On behalf of the Historical Poetics Department of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Board of the Foundation "Center for International Polish Studies," we would like to invite you to participate in an international interdisciplinary conference "Poetics of (Mis)understanding: Culture-Making Potential of Interference in Artistic Communication." The conference will take place on December 7-8, 2017 at the Institute of Literary Research (ul. Nowy Świat 72, Pałac Staszica) in Warsaw, Poland.
We are interested primarily in exploring the positive aspects of misunderstandings in communication – unlike the approaches that have traditionally emphasized the destabilizing and destructive impact of such interferences. Together with you, we would like to show the mistakes and misunderstandings in communication as an undervalued source of innovation in culture. We treat misunderstanding and various semantic shifts as mechanisms of intercultural contact that are permanent, inherent, and impossible to eliminate; they are inscribed in the broadly defined translation process.
We want to reflect upon communication that is para-, between-, and beyond language; that is (inter)cultural, literary and artistic. We would be particularly interested in approaches within the areas of literary criticism, anthropology, cultural and translation studies. We treat all philosophical, sociological, communication, and cognitive perspectives as a context for issues in the fields of literature, culture, and translation.
We propose to discuss the following:
- Misunderstanding as a communication event and transparent, often underestimated or unnoticed form of contact – its causes, contexts, mechanisms, and possible positive effects;
- Misunderstandings and distortions of meaning in the process of interlingual, intercultural, and intersemiotic translation as an inherent element and a constant value in communication;
- Historicity of misunderstandings;
- Interferences in the transfer of knowledge and cultural forms as a source of new ideas/forms of expression;
- Misunderstanding and incomprehension/incomprehensibility as artistic strategies;
- Cultural representations of misunderstanding and incomprehension;
- The dynamics of misunderstanding: momentariness, scale ratio, and gradualness vs. processuality/relativity of the understandable and the incomprehensible;
- The status and possible value assessment of misunderstandings and incomprehensions in different theories of artistic communication;
- Historically variable interpretations of the role of misunderstanding and of incomprehensible cultural texts;
- Strategies and effects of combining native cultural tradition with what is foreign/new and misunderstood or understood fractionally, what is distorted;
- "Reception barriers" in translation (cultural, historical, religious, and genre strangeness);
- Cultural reevaluations of translations originally regarded as misguided /misleading/wrong;
- Historical models of experimental translations that deliberately distort the original;
- The boundaries of (mis)understanding vs. the boundaries of interpretation of artistic statements – alternative proposals to variants of the poststructuralist theory of misreading.
The languages of the conference will be Polish and English (the latter preferred due to the planned post-conference monograph in English). Please send your paper proposals in the form of an abstract in English (up to 200 words) by September 15, 2017 to:
poetyki.nieporozumienia@gmail.com
We will inform you of whether your proposal has been accepted by September 30, 2017. We plan a conference fee of 300 PLN.
Further information will be posted successively on the website of the Institute of Literary Research: http://ibl.waw.pl.
We look forward to meeting you at the conference.
Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik
Associate Professor and Chair of
The Department of Historical Poetics
Vice President, "Center for International Polish Studies" Foundation
Institute of Literary Research
Polish Academy of Sciences
Nowy Swiat St. 72, room 128
00-330 Warsaw, Poland
rembowskapluciennik@gmail.com
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Associate Professor
President, "Center for International Polish Studies" Foundation
Institute of Literary Research
Polish Academy of Sciences
Nowy Swiat St. 72, room 128
00-330 Warsaw, Poland
tamara_brzostowska@wp.pl
Beata Śniecikowska, Ph.D.
Conference Secretary
Vice President, "Center for International Polish Studies" Foundation
Institute of Literary Research
Polish Academy of Sciences
Nowy Swiat St. 72, room 128
00-330 Warsaw, Poland
beata.sniecikowska@gmail.com