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Dear all, We are pleased to invite you to join us for the first session of the IMLR Graduate Forum this week, on Thursday 18 October at 6 pm in Room 234 (Senate House, London). Below you will find the full programme for 2018-19 and the abstracts for the first session. The Forum is a friendly and informal space for postgraduates to present their research. However, everyone is welcome to join us for our monthly sessions. Presentations will be followed by a Q&A with free wine and nibbles. After the reception, the conversation will continue at a local pub. All the best, Arianna Bassetti, Alessandra Rosati, Dalila Villella, Kendsey Clements IMLR Graduate Forum Coordinators ——————— Institute of Modern Languages Research Graduate Forum Programme 2018-19 Thursday 18 October, 6 pm – New Approaches Room 234, Senate House Chair: Arianna Bassetti (QMUL) Jennifer Caisley (Cambridge), ‘New Approaches to Goethe’s Geological Writings’. Angelika Peljak-Łapińska (Swansea), ‘English-Polish-Belarusian Literary Parallel Corpus’. Jinghui Wang (UCL), ‘Body Writing as A Postcolonial Descriptive Discourse: Representation of the Body in Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe, and Midnight's Children’. Thursday 15 November, 6 pm – Popular Culture Room G34, Senate House Chair: Alessandra Rosati (Goldsmiths) Pauline Suwanban (Birkbeck), ‘Held Captivated: Recurrences of the Captivity Narrative by Female Writers (Elizabeth Marsh (1769), Penelope Aubin (1720-30), E.M Hull (1919))’. Waqas Mirza (Oxford), ‘“Only Poets Know the Truth About Us” From Baldwin to Lamar: Peace, Love and Self-Knowledge as Resistance’. Arianna Bassetti (QMUL), ‘Solidarity in a World of Junk: Zerocalcare’s Accumulative Poetics inKobane calling’. Thursday 6 December, 6 pm – Intercultural Encounters Room 246, Senate House Chair: Alessandra Rosati (Goldsmiths) Alessio D'Agapito (Roma Tre), ‘Diplomatic Relations Between Italy and Great Britain in the Late '70s: a British Prospective’. Alexander Humphries (SOAS), ‘The Christian Formation of Iraq: A Study of the Chaldean Catholic Church’s Role in the Creation and Development of the Iraqi Nation’. Amanda Moehlenpah (North Carolina / Oxford), ‘Dancers, Readers, and Spectators: Communities Formed by the Practice of Social Dance in Early Modern England and France’. Thursday 17 January, 6 pm – Women’s Resistance Room 243, Senate House Chair: Kendsey Clements (UCL) Charlotte Grace Mackay (Melbourne / Sorbonne), ‘The Womanist Women of Fatou Diome: Feminine Oppression, Resistance and Fulfilment in Those who wait [Celles qui attendent]’. Adjoa Osei (Liverpool), ‘Black Brazilian Women of the Harlem Renaissance’. Jess McIvor (Southampton / Bristol), ‘(Re)making Meaning: Visible and Invisible Afterlives of Photography of Women Militants’. Thursday 21 February, 6 pm – Trauma and Autofiction Room 246, Senate House Chair: Kendsey Clements (UCL) Margaret May (IMLR), ‘“Die banalen Wörter ‘aus nichts’”: Exploring the Sophisticated Simplicity of Barbara Honigmann’s Narrative Style’. Pauline Harris (Birkbeck), ‘Raw Writing: Truth and Treachery in the Novels of Sorj Chalandon (1952- )’. Thomas Liano (UCL), ‘Hélène Cixous’ “The-Book-I-Don’t-Write”: Reflections on a Critical Silence’. Thursday 21 March, 6 pm – Media, Economics, Education Room 246, Senate House Chair: Dalila Villella (Birkbeck) Maren Rohe (Birmingham / IMLR), ‘Constructing the Other - Polish and Russian Narratives on Germany Between Individuality and Media Influence’. Guilherme Celestino (KCL), ‘Visconde de Cairu, the Journalist: Press, Independence and National Identity in Brazil from 1821 to 1825’. Luis Medina (KCL), ‘What Defines the Contemporary? The Impacts of Economic Crisis on Ecuadorian Literature’. Francesca Masiero (UCL), ‘The Shaping of the Humanistic Curriculum in the Veneto’. Thursday 11 April, 6 pm – Philosophy and Literary Theory Room 243, Senate House Chair: Dalila Villella (Birkbeck) Georgina Edwards (Oxford), ‘Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Hesse: Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents’. Sofia Cumming (East Anglia), ‘Walter Benjamin as Vermittler; Lasting Snapshots of the European Intelligentsia’. Philippa Campbell (Goldsmiths), ‘Philosophy and Narrative: A New Approach; A New Understanding’. Vincenzo Torromacco (QMUL), ‘An Ungraspable Threshold Between a “Not Yet” and a “No More”: On the Temporality of Aesthetic Experience and the Contemporary Novel’. Thursday 16 May, 6 pm – Translation and Interpreting Room 246, Senate House Chair: Arianna Bassetti (QMUL) Zihui Wang (Swansea), ‘Note taking in Conference Consecutive Interpreting in Business Domain: A Case Study of English - Mandarin Language Combination’. Silke Lührmann (East Anglia), ‘From the House of Wisdom to the Virtual Assembly Line: Perceptions of Professional Identity in the Translation Industry’. Laphatrada O'Donnell (Goldsmiths), ‘Researching Translation and Tourism’. Isabel García Ortiz (QMUL), ‘Medical Learnèd Borrowings and the Universalization of Scientific Knowledge: A Corpus-Based Study’. ——————— Session One: 18th October – New Approaches 1) New approaches to Goethe’s Geological Writings Jennifer Caisley (Cambridge) ‘Da ist für mich nichts Neues zu erfahren | Das kenn ich schon seit hunderttausend Jahren’ [‘There is nothing new for me to learn here | I’ve known that for centuries’] exclaims Mephistopheles in ‘Hochgebirg’, a scene in Goethe’s magnum opus Faust in which Mephistopheles and Faust discuss the geological origins of the Earth.[1]<https:[log in to unmask]&path=/mail/drafts%22%20%5Cl%20%22_ftn1%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank> Mephistopheles’ dismissive attitude, reflective of a man tired of rehashing the same debates, is shared by many critics of Goethe’s geology.[2]<https:[log in to unmask]&path=/mail/drafts%22%20%5Cl%20%22_ftn2%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank> It can also be applied to geology as a whole: a field which is as old as the Earth itself could seemingly offer little in the way of new approaches. However, as my paper suggests, Goethe’s geological investigations can, and should, be placed at the forefront of literary inquiry into his works. This coupling of the eternal and the present-day is also seen in the domain of new materialism, which has begun to blur the boundaries between timeless material objects and modern technological advances. As Coole & Frost summarise in their seminal work, this field of criticism is shaped by ‘the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the place of embodied humans within a material world’.[3]<https:[log in to unmask]&path=/mail/drafts%22%20%5Cl%20%22_ftn3%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank> Pairings between Faust and Goethe’s geological writings are mutually illuminating in light of these ‘fundamental questions’, which are precisely those asked in Goethe’s 1784 essay ‘Über den Granit’, in which the protagonist sits atop a mountain peak and ruminates on human existence. This paper argues that the juxtaposition of Faust II and ‘Über den Granit’, grounded in parallels ranging from physical setting to lexical choice, offers potential answers to the ‘fundamental questions’ asked by Coole & Frost in their work: the space occupied by the interaction between humans and nature is located on a sensory, emotional and even economic plane. I argue that, despite critical views to the contrary as summarised by Mephistopheles’ statement, even the oldest, most eternal element of nature can yield fresh findings as to the relationship between the embodied self and the materiality of the natural world. Jennifer Caisley is a second-year PhD student within the Section of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge (UK) where she is supervised by Dr Charlotte Lee in her research on the interplay between literary and scientific texts during the Long Eighteenth Century. Her previous conference experience includes collaborating as a mentor and panel chair for the National German Undergraduate Conference in Cambridge (UK), a paper given at NYU (USA) on the seductive narrative techniques used in Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften, a paper at Binghamton SUNY (USA) on immateriality in Goethe, and an upcoming paper at the German Studies Association’s annual conference in Pittsburgh (USA). [1]<https:[log in to unmask]&path=/mail/drafts%22%20%5Cl%20%22_ftnref1%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank> Goethe, J.W., 2001. Faust: Die Tragödie Zweiter Teil. Stuttgart: Reclam, p.163. [2]<https:[log in to unmask]&path=/mail/drafts%22%20%5Cl%20%22_ftnref2%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank> While modern critics are somewhat more accepting of the geological writings, a typical critical statement on the geological writings is expressed in Ronald Gray’s 1952 work Goethe the Alchemist, in which he states that they lack ‘the certainty and conviction which inspires [Goethe’s] botanical and optical works’ (p.134). [3]<https:[log in to unmask]&path=/mail/drafts%22%20%5Cl%20%22_ftnref3%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank> Coole, D. and Frost, S., 2010. New Materialisms. Durham (NC) & London: Duke University Press, p.3 2) English-Polish-Belarusian Literary Parallel Corpus Angelika Peljak-Łapińska (Swansea) The main goal of my project is to create the English-Polish-Belarusian Literary Parallel Corpus (EPB corpus) and present its applications in translation studies, as well as its potential to solve problems within other linguistic disciplines, such as discourse analysis. My thesis addresses the problem of the differences in the development of corpus linguistics in the three languages: English (referred to as lingua franca), Polish (statutory national language) and Belarusian (minority language). By means of the analysis of available tools and resources, as well as the socio-political issues concerning the Belarusian language I demonstrate the need for EPB corpus. A substantial part of my thesis consists of the documentation of the process of creating the corpus. So far I have dealt with various aspects of the corpus design and text collection. I managed to gather 95% out of 321 original and translated texts. The corpus size up to date is over 8 million words. Currently I am testing several tools for encoding the corpus on various levels, namely for tokenization, lemmatisation, POS tagging and alignment. I paid special attention to the tools specifically designed for each language and to the solutions that would allow merging the data processed by these tools. Next step in my project is to make the final choices regarding tools for corpus encoding and to publish the corpus with limited access – only for students and academics who can login via their home institutions that are part of CLARIN or ELRA. Apart from that I will perform analyses on the data I gathered to show the corpus applications in theoretical, descriptive and applied translation studies. Angelika Peljak-Łapińska is holder of Swansea University PhD Studentship in Cross-Language Digital Humanities (at the College of Arts and Humanities, Department of Modern Languages, Translation and Interpreting). Her doctoral research project involves creating and using corpus linguistics resources for three languages, English, Polish and Belarusian, and focuses on the literary translations of the 20th and 21st centuries. In her academic activities Angelika actively promotes Belarusian language, culture, literature and knowledge about the socio-political issues of Belarus. She has received B.A. and M.A. in Belarusian Studies (both first-class honours) and M.A. in English Studies from the University of Warsaw. She was awarded the Scholarship of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and several times the Rector's Scholarship for Outstanding Academic Achievements. 3) Body Writing as A Postcolonial Descriptive Discourse: Representation of the Body inWaiting for the Barbarians, Foe, and Midnight's Children Jinghui Wang (UCL) This paper explores the nuances of the dialectic and deconstructive framework of body writing in postcolonial literature as manifested in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Foe(1986), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Each of these novel embodies in its own terms the problematic intellectual process of naming and identifying the body in either the colonial or postcolonial setting. This paper examines how these novels’ narratives represent the body in such a way as to “embody” and dramatize the dialectical relationship between the (post)colonial discourse and corporeality, and between the narrator as subject and body as object in the (post)colonial context. The analysis applies Bhabha and Derrida's theories to analyse the postcolonial representation of the body as a discursive diversion from the colonial legacy, and to look at the body as a critical lens to unravel and deconstruct this crisis of subjectivity that seems to creep into the postcolonial narrative voice. Jinghui Wang is a master student in comparative literature at UCL. She gained her BA in English from Tsinghua University in 2018. Her main research interests include contemporary anglophone and sinophone literature, modern drama, and literary theories. <https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/comparative-literature-and-culture/people/phd-students/profiles/bassetti.html> ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the AFLS-NEWS list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=AFLS-NEWS&A=1