The 5th International Interdisciplinary Conference in Iasi, Romania devoted to the life and work of C. S. Lewis:
Of This and Other Worlds

22-23 November 2018

The Fourth Interdisciplinary Conference devoted to the life and work of C. S. Lewis: C. S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits, Iasi, 22-23 November 2018, continues the series of events devoted to the celebrated Oxonian writer and scholar and is open to both specialists and lay people who are interested in, and fascinated by, the Oxford Don’s legacy and influential presence within current culture.

Details on the conference and registration: http://simpozioncslewis.blogspot.com/

Contact persons:

30-31 May 2019, Iasi - Romania

Oral tradition or oral lore is a form of communication wherein the set of knowledge, art, and ideas which define a given culture is received, preserved and transmitted orally from one generation to the next. Once recorded in writing, a culture becomes visible, its values are expressed clearly, and those records will endure. It is not only visibility and recorded expression that it gains but also vitality and a virtually universal dimension.

We invite participants in the conference From Runes to the New Media and Digital Books to look at how writing in English shaped a language which has become the world’s most used, the lingua franca of our contemporary world. From the earliest indigenous writing found in England, written on the ankle bone of a roe deer, from the Undley bracteate (a gold medalion), which is the earliest example of Old English found so far, from the dramatic increase in the amount of writing in the Middle English period, through the advent of printing to the development of the World Wide Web and the Internet, the history of the English language is the story of its written texts. As Dominic Wyse argues in How Writing Works: From the Invention of the Alphabet to the Rise of Social Media, "New forms of social media still rely heavily on the alphabetic language of English. And new developments such as emoticons and images have been reunited with written language perhaps as an echo of the hieroglyphic past. At the same time the global spread of language, and particularly the English language, as a result of the internet, including in juxtaposition with still and moving images, music and sound, is on a quite extraordinary scale. The extent to which English establishes itself as a digital lingua franca remains an open question” (88).

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12-15 October 2017

Iași and Chernivtsi

Discourse on linguistic and cultural diversity is by no means new and the topic has been approached from the most diverse angles of investigation: from cultural studies, anthropology and linguistics to literature, translation studies and foreign language teaching –if we were to mention some of the disciplines that are closest to this area of research. Despite its recurrence, though, the subject is far from losing its high relevance at a time when cultural and linguistic identities are constantly challenged by the powerful – and inevitable – phenomenon of globalization. Moreover, the interdisciplinary potential of the topic makes it still attractive to further multifaceted research and thought-provoking inquiries.

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