Committee meeting

On Tuesday 28^th January, we are pleased to welcome Prof Janice Carruthers, Professor of French Linguistics at Queen's University Belfast and Leader of the Sociolinguistics Strand of the major interdisciplinary project Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (MEITS). It is her involvement with this project that forms the basis of our seminar. This is an excellent opportunity to engage with current research into how multilingual individuals and societies draw on multiple languages, cultures and modes of thought.

Abstract​

This paper forms part of the research on language and identity in a large interdisciplinary project funded by the AHRC’s Open World Research Initiative (OWRI): ‘Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies’. I will start by outlining the aims, objectives and shape of the full MEITS project, explaining how the work of the Queen’s strand relates to the broader research questions. I will focus on one particular dimension of our work, i.e. research on Contemporary Urban Vernacular French. I will outline the nature of the linguistic and social characteristics normally associated with this variety of French and will explain the methodology and theoretical framework for our study. The core of the paper will analyse listener perceptions in relation to speakers of CUV French, with a particular focus on questions of migration and multilingualism but also including the role of other speaker variables such as age, gender and regional origin. Drawing on Eckert’s (2008) concept of ‘indexical fields’, I will explore the possible indexical meanings of a number of linguistic features, and combinations of features, interrogating their relationship with questions of perceived identity in multilingual urban environments. ​

If you would like to register to attend this seminar, or if you have any queries, please feel free to email mitn@warwick.ac.uk or book via forgeskills, or just come along we'd love to see you there.

The first talk in this term’s Caribbean Centre seminar series is on Tuesday 28^th January at 5.15pm. Dr Kristy Warren from the University of Leicester will give talk on ‘Tracing Commemorations of Colonial Settlement in Bermuda’.

It will be held in Room OC1.03, Oculus building, University of Warwick. Please see here for directions https://warwick.ac.uk/about/visiting/maps/interactive/

Caribbean seminar series: 'Tracing Commemorations of Colonial Settlement in Bermuda'

by Dr Kristy Warren (University of Leicester)

Josh Robinson teaches modern and contemporary critical theory in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at the University of Cardiff. Most recently, he is author of Adorno’s Poetics of Form, which appeared last year in SUNY’s Contemporary Continental Philosophy series: https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6556-adornos-poetics-of-form.aspx

"Crisis in Theory: Beyond the Representational Paradigm"

This paper aspires to offer a critical account of a set of assumptions that are widespread in literary and critical theory, both in its historical emergence (as seen primarily through its institutional histories) and in several more recent developments (including the various ‘turns’ that arise from time to time). My focus is on what I term the representational paradigm: in its simplest and broadest formulation, the assumption, explicit or otherwise, within literary studies that works of literature matter insofar as they are representative; that what matters about literary works is their representative character.

This paradigm persists in multiple, not always interdependent (or even necessarily compatible) manifestations, which include: an analytical focus on events represented within works of literature (what might be called a focus on content at the expense of form); a set of analytical procedures that rely on an implicit theory of allegory, whereby readings are produced that see elements of a work as representing elements outside it; attempts to reconfigure the canon and/or redesign our curricula, such that the works and authors within it are more representative of global society. I outline a tentative taxonomy of these different versions of representationalism, and relate them to a set of shared democratic assumptions about political representation – assumptions which have a tendency to place themselves beyond scrutiny. I argue that while the democratic aspirations expressed at least in progressive versions of the representational paradigm constitute a commendable alternative to the (not only cultural) conservatism of the tendencies against which they are, in many respects, a reaction, these underlying assumptions ultimately overlook or even limit the potential of literature’s ways of thinking to contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the political. I thus set out some of the ways in which criticism and theory might move beyond the representational paradigm.