In Search of (Non)Sense
Literary Semantics and the Related Fields and Disciplines

1. NARRATIVE AND METAPHOR

Convener: Prof. Monika Fludernik
The University of Freiburg, Germany
monika.fludernik@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de

This session will analyse the use of metaphors in narrative texts both on the micro and macro levels of narrative. Conversely, the metaphoric use of narrative outside literary study could be focussed on.

Participants:

• Beatrix Busse (Münster, Germany): “Writing Is Medicine”: Conceptual Blends in Interplay with Fundamental Metaphorical Mappings in Paul Auster’s Narrative Fiction
  
• Benjamin Biebuyck (Ghent, Belgium): Configurative Para- and Micronarrativity. Considerations on the Role of Metaphor on the Intersection of Rhetoric and Narratology, with references to Nietzsche’s Über die Zukunft der Bildungsanstalten
• John Douthwaite (Genoa, Italy): Metaphor and Other Devices in Whose Life Is It Anyway?
  
• Michael Kimmel (Vienna, Austria): "Metaphor Mesh" and Other Ways of Reconstructing Narrative Plot Comprehension by Combining Image Schemas.
• Bo Petterson (Helsinki, Finland): Imagine a World in Which...: Bridging Narrative and Figural Accounts in Cognitive Literary Studies.
• Esther Romero and Belen Soria (Granada, Spain): Metaphorical Identification in Fictional Discourse.

2. BEYOND METAPHOR – OTHER MACRO- AND METAFIGURES OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

Convener: Dr. hab. Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska
The Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland
echklucz@vela.filg.uj.edu.pl

The workshop is meant to bring into focus other figures of language and thought, often eclipsed by the overwhelming power of metaphor. Metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, euphemism, oxymoron, antithesis, irony, passing over, allegory, etc. which organize sequences of sentences, fragments of texts, or even entire discourses, form a rich tropological space in which literary interpretation takes place. The workshop will examine the issue to what extent all the above-mentioned figures (and many more) generate nonsense and to what degree they help us to understand the actual and fictional worlds. The perspectives from which we want to examine these issues are those of philosophy of language, traditional rhetoric and poetics, cognitive linguistics, literary criticism, and possibly others.

Participants:

• Larissa Belekhova (Kherson, Ukraine): Conceptual Oxymoron: Cognitive Mechanisms of the Formation of New Verbal Poetic Images
  
• Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska (Kraków, Poland): Philosophical Underpinnings of Metatropes: Is Vico's Tropological Circle a Vicious Circle?
  
• Katarzyna Kuczma (Poznań, Poland): Sensing Illusions: The Works of Paul Auster
  
• Monika Markiewicz (Kraków, Poland): Phenomenological View of Macrosynecdoche
  
• Olga Vorobyova (Kiev, Ukraine): The Poetics of REFLECTION in V. Woolf’s Short Fiction: In Search of Multiple Sense
  
• Anna Walczuk (Kraków, Poland): Irony: Constructive or Deconstructive Strategy of Sense-Making in Literary Fiction?
• Lin Zou (Bloomington, USA): Beyond Sense and Non-Sense – AFFECT as a Figurative Structure
  

3. INTERPRETABILITY OF HUMOUR

Conveners: Dr. Władysław Chłopicki
The Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland
chlopick@interia.pl
Prof. Salvatore Attardo
Youngstown State University, Ohio, USA

We would like to focus on the idea of interpretability of humour. In particular, we wish to discuss the “aftermath” of the discovery of humorous oppositions and/or logical mechanisms by the potential text recipient. What does s/he make of the meaning then? Is s/he left with nonsense? This brings us back to the old question of the presence or absence of resolution in humour and to the issue of the role of humour in the text (does it advance the plot or divert from it?). The question of the influence of genre or discourse type is most pertinent in this regard as well as those of meaning layering of a humorous text and the role of visual imagery.

Participants:

• Salvatore Attardo (Youngstown, USA): Salience of Incongruities in Humorous Texts
  
• Geert Brône and Kurt Feyaerts (Leuven, Belgium): Towards a Dynamic and Layered Account of Humorous Meaning: Analysing Humour in Terms of Discourse and Mental Spaces
  
• Władysław Chłopicki (Kraków, Poland): Visual Imagery as a Pre-requisite and Background to Humour
• Margherita Dore (Lancaster, UK): Interpretation and Translation of FEI-Based Puns
  
• Patricia Gomez Blazquez (Córdoba, Spain): Narratological Issues Concerning Humour in Film: The Case of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall
  
• Dan McIntyre (Huddersfield, UK) Humour, politeness and multiple meanings in Peter Cook's "One Leg Too Few"
  

4. UPDATED WAYS OF MAKING SENSE OF SHAKESPEARE

Convener: Dr. Mireille Ravassat
The University of Valenciennes, France
mireilleravassat@tele2.fr

This session offers, in a perspective of text linguistics, more specifically of discourse analysis, to probe into one of the most recent features among the array of interpretations of the Shakespearian canon.

The topic of the relation of the present to the past is an issue that has been requalified by the concept of presentism, an equally challenged and challenging notion. Such an attitude stems from the very modes of discourse, ideologies and practices of our own topical hic et nunc. This standpoint is one among others offering new insights into Shakespeare as icon and allowing present-day researchers to reconsider his language and universal genius.

Scholars involved in all branches of Shakespeare studies and discourse analysts will be welcome to discuss this stimulating up-to-date issue.

Participants:

• John Drakakis (Sterling, UK): Present Text: Editing The Merchant of Venice
  
• Ewan Fernie (London, UK) and Simon Palfrey (Oxford, UK): Who Kills Duncan?: Macbeth by the Brothers Karamazov
  
• Mireille Ravassat (Valenciennes, France): In Search of Meaning: A Diachronic Approach to the Oxymoron in Shakespeare