january 2020 issue no. 15
TRANSCRIPT
JANUARY 2020 Issue No. 15
The Institute of English Studies Newsletter is published for staff members as well as
anyone interested in following the current developments and future activities
of the Institute of English Studies at the University of Łódź. Each issue covers recent
and upcoming events with regular updates on our conferences, publications, guest
lectures and other educational and/or academic projects.
We welcome ideas for content and feedback on how the publication can be improved.
You can submit your suggestions for the next issue directly to the Editors:
In this issue, we provide updates on conferences hosted by the University of Łódź,
recent and forthcoming publications, guest lectures, international projects and other
important academic events. Read on to find out about our latest news updates.
Editors:
Agnieszka Rasmus and Anna Ewa Wieczorek
E-mail: [email protected]
Institute of English Studies
University of Lodz
Pomorska 171/173
90-236 Łódź, Poland
The Institute of English Studies Newsletter
University of Łódź
Recent and forthcoming conferences
CANADIAN (RE)VISIONS: FUTURES, CHANGES, REVOLUTIONS
25-27 September 2019, Ło dz
On 25-27 September, the 8th Congress of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies took
place in Łódź and was attended by the Ambassador of Canada in Poland, Leslie Scanlon, and
the Counsellor at the Embassy of Canada in Poland, Jeanette Sautner.
The theme of the congress “Canadian (Re)Visions: Futures, Changes, Revolutions”/ “Les
(Re)Visions canadiennes: Projections, Changements, Révolutions” attracted a lot of partici-
pants.
LITERATURE AND MEDIA: PRODUCTIVE INTERSECTIONS
24-26 October 2019, Ło dz
The conference aimed at addressing a variety of issues concerning the relations between
drama, theatre, literature and media or, more generally, word and image. On the one hand, it
invited conference papers that explore ways in which literature responds to the emergence
of multiple media, and how literary or dramatic texts function in the (new) media environ-
ment. On the other hand, the organisers addressed questions about new media and their re-
lation to the more traditional literary forms or narrative techniques – in particular how new
media adapt and incorporate formats and genres developed by literature and its conventions.
In visual arts, which use technological means to question the distinction between objects and
viewing subjects, artists are interested in affective relations of the senses rather than con-
ventional narration and representation. The conference sought to reflect on the role and
function of word and image in art projects which facilitate bodily experiences with the help
of new technologies.
Organising committee:
Magdalena Cieślak
Justyna Stępień
Michal Lachman
For more information visit https://www.adaptation.uk.com/cfp-literature-and-media-pro-
ductive-intersections/
ACCENTS 2019 – THE 13TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE ACCENTS OF ENGLISH
12-14 December 2019, Ło dz
‘Accents’ is an annual conference organized by the Department of English Language and
Applied Linguistics at University of Łódź, Poland. It brings together researchers and teachers
interested in native and non-native accents of English, approached from a variety of
theoretical and/or practical perspectives. The key issues discussed each year include
individual accent characteristics, the dynamism of accent usage, accent in teaching and
learning, the methods and tools for accent studies as well as pronunciation instruction. The
leitmotif of Accents 2019 revolved around different contexts for the use of specific
pronunciation features in spoken discourse in naturalistic and instructed settings.
Plenary speakers:
Prof. Murray Munro, Simon Fraser University
Prof. Veronica Gabriela Sardegna, Duquesne University
Prof. Pavel Trofimovich, Concordia University
Organising committee:
Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
Ewa Waniek-Klimczak
Anna Jarosz
For more information visit http://filolog.uni.lodz.pl/accents/
NDLP 2020 – 9TH LODZ SYMPOSIUM NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN
LINGUISTIC PRAGMATICS
11-12 May 2020, Ło dz
Marking the 15th anniversary of the establishment of Department of Pragmatics at the Uni-
versity of Łódź, this 9th edition of the NDLP conference series will respond to a surge of new
research in pragmatics, with a view to bringing together the novel, empirically, experimen-
tally and clinically based models, and classical topics and frameworks such as Gricean prag-
matics, Speech Act Theory and presupposition. We encourage papers (re-)examining the se-
mantics-pragmatics boundary, which has been sometimes blurred by the confrontation of
the new and the traditional frameworks. Proposals are welcome at the intersection of the
philosophy of language and pragmatics dealing with theoretical, methodological and defini-
tional issues, as well as issues of interdisciplinarity in pragmatic investigation.
Keynote speakers:
Chris Cummins (University of Edinburgh)
Marta Dynel (University of Lodz)
Anita Fetzer (University of Augsburg)
Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (University of Manchester)
For more information visit https://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1668.html
IASIL 2020 CONFERENCE – INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR
THE STUDIES OF IRISH LITERATURES
20-24 July 2020, Ło dz
The IASIL 2020 conference wishes to reflect on the concept of borders and their creative
potential that helps define identities, generates critical discourses, and provokes literary
works to tackle issues of global political, social, and cultural nature. On the one hand, the
border is seen here as a necessary confinement and a formal limitation. On the other, it is
viewed as an inspiring challenge to explore the other, the unknown, and the invisible, all of
which lie beyond the widely accepted definitions and theories.
We wish to look at Irish literature as a product of imagination inspired and nurtured by
English, European, and global traditions connected with both Americas and the East (e.g.
China and Japan). With this in mind, our definition of a border expands beyond purely
geographic and political conditions of literary production; it accounts for differences in
literary sensibility, aesthetic preferences, varieties of style and diction, and diverse selections
of topics, which naturally result from a creative clash of literary traditions and artistic choices
formed and bred under varying environments but coming into a creative confrontation in
movements across real and imagined frontiers within global Irish studies.
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Maud Ellmann Professor Margaret Mills Harper
University of Chicago University of Limerick
Richard Kearney Anthony Roche
Boston College UCD
Organising Committee:
Michal Lachman
Joanna Kruczkowska
Katarzyna Ojrzyńska
Wit Pietrzak
Please visit http://iasil.uni.lodz.pl/ for more information and call for papers.
AT THE DUSK OF LITERATURE? 21ST-CENTURY NORTH
AMERICAN WRITING IN EXTREMIS.
28-30 September 2020, Ło dz
Discussing new challenges for the 21st-century literature in the wake of the newly emergent
neurobiological scheme of thought in Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction,
Deconstruction (2003), the French philosopher Catherine Malabou famously argued that
writing must now face the dawn of the post-deconstructive era. Venturing beyond
deconstruction, Malabou points to a necessary “reorientation of literature” along the lines of
neurobiological research, whose aim is to reclaim the body from either philosophical or
scientific reductionism1. Interrogating the notion of writing construed in the deconstructive
thinking of Blanchot and Foucault as the thought from the outside, a neutral space where the
subject finds shelter, she speaks of the outside as the unthinkable post-traumatic space that
literature must confront in new ways. According to Malabou, the textual domain now finds
itself at the twilight point, where the Derridean model no longer holds and where writing
finds itself in extremis. At the same time, the dusk of writing signifies a possible horizon of
transformation for writing.
1 Catherine Malabou, “What is Neuro-literature?”, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 45.2 (2016): 81.
One notable example of present-day poetic writing’s renegotiation of extremity has been
recently offered by the American conceptual poet, scholar, and editor Divya Victor, curator of
the special feature Extreme Texts published in Jacket2. For Victor, writing the call for papers
in 2017 only several months into Trump’s presidency meant taking into account the reality
in which “a majority of Americans had acquiesced to live, normally, under extreme conditions,
with denuded civil rights, attenuated freedoms of press, increasing inequality of wages, and
diminishing access to medical care, and under misogynist, transphobic, and supremacist
policies”2. Extreme Texts offers an impressive range of modes of thinking about the notion of
extremity in contemporary experimental poetry and poetics, reclaiming the term’s
complexity visible in the ways the contributors investigated the condition of texts in terms of
their own limit(s) and excess(es), evident in their material or affective extremity, as well as
manifested in their radical philosophical and conceptual stakes, which, as Victor had certainly
hoped, successfully accounts for the complexity of the term “extremity,” freeing it from the
current association with “extremism.”
Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Divya Victor
Michigan State University
Dr. Divya Victor is the editor at Jacket2, author of Curb (2019, The Press at Colorado College),
Kith (2017, Fence Books/Book Thug), Natural Subjects (2014, Trembling Pillow, winner of
the Bob Kaufman Award), Unsub (2014, Insert Blanc) and Things to Do With Your Mouth
(2014, Les Figues) and the editor of Extreme Texts (2019, Jacket2)
Organising Committee:
Dr. Małgorzata Myk
Mark Tardi, MFA
Please visit https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/5556530/dusk-
literature%E2%80%9321st-century-north-american-writing-extremis for more
information and call for papers.
2 Divya Victor, ed. “Preface.” Extreme Texts. <https://jacket2.org/feature/extreme-texts>.
Recent and forthcoming publications
ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION IN L2 INSTRUCTION
Anna Jarosz
This book provides an overview of pronunciation
teaching and learning practices in secondary schools,
providing insights into secondary school learners'
needs, expectations and motivation regarding the
importance of learning English and particularly
English pronunciation. It presents a summary of the
research on L2 pronunciation acquisition, teaching
techniques and factors affecting the learning process
as well as the results and conclusions of a longitudinal
study conducted in a Polish secondary school.
The study indicates that learners consider
pronunciation a crucial component of English
learning and a predictor of successful communication.
Moreover, it shows that accuracy is highly valued by
learners, and that systematic and regular
pronunciation instruction, even if devoted mainly to
segments, has the potential to contribute to the
overall improvement in learners' communicative
competence and their confidence as speakers and
users of English. The book is based on the first-hand
experience of a teacher-researcher.
For more information visit https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030138912
UPPING THE ANTE OF THE REAL
Speculative Poetics of Leslie Scalapino.
Małgorzata Myk
The author frames her reconstruction of the Bay Area
poet, scholar, and experimental prose writer Leslie
Scalapino’s transmedial poetics in the context of
Scalapino’s published writings, available criticism of
her works, as well as previously unpublished archival
materials located among The Mandeville Special
Collections and Archives at UC San Diego. Scalapino’s
poetics are reconsidered here along the lines of new
materialist modes of inquiry as well as contemporary
new realist and speculative approaches that continue
to grapple with the tension between thought and the
social realm.
For more information visit https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/64113?tab=aboutauthor
BEIRUT TO CARNIVAL CITY
Reading Rawi Hage
Edited by Krzysztof Majer
Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage is a
pioneering collection of commissioned critical essays
on the work of the highly relevant Canadian writer.
With four acclaimed novels and scattered short
fictions, the Lebanese-born Hage has become a
formidable literary force. The volume is an attempt to
situate his fiction not only in the context of Lebanese
diasporic writing, but that of trans-geographical
literature, as well as to emphasize his progressive
dissociation from the realist paradigm. The goal is
also to correct an imbalance of critical attention by
refocusing on Hage’s more recent, equally challenging
work. The richness of Hage’s fiction is attested to by
the diversity of thematic concerns and critical approaches. The volume reflects the
worldwide range of Canada-oriented research, and places European perspectives alongside
North American and Lebanese ones. Significantly, it features an original essay authored by
Hage’s literary peer, Madeleine Thien.
Contributors: F. Elizabeth Dahab, Andre Forget, Kyle Gamble, Syrine Hout, Ewa Macura-
Nnamdi, Krzysztof Majer, Lisa Marchi, Judit Molna r, Alex Ramon, Rita Sakr, Dima Samaha,
Madeleine Thien, Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka
For more information visit https://brill.com/view/title/56301
BOGOWIE POKAZUJĄ KLATY by Bill Gaston
Translated by Krzysztof Majer
Guest lectures and visits
THE CONSUL OF THE US EMBASSY MEETS OUR STUDENTS
On 12 November 2019, the students of Philology Faculty had the chance to find out more about
travel to the USA from the best source available thanks to the meeting with Justin Door from the
US Consulate, who shared information about summer exchange programmes as well as
opportunities of studying in the US. The meeting also covered the issue of abolishing tourist visas
to the US. Students had an opportunity to ask questions as well as to listen to a talk by two other
guests, Bożena Magdziak, Consular Assistant and Krzysztof Guzenda, Camp Counselors USA –
Poland.
Justin Door is a diplomat in the rank of a Consul in the US Embassy in Warsaw. He is from
Michigan. He used to work for 6 years as a Flight Controller for the International Space Station.
He has Masters in Business Administration from Virginia Tech and Masters of Science in
Astronautical Engineering from the University of South California. He has been in Poland for over
a year, supervising visa applications and attending meetings with universities and high-schools.
A GUEST LECTURE BY
Krzysztof Majer
On 17 December 2019, dr Krzysztof Majer gave a guest lecture on translating Madeleine
Thien’s short stories entitled “Simple Recipes” during the Day of (not only) Quebecoise Cul-
ture in Sosnowiec, the University of Silesia.
National and international projects
OTWARTA ŁÓDŹ (eng. OPEN LODZ)
a new project co-ordinated by
Monika Kopytowska
On 6 November 2019, a new project called “Open Łódź” was officially inaugurated in the
Faculty Council Aula and was attended not only by the academic community but also by the
representatives of Łódź police force, municipal police, city council and Marek Edelman Dialogue
Centre. The aim of the project is to enable foreigners working in the region to better integrate. It
also entails providing support for city clerks and officers who regularly help foreigners in their
administrative and other problems.
The project is part of Łódź Voivodeship Programme for Social Welfare 2020 meant to raise the
level of integration of foreigners living in the region. Dr Monika Kopytowska is the coordinator
of the project on behalf of the Philology Faculty.
Other academic events
RECTOR’S AWARD FOR JOANNA KRUCZKOWSKA
Joanna Kruczkowska was presented with the Rector’s award
for her monograph entitled Irish Poets and Modern Greece:
Heaney, Mahon, Cavafy, Seferis.
For more information on the publication visit
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319581682
INTERVIEWS BY KRZYSZTOF MAJER
On 21 October 2019, dr Krzysztof Majer conducted an interview with Bill Gaston entitled
“Everything that I have burned” during The Joseph Conrad International Literature Festival
in Kraków.
On 26 September 2019, dr Krzysztof Majer talked to Canadian authors: Bill Gaston, Dede
Crane, John Gould and Norman Ravvin, in Dom Literatury, Łódź.
IN MEMORIAM
On 11 June 2019, we bid farewell to our dear colleague, Grażyna Chętko, who was a long-term
member of the Institue of English Studies secretariat team.
She will be greatly missed. May she rest in peace.