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EditorialPresident's report: Will van PeerDear IGEL Members, This is a report on the progress we are making in the preparation of the 10th conference in Munich in August 2006. A Business Meeting of the Executive Committee was held in Munich on 20 June 2005, where a number of issues were decided. We have been successful in canvassing the following plenary speakers so far: Norbert Groeben (University of Cologne), together with Margrit Schreier (International University of Bremen), and James Pennebaker (University of Texas). Concerning the history of reading we are negotiating with William St.Clair (Trinity College, Cambridge University). For the sociological approach, Elizabeth Long (Rice University) has been invited. I will continue my work on organizing the round table discussion with the founding fathers / mothers over the coming months. We have approached Denis Dutton, a philosopher of aesthetics and editor of the influential journal Philosophy and Literature as the figure to build our debate around. He has not given a final answer yet, but feels very attracted to the idea. In all probability the debate will be about the concept of art / literature and the factors involved in attempting a definition. That could include questions over the formal / psychological / social elements involved in such an attempt. A CALL FOR PAPERS will be sent out. Deadline for sending in Abstracts will be 1 February 2006, deadline for registration 1 May. We also will introduce a new idea, originally suggested by Norbert Groeben: After the 2006 Conference, we will give 3 prizes for the best papers presented by students. The prize will be waiving fees at the next conference and waiving the annual contribution for one year, plus the mentoring by one of the former Presidents of IGEL, leading to a joint publication in a refereed journal. This will also be mentioned in the CALL FOR PAPERS. Allocation of the prizes will be carried out by the Conference Committee (minus Auracher), the composition of which is as follows: Jan Auracher, Melanie Green, Norbert Groeben, David Miall, Will van Peer. Furthermore, the Executive Committee will draft a ‘mission statement’ of roughly one page over the following weeks, which will describe the core aims and activities of the association and therefore present something like a ‘corporate identity’. This statement will be posted on the IGEL website, and will also be employed when sending out messages announcing the conference of various discussion groups, lists, etc. on the internet. Melanie Green will, with the help of the other members of the Committee, compose an extended list to which she will send information about our society and conference. We will also open negotiations with the IAEA (International Association for Empirical Aesthetics) about holding conferences back to back in the same region in the future.Nel van Dijk has decided that she wishes to leave her job as Treasurer and Membership Secretary after the next conference. Our warmest thanks for her for her valuable service in this position! We will announce the vacancy in one of the coming issues of the Newsletter. The Executive Committee will propose a successor at the coming conference. We will then also have to elect a new President to organize the 2008 conference. Moreover, as IGEL has a system of organizing its conferences alternatively in Europe and America, the 2008 president must be resident on the American continent. The Committee is already investigating the matter. Concerning the Summer Institute 2006 the Conference Committee for the Summer Institute has been composed as follows: Jan Auracher, Peter Dixon (and presumably also Marisa Bortolussi), David Hanauer, Don Kuiken. It will lay more emphasis on workshops, organizing them in two ‘streams’: one more to do with the analysis of literary and media products, another one on methodological and statistical matters. Thus people with a strong literary background could go to a workshop on multivariate models of analysis, while students who are well-versed in these could attend a workshop on narrative perspective. Participants will be asked again to develop a research project in a team. We will offer them the posters of the projects developed last year in Edmonton as a possible starting point. We will ask participants to familiarize themselves with the project in the months prior to the Summer Institute and to form groups and hold initial discussions on their project over the REDES discussion forum. As in last year’s Summer Institute, some senior members will give presentations on their personal relationship to the profession. The preparations for the Banquet are under way: we will try to organize it in a somewhat different way, namely as a barbecue on the banks of the lake, with music and the possibility for dancing after the meal. One major advantage would be the price tag attached to it: we could then have the banquet for about 15 Euro per person, which would certainly be advantageous for students participating. We will offer a small excursion possibility in the middle of the conference: we would stop paper presentations at 4 p.m., then travel by boat to the Herreninsel (Men’s island), where we can have a guided tour of one of the fairy-tale castles built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, followed by a boat trip around Lake Chiem, coming back to the Fraueninsel somewhere around 7.30 p.m., with the rest of the evening free. We are still studying the cost of this opportunity. We are considering the idea of bringing out a volume with a selection of the papers with a regular publisher after the conference. The selection will be done by the editorial committee for the student prizes. We thought the time has come for a redesign of the web page, also to make it somewhat more interactive and informative. One idea is to make available on the website a number of articles and book chapters that we believe capture the ‘essence’ of our organization, and carry out our Mission Statement to a high degree. The Executive Committee will act as an editorial board for this. David Miall has provided the URL of a site on evolutionary psychology: http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/index.html, which could act as a model. Members are requested to send suggestions for the new website to our webmaster (David.Miall@Ualberta.Ca). Finally, we will start building a database with bibliographic entries on empirical studies in a variety of journals from one of the following Newsletters onwards, as a service to our readers, and in order to make the Association more attractive. As you can see, we have been busy, and trust that the work will lead to a better organization. I hope to see you all in Munich in about a year’s time from now. Will van PeerPresident Call for contributionsAs usual, your Newsletter editors would like to remind you of the value of the contributions you make, without which, of course, there would be no Newsletter! These are among the categories of material we welcome:
If you have contributions for one or more of these sections in the next Newsletter, make sure to send your contribution to us ON OR BEFORE DECEMBER 1ST 2005. In addition, ideas for innovations are always welcome. Please send your contributions and suggestions to one of us, as follows:
Copyright of graphics in the Newsletter remains with the copyright holders. Any copyright holders who require individual acknowledgment are invited to contact us. Personal NewsGerard Steen: Research Award, "Metaphor in discourse: linguistic forms, conceptual structures, cognitive representations"A five-year research programme has been awarded to Gerard Steen by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The research will addresses the role of metaphor in discourse by examining its distribution, structure, function, and effect in four varieties of English. The hypothesis is that distinct linguistic forms and conceptual structures of metaphor display distributions and functions of their own, and that these interact with the domains of discourse in which language users employ them. The programme aims at describing and explaining these interactions on the basis of detailed corpus research on four samples from the British National Corpus, and at testing the cognitive effects of some of these interactions in their mental representation by language users. Metaphor in discourse will be modelled by means of a discourse-analytical elaboration of the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor as a cross-domain mapping. Research involves corpus analysis of samples from the British National Corpus and psycholinguistic experiments on various aspects of metaphor processing. Central to the research programme will be four funded Ph.D projects. Each of the projects will concentrate on the use of metaphor in one specific language variety: conversation, news texts, academic texts, and fiction. All projects will be organized by the same five-year timetable, and the research will be characterized by a great deal of synchronized team work. During the first year, all researchers will identify metaphors in samples from all four language varieties, after which each researcher will concentrate on one language variety for the rest of the programme. The programme is part of one of the four research programmes of the Institute of Language, Culture, and History of the Faculty of Arts of the Vrije Universiteit, “The architecture of the human language faculty”. This research programme investigates the modular structure of human language and cognition, with participation from formal, functional, and cognitive grammarians, and psycholinguists as well as discourse analysts. Peter Vorderer: Forthcoming Edited BooksPsychology of Entertainment. Edited by Jennings Bryant and Peter Vorderer, forthcoming (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). From the Preface: The Seattle grunge band Nirvana (1991) contributed what may be the defining mantra of these postmodern times in "Smells Like Teen Spirit," when they proclaimed, "Here we are now, entertain us!" As entertainment becomes a trillion dollar a year industry worldwide (Emanuel, 1995), as our modern era increasingly lives up to its label of "the entertainment age" (Zillmann & Vorderer, 2000, p. vii), and as economists begin to recognize that entertainment has become the driving force of the new world economy (Wolf, 1999), we can safely say with only a touch of irony that scholars are beginning to catch up with Nirvana and take entertainment seriously. The scholarly spin on entertainment has been manifested in traditional ways (e.g., courses, symposia, sessions at scholarly conferences, consulting) as well as in innovative ones (e.g., videogame design, launching new entertainment companies). Without a doubt, the accumulating empirical evidence, theoretical formulations, and practical wisdom are contributing mightily to the emerging area of entertainment theory. But the battle is far from won. It is often noted that only by teaching a subject does one fully understand it. A corollary is that teaching makes you cognizant of a topic’s limitations and weaknesses. Having taught numerous seminars in entertainment theory over the years, and having presented a plethora of lectures on various facets of entertainment on several continents, your co-editors were not at all surprised to learn that we concurred on most of the areas about which we had experienced delimiting knowledge gaps in entertainment theory and research. Moreover, independently we had come to the conclusion that the weakest links included fundamental aspects of the topic’s intellectual infrastructure. Specifically, both of us had found that conceptualization and explication of key psychological mechanisms underlying entertainment often were inadequate, and the specific ways entertainment processes purportedly differed from those commonly associated with information, education, or persuasion were not always well articulated. Once we realized we concurred on areas in which conceptualization and explication of entertainment mechanisms and processes were underdeveloped, we found ourselves taking a positive turn and identifying scholars who were doing excellent research and theory construction in these underserved aspects of entertainment theory. Again, more often than not we found that we agreed on the identity and scholarly ability of those leading lights who were successfully addressing these troublesome abysses. At some point in our deliberations (i.e., that “Eureka” moment), we decided that the most productive way of advancing understanding of these psychological mechanisms and processes of entertainment would be to call upon those peers who seemed to be making the most significant progress in understanding these fundamental intellectual underpinnings of entertainment theory and ask them if they would be willing to share their insights as well as the fruits of their scholarship with kindred spirits. To our great pleasure, our associates were more than willing to synthesize their research, as well as the cognate scholarship of others, in the several research domains we had identified. The concrete product of our collaboration is Psychology of Entertainment, which is dedicated to advancing understanding of the fundamental psychological processes and mechanisms of entertainment. Playing Video Games:
Motives, Responses, and Consequences. Edited by From the publicity: When Palladas, the Greek poet who flourished in the 4th century AD, said that life is but a game, he hardly could have imagined how pervasive games could become in every aspect of our modern lives. From security training simulations to war games to role-playing games, to sports games to gambling, playing video games has become a social phenomena and the increasing number of players that cross gender, culture, and age is on a dramatic upward trajectory. Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences integrates communication, psychology, and technology to examine the psychological and mediated aspects of playing video games. It is the first volume to delve deeply into these aspects of computer game play. It fits squarely into the media psychology arm of entertainment studies, which promises to be the next big wave in media studies. The book targets one of the most popular and pervasive media in modern times, and it will serve to define the area of study and provide a theoretical spine for future research. This unique and timely volume will appeal to scholars, researchers, and graduate students in media studies and mass communication, psychology, and marketing. Melanie Green: movingMelanie writes: I am moving: I have accepted a job at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in the Psychology Department), and I will be starting there in the fall. Starting August 5, my new email address will be mcgreen@email.unc.edu Brian Boyd: PublicationsBrian Boyd (English Department, University of Auckland), who was one of our distinguished invited speakers at IGEL 2004 in Edmonton, has edited and published Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). This includes chapters by leaders in the field of attribution studies in Early Modern drama, from Marlowe to Webster, in honor of the doyen of the field, Mac Jackson. Jackson’s statistical analyses of linguistic features in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have led to the recognition of the hands of George Peele, Thomas Middleton and George Wilkins in Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens and Pericles, respectively. He has also co-edited, with Stanislav Shvabrin (UCLA) a volume of Vladimir Nabokov’s translations into verse, Verses and Versions (New York: Harcourt, forthcoming). Nabokov translated into English, French and Russian verse from English, French, German and Russian. The bulk of the volume will be Russian into English translations, especially from Pushkin. He has published "Literature and Evolution: A Bio-cultural Approach," Philosophy and Literature (29:1 [2005], 1-23). He has also written the first half of his book on evolution and fiction, Heads and Tales: On the Origin of Stories, and expects to complete it by the end of this year. Deanne Bogdan: Conferences and Secretaryship1) Invited Speaker, “Music, McLuhan, Modality: Musical Experience from ‘Extreme Occasion’ to ‘Alchemy,’” a lecture-recital in The Distinguished Speakers McLuhan Lectures, The Medium is the Message: A Series on Information Literacy in a Multi-Media Age, Department of Information Studies, University of Toronto, June 29th, 2005.
This presentation combines the author's live performance of a Chopin
Mazurka with a paper in which the same piece is presented in multi-media
by different recording artists. Drawing on the writings of musicologist
Leonard Meyer, cultural theorist Edward Said, Marshall McLuhan, and Glenn
Gould, the presentation conducts an experiment in aesthetic education
focussing on McLuhan's and Gould's ideas about modality as a substantive
issue in musical performance and reception.
2) Invited Speaker, Spring Interview Series, Horizons of Hope, Thomas More Institute for Adult Education, Montreal, Quebec, June 14th, 2005. On the occasion of the Convocation of TMI (under the aegis of Bishops University), Professor Bogdan was interviewed publicly by two of TMI's Faculty Members on the implications for adult learning of the major tenets of her publications over the past 25 years.
3) Deanne Bogdan was elected Secretary of The International Society of the
Philosophy of Music Education for a two-year term on May 21, 2005, at the
ISPME's 6th Biennial Symmposium at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
ESL meets IGEL. "Exploratory studies" and an explanatory "Empirical Science" of Literature -- an assessment of the present state of affairsEdmund Nierlich
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Literary Pragmatics |
Discourse Analysis Stylistics-Poetics-Rhetoric Narratology Philosophy of Language Sociolinguistics Psycholinguistics Cognitive Studies |
Fourth Conference of the International Association of Literary Semantics
Institute of English Philology, The Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland, Thursday 12 October -- Saturday 14 October 2006Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Margaret H. Freeman (Myrifield/USA)
Prof. David S. Miall (Edmonton/Canada)
Prof. Michael Toolan (Birmingham/Great Britain)
In the 14th year of its activities the International Association of Literary Semantics (IALS) moves eastwards, to the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, the oldest university in Poland and one of the oldest such institutions in Europe (founded in 1364).
The first two IALS conferences, held at the University of Kent at Canterbury (1992) and at the University of Freiburg, Germany (1997) brought together around three hundred scholars from several dozen countries around the world. They also made us aware of the fact that literary semantics, a highly specialized linguistic discipline, can and should deal with a wealth of theoretical and practical problems. The last conference at the University of Birmingham (2002) centred on the methodological issues, such as the scope of literary semantics and its theoretical framework. The conference clearly demonstrated that literary semantics can fruitfully draw from different linguistic orientations: traditional, structural, cognitive, functional, and systemic, to mention only some well-established currents. Literary semanticists proved that they are capable of arguing contrastively over several issues -- from different standpoints, yet in a congenial atmosphere.
This time we would like to focus our attention on two sets of problems. Firstly, should literary semantics -- the linguistic study of texts / discourses marked with the feature of ‘literariness’ and ‘poeticity’ -- strive after an interpretation of all such texts at all costs? Are all literary texts interpretable? How do we, as literary semanticists, cope with such troublesome linguistic phenomena as anomaly, deviance, absurdity, which result in aporias and estrangement? Aren’t we, by any chance, fascinated by nonsense? Do we try to make it at least partly meaningful? Is interpretability our default value?
Secondly, while trying to answer these questions, well-aware of the fact that literary semantics is a fuzzy branch of linguistic studies (albeit with a well-defined core), we may attempt at exploring its borderline zone to see to what extent we have to draw from other theoretical sources and to what degree we are able to keep literary semantics autonomous.
The questions above are only general suggestions as to the conference theme and should not, by any means, limit your inventiveness.
We warmly invite you to Kraków to discuss these and related issues in an international company of academics.
Proposals for sessions and panels are now invited. Session and panel convenors are kindly requested to step forward by 15 October 2005.
Offers of papers are welcome by 15 January 2006.
Local conference organisers: Dr. El|bieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska echklucz@vela.filg.uj.edu.pl
Conference Web site: http://www.filg.uj.edu.pl/ialsiv/
Recent Publications
Gao Wei, D. S. Miall, D. Kuiken, and T. Eng. "The receptivity of Canadian readers to Chinese literature: Lin Yutang’s writings in English." Empirical Studies of the Arts 23 (2005): 33-45.
Hakemulder, J. "Foregrounding and Its Effect on Readers' Perception." Discourse Processes 38 (2004): 193-218.
Hogenraad, R. "Prognozirovanie razvitiia konfliktov s pomoshch'iu komp'iuternogo kontent-analiza" [Predicting conflict development by means of computer-aided content-analysis]. Sotsiologiia: Metodologiia, Metody, Matematicheskie Modeli [Sociology: Methodology, Methods, Mathematical 'Models] 19 (2004): 158-175. (in Russian)
Hogenraad, R. “What the words of war can tell us about the risk of war.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 11 (2005): 137-151.
Miall, D. S. "Episode Structures in Literary Narratives." Journal of Literary Semantics 33 (2004): 111-129.
Nemesio, A. "La retorica e il testo scientifico," Prometeo, XXII, 86 (2004): 44-49.
Nemesio, A., M. C. Levorato and L. Ronconi. "Risposta emotiva e qualità del testo nella lettura del racconto del mistero," Età evolutiva 79 (2004): 60-67.
Nemesio, A. "La narrazione referenziale: il racconto dell'esperimento nel testo
scientifico," in Nicola Merola e Giovanna Rosa, eds., Tipologia della
narrazione breve. Roma: Vecchiarelli, 2004, 199-212.
Nemesio, A. "Letteratura senza confini: una prospettiva multiculturale," in Guido
Baldassarri e Silvana Tamiozzo, eds., Letteratura italiana, letterature
europee. Roma: Bulzoni, 2004, 255-260.
Nemesio, A., and M. C. Levorato. "Readers' responses while reading a narrative text," Empirical Studies of the Arts 33 (2005): 19-31.
Nierlich, Edmund. "An 'Empirical Science' of Literature." Journal for General Philosophy of Science 36 (2005): 1-26.
Zyngier, S., et al. Venturas & Desventuras. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2005. (in Portuguese)