach across Contexts and Media  Wednesday 1 December 2021  Department of Studies in Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication University of Milan  Members of the Milan Unit of the 4EU+ Alliance Minigrant Project “Transnational Legal  Communication on COVID-19: From Legislative to Popular Discourse” in the Department of  Studies in Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication are pleased to announce the  one-day colloquium to be held online on 1 December 2021.  The colloquium intends to explore the aspects of legal communication related to COVID-19  and its popularisation in the evolving stages of the pandemic and its aftermath.  Among the consequences of the crisis caused by the pandemic is the rethinking of current  global challenges ‒ public health, environmental sustainability, mobility, labour, education,  just to name a few ‒ with a better orchestrated approach, both at the national and European  level. Against this changing backdrop, political and institutional communication and the  media have been playing a key role in (dis)informing citizens of health risks and good  practices and promoting social debate to build new perspectives.  Understandably, a major area of analysis for language scholars is legal discourse. In each  individual EU country and transnationally, governments have been striving to respond to the  emergency by promulgating safety regulations and enacting the legislation needed to activate  new economic policies and boost the expected recovery of several sectors, deeply affected by  the pandemic.   This colloquium sets out to investigate the linguistic and discursive construction underlying  the implementation of legal measures and their dissemination to face the COVID-19 crisis,  with resulting changes. Besides the legal and medical domains, other possible areas of  analysis include, but are not limited to, institutional discourse within EU institutions and  media discourse, as both have contributed to the dissemination of legal regulations on a  national and global scale.  In particular, the colloquium aims to explore the perception of all these issues across  multiple cultural contexts, which are to be investigated in their linguistic and discursive  aspects and implications, as well as in the perspective of translation and interpreting.  Synchronic, diachronic, contrastive, interlinguistic and intercultural approaches are equally  welcome.  Conference Language: English  Dipartimento di Scienze della Mediazione Linguistica e di Studi Interculturali  Piazza Indro Montanelli, 1 – 20099 Sesto San Giovanni (MI) – Italy Tel.+39 02.503.21629 – Fax +39 02.503.21640 e-mail: smelsi@unimi.it    Keynote Speakers  Giuliana Elena GARZONE, Professor of English Linguistics and Translation, IULM International  University of Languages and Media, Milan.  Joanna OSIEJEWICZ, Associate Professor of Law and Linguistics, Principal Investigator of the  4EU+ minigrant, University of Warsaw.  Submission Guidelines  The submission deadline is 20 October 2021. Proposals of no more than 250 words should be jointly directed to mariacristina.paganoni@unimi.it and valentina.crestani@unimi.it.  For all submissions, please clearly indicate:  – Abstract title, author names, and full institutional affiliation  – Contact e-mail address and phone number for the responsible author  Decisions about acceptance will be communicated by 31 October 2021.  Oral presentations will be allocated 30 minutes (20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for  discussion).  Publication of selected papers in an international journal will follow.  Scientific Committee  Maria Cristina Paganoni (Chair), Bruno Arich-Gerz, Maria Vittoria Calvi, Paola Catenaccio,  Giuliana Garzone, Joanna Osiejewicz, Giuseppe Sergio  Organising Committee  Lisa Consonni, Valentina Crestani, Maria Cristina Paganoni Dipartimento di Scienze della Mediazione Linguistica e di Studi Interculturali  Piazza Indro Montanelli, 1 – 20099 Sesto San Giovanni (MI) – Italy Tel.+39 02.503.21629 – Fax +39 02.503.21640 e-mail: smelsi@unimi.it 

Sterne and the Grand Tour: Places, Postures, Portraits Fourth International Laurence Sterne Foundation Conference, Naples 28-30 October 2021 Sterne’s eccentric Grand Tour through Italy culminated in Naples, where he arrived ‘Shandaically’ enough just in time for the pre-Lenten festivities in February 1766. For the Fourth Conference in Naples the ILSF warmly welcomes proposals that focus on Sterne’s artful investment in all aspects related to the Grand Tour. Topics may include the following: The Grand Tour in the eighteenth century and Sterne’s narrative ‘detours’ Sterne in Italy between antique and modern arts Sterne and learned wit The metaphor of writing as travelling and Sterne’s travesties and postures Sterne’s authorial masks and the festive repertoire of the carnivalesque We also welcome proposals for themed panels. Abstracts (max 300 words) should be sent to Peter de Voogd (theshandean@fastmail.fm) and to Maria Laudando (cmlaudando@unior.it). The deadline is 31 July 2021. More info: http://shandean.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ILSF-Conference-2021.pdf ilsf-conferences

INTERNATIONAL ONLINE CONFERENCE VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY Co-organised by Raffaella Antinucci, Università Parthenope, Naples, and Adrian Grafe, Université d’Artois (Research Lab “Textes et Cultures”) 16th-17th December 2021 Art in general, and literature in particular, have long been used as means to represent and give visibility to dynamics of violence, hurting and endurance. Vulnerability and resilience are two strongly related and almost antonymic concepts whose first meanings originate in the physical world. If vulnerability indicates the quality of being easily physically hurt or attacked, the word resilience was first used in physics to describe the ability of a substance or body to recover its shape and size after being bent, stretched, or pressed. When transferred into the social sciences, vulnerability denotes the diminished capacity of an individual or group to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a traumatic situation, whereas resilience points to a human intrinsic quality or “inner strength” that varies according to each individual’s capacity to react in a positive way to the same dramatic event or conditions. Considering the dramatic social and epistemic changes, including several tragic events, that characterized nineteenth-century Britain, the conference wishes to explore the literary forms in which individual and collective responses to traumas and marginalisation were addressed. Taking into account the Darwinian paradigm but intending to broaden and go beyond it, the conference seeks to address the representation of modes of exposure and (apparent) powerlessness, and how these are overcome. The conference will examine literary responses in the nineteenth century to crisis, trial and torment, topoi that loom large, for example, in Joseph Campbell’s idea of the monomyth, or hero’s and heroine’s journey, although here we are also specifically concerned with the non-heroic and anti-heroic. The neuroscientist Boris Cyrulnik has, in Un merveilleux malheur, described resilience as related to the idea that a crisis that deals the human subject a serious psychological blow may divide him or her into two, with one part of the self suffering the blow while the other ensures the subject’s survival by focusing on possibilities for happiness, what Hardy in a much-quoted phrase called ‘the appetite for joy’. How does the ‘acceptance of the fallible self’ (Collins 144) lead to a superabundance of love and goodwill? In George MacDonald’s novel Adela Cathcart (1864), the heroine suffers from a mysterious illness to which storytelling is perceived as ‘a potential cure’, and the means “to another kind of life”’ (cf Dubois 2015). The conference seeks to go beyond purely individual vulnerability. It will therefore take into account how nineteenth-century literature, in the shape, for instance, of the invasion scare novel, dramatised what Stephen Serata has called “the nation’s vulnerability” (110). Sir George Chesney’s 1871 cautionary novel The Battle of Dorking (mentioned by Serata) is but one example. It also means to explore ways in which different literary genres can be perceived in the nineteenth century as more or less vulnerable: poetry, for example, due to the rise in novel-reading. Also in this respect, we will be glad to receive proposals exploring the conference topic in journals, apologies, confessions, and autobiographies. What is the relationship between the artist Benjamin Haydon’s writing his Journal, which ends on June 22 1846, and his suicide committed a few hours after the entry for the latter date. We are interested in literary depictions of the family as a site of vulnerability and resilience: the treatment and mistreatment of Pip and Joe in Great Expectations. Are children such as Pip or Jane Eyre depicted as mistreated as a manipulation of the reader on the author’s part, in order to arouse the former’s sympathy for the hero or heroine (cf Coveney). Among examples of prison literature, we would be pleased to welcome readings of Wilde’s De Profundis (written while he was in prison) and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (written after his time in prison and he had left England for France). Apart from the above examples, and among other possible topics, presentations may focus on: – Literature, storytelling, humour and altruism as mechanisms of resilience and survival; – Impact, positive or negative, of local communities on the individual; – Damage done to, and the survival of, children; – Resilience and social Darwinism; competition or adaptation? – The depiction of illness and care, the responsiveness or otherwise of patients to treatment, the nature and quality of medicine and the medical professions; – Post-feminist readings of care ethics in the literature of the period; – ‘broken and failing groups of organic beings’ (Darwin, Origin, as quoted by Beer, 42); – Gratitude, kindness and bravery as factors in the promotion of resilience and survival – or not? – Poetry as mourning (Tennyson) or – As response to, if not enactment of, spiritual disturbance and recovery (Hopkins); – Why do some characters overcome adversity and others do not? – The perception and depiction of gender in relation to vulnerability and resilience: does “the man”—rather than “the woman”—ever “pay”? – … SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY – Beer, Gillian (2009). Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. CUP. – Collins, Deborah L. (1990). Thomas Hardy and His God: A Liturgy of Unbelief. Macmillan. – Coveney, Peter (1967). The Image of Childhood. Penguin. – Cyrulnik, Boris (1999). Un merveilleux malheur. Paris: Odile Jacob. – Dubois, Martin (2015), ‘Sermon and Story in George MacDonald’, Victorian Literature and Culture 43, 577-587. – Serata, Stephen (1996). Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire. CUP. – Troisi, Alfonso (2001). “Gender differences in vulnerability to social stress: a Darwinian perspective”. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11438373 There are no fees to take part in, or attend, this online conference. Please send Adrian Grafe adrian.grafe@univ-artois.fr and Raffaella Antinucci raffaella.antinucci@uniparthenope.it 150-word proposals for 20’ presentations, along with a brief bio-biblio, by July 3rd 2021. We expect to publish a set of essays arising from the conference.

Segnaliamo il seguente evento: “Tertiary Teaching for the Multilingual University” Date: 11-12 June 2021 Institution: Free University of Bolzano, Faculty of Education (Bressanone) Description: The integration of content and language in higher education (ICLHE) has become central to the internationalisation of university curricula, yet quality in curriculum planning and delivery has sometimes been overlooked in the rush to internationalise. The conference examines models of innovation in tertiary teaching with a focus on content-and-language integrated learning, seeking to identify synergies between pedagogical research and didactic practices for EMI/multilingual higher education. Scientific Committee: Lynn Mastellotto, Renata Zanin, Liliana Dozza, Maria Cristina Gatti, Michele Cagol (Unibz); Amanda Murphy e Francesca Costa (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore); Elena Borsetto (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia). Registration: This will be an online event hosted on Zoom. There is no registration fee, but participants must register and will receive the Zoom link. Registration information available at this link: https://www.unibz.it/…/136690-tertiary-teaching-for-the… Conference website: https://iclhe2021.events.unibz.it/?page_id=100&lang=it