The Changing City: Representations, Metaphors and Memory

Naples, 28-30th of April 2021

Call for Papers

"Una città non è disegnata, semplicemente si fa da sola. Basta ascoltarla, perché la città è il riflesso di tante storia."

 [A city is not designed, it simply creates itself.  It is enough to listen to it, because it is the reflection of many stories.]

(Renzo Piano, 2000)

Cities, according to the architect Renzo Piano, are places that are continually being created, they are ever-shifting repositories of stories. They tell of times past, giving glimpses of history, traditions and memories which live alongside the most compelling expressive needs of modernity; and at the same time they thrust themselves towards the future.

Against the backdrop of cities, novels, plays and films are written, characters are sketched, the impossible is imagined, discourses are generated which establish inclusive and exclusive identity practices. As Charles Baudelaire outlines in the dedication of Le Spleen de Paris (1869), the inhabitation of “enormous cities” gives rise to new written forms. 

Characterised by a profound spatial and political inhomogeneity, which governs the entropy on which the immense system is balanced, cities offer themselves as spaces open to translation and contamination, where linguistic, cultural and social meanings are continually remediated, negotiated and redefined. Listening to the city means understanding its innumerable languages, in a public space which can be both read and tread on, defined by Rodrigue Landry and Richard Y. Bouthis as Linguistic Landscape (1997).

Starting from these considerations, the sixth edition of the Graduate Conference of the University of Naples “L’Orientale” invites contributions which, addressing the critical categories of urban space, gravitate around the representation of the kaleidoscopic experience of the city. 

Multiple intersecting themes are present, so, with the aim of promoting an interdisciplinary debate, the proposed lines of research are as follows:

• The multilingual city

• The translated city

• The narrated city

• The mediated city

• The digital city

• The smart city 

• The ancient city 

• The buried city

• The city of the future

• Imagining the city

• Inhabiting the city

• Rediscovering the city

• Mapping the city 

• Enhancing the city

• Identity and the city

• Accessibility and the city

• Sustainability and the city

CALL FOR PAPERS IN ITALIANO

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.

We invite the submission of Abstracts, which should not exceed 300 words (excluding the title and essential bibliography) to be submitted by the 15th of June 2020 in .pdf format, accompanied by a short biographical statement (100 words max).

Please, be sure to upload a pdf file containing the abstract, bibliography and, bio-note about the author(s).

It should be noted that contributions are welcomed in Italian or English.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified whether their contribution will be an oral talk or in the form of a poster.

Talks will have a maximum duration of 15 minutes.

List of Methodologies

• Linguistic Analysis, Synchronic/Diachronic Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Dialectology, Applied Linguistics, Comparative Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Lexicography

• Literary Criticism, Comparative Literature, Ectodics, Philology

• Anthropology, Ethnography, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial and Gender Studies 

• Literary Translation Studies, Audiovisual Translation, Specialised Translation, Machine Translation

• Art, Cinema and Theatre

• NLP, Data Visualisation, Digital Storytelling, Distant and Close Reading, Image Recognition, Social Media Analysis

The proposed methodologies are not exhaustive. 

Committee

Program Committee

• Annarita Diretto
• Aoife Beville
• Arianna Grasso
• Carola Carlino
• Erika Papagni
• Giulia Speranza
• Luca Gendolavigna
• Luca Sarti
• Luisa Marino
• Maria Veronica Ventriglia
• Raffaele Manna
• Roberta La Peruta
• Roberto D'Urso
• Rosa Schioppa

Invited Speakers

• To be announced

Publication

Subsequently, the authors will be invited to submit their full papers for the publication of the Conference Proceedings, edited by the Conference Committee and the Scientific Committee of the Doctoral Teaching Body.

Venue

The conference will be held in Palazzo Du Mesnil, Via Chiatamone 61/62, Naples, Italy

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to gclorientale2020@gmail.com