Change in English Language and Literature

April 30

Martin Hilpert

Prof. Martin Hilpert, Unine

Prof. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, UniNe

Prof. Patrick Vincent, UniNe

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, University of Notre Dame, USA

David Simpson, UC Davis, USA

Terttu Nevalainen, University of Helsinki

Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare Institute Birmingham

This workshop will be a satellite event of the 2017 SAUTE conference, which will address the topic of change. We selected this topic because it is of interest both to the study of literature and to the study of language. In literature, relevant questions would include: the rapid recent changes in the field itself; the ways change is thematised or addressed in a text, or set of texts, in response to pressures from the environment -socio-political or economic change as well as changes in the media of production. In linguistics, change is crucial with regard to questions of historical developments like syntactic or semantic change. It also has a central role in sociolinguistics, where its relation to language variation makes it particularly relevant. Four international keynote speakers with different areas of expertise have confirmed their attendance of the SAUTE 2017 meeting. All of them have agreed to participate actively in our workshop, so that we can offer a program with focused work groups. During the morning, the participants will form two work groups, each of which will be led by two of our invited speakers. Each group will discuss the topic of change from an interdisciplinary angle, based on readings assigned by the speakers. In the afternoon, the participating doctoral students will have the opportunity to present work in progress and get feedback from their peers and the invited speakers.

Université de Neuchâtel, Faculté de Lettres et Sciences Humaines

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