Conference

(Site description:) FDG 2012, the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, is a focal point for academic efforts in all areas of research and education involving games, game technologies, gameplay, and game design. The goal of the conference is the advancement of the study of digital games, including new game technologies, capabilities, designs, applications, educational uses, and modes of play.

FDG 2012 invites Paper, Poster, Panel, Doctoral Consortium, Demo, and Workshop submissions in all research areas related to games. This year we are also adding the Research and Experimental Game Festival which will showcase innovation in game design and game technologies.

The Nordic Association for Comparative Literature (NorLit) organizes every two years an international scholarly conference. The aim of NorLit is to develop the study of Comparative Literature through Nordic collaboration both in its own discipline and in Modern Language and Cultural studies. The next conference will take place in Stockholm, August 6-9, 2009. The conference is organized by the School of Computer Science and Communication, Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), the Department of Comparative Literature, Stockholm University, the Department of Communication and Culture, Södertörn University College, and the Department of Comparative Literature, Uppsala University. 

The theme for the meeting is ”Codex and Code: Aesthetics, Language and Politics in an Age of Digital Media”. The conference venue is the Royal Institute of Technology. The conference languages are the Nordic languages and English.

The conference wants to stimulate interdisciplinary scholarly research of the literary in a broad sense. We addresse ourselves to scholars in Comparataive Literature and in Classical and Modern Languages, Aesthetics, Media and Communication studies, Film and Theatre studies, Philosophy and adjacent disciplines. We want to encourage a discussion of how literary studies respond to the ongoing changes in media and technology, politics and economy. Many argue that the Humanities currently are in a state of crisis. We argue that the discipline seldom has found itself in such an interesting and fruitful historical moment.

The principal question for the conference is the challenge that the study of literature encounters in an age of digitalization and globalization. The conference also adresses questions of authenticity and originality, identity and gender, literary genres and reading practices, media and materiality, culture and popular culture, language and history, world literature, work aesthetics, translations and canon formation. Several of these questions have surfaced during earlier media system changes, in particular during Romanticism and Modernism, which provides the conference with an historical frame.

Keynote speakers (confirmed): Professor Patrizia Lombardo, Département de langue et de littérature françaises, Université de Genève Professor Jochen Hörisch, Seminar für Deutsche Philologie, Universität MannheimProfessor Andrea Polaschegg, Institut für deutsche Literatur, Humboldt Universität Dr. Göran Sommardal, Institutionen för orientaliska språk, Stockholms universitet

The conference is organized around a number thematic sessions to which we invite researchers and scholars to present papers.

The first international conference on translating E-literature will take place from 12 to 14 June at the Universities of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and Paris 7 Diderot Denis. The conference is organized by OTNI: Objets textuels non identifiés (UTO: Unidentified Textual Objects), a research project into the evolution of textuality in the digital age. It is supported by the Electronic Literature Organization.

E-literature is an emphatically global phenomenon. Its authors are of many different nationalities. Sometimes they write in a form of global English. The reception of E-literature nevertheless raises issues which are far from being exclusively discursive in nature. It also involves criteria that are visual (screen display, graphics, color…), dynamic (screen animations) or kinetic (reader/players’ actions and movements). These dimensions extend far beyond the competences traditionally required of readers of literary works on paper. They are often highly culture-specific. A new semiotics, a new rhetoric and a new poetics are needed if the analysis of these aspects of E-literature is to progress properly. It is impossible to translate works of E-literature without paying detailed attention to them. Thus, translation does not simply provide materials for research into E-literature. It is a research activity in itself – a form of theoretical practice.

The conference will explore a wide range of questions concerning the translation of works of E-literature. It welcomes proposals relating to:

•  globalized English and vernacular languages;
•  transposing screen displays from one culture to another;
•  the cultural specificity of dynamical figures;
•  technology and gesture in local cultures;
•  digital technology as a medium of translation and/or transformation;
•  …

The conference is open to proposals formulated in terms of poetics, rhetoric or semiotics but also to issues raised by cultural studies and science and technology studies; to theoretical discourse as well as experimentation in and analysis of actual translations; to studies of works in which translation between languages or transpositions effected by technology constitute a literary strategy…

Translation workshops will form part of the conference. Participants are invited to suggest innovative formats to enable these.

The conference will stage a multilingual program of E-literature.

The conference proceedings will be published on-line. They will include textual contributions and videos of the translation workshops. Experimental translations of E-literature will also be featured.

&NOW is a festival of fiction, poetry, and staged play readings; literary rituals, performance pieces (digital, sound, and otherwise), electronic and multimedia projects; and intergenre literary work of all kinds, including criti-fictional presentations and creatively critical papers. We particularly encourage pieces that promote linguistic and genre transgressions, along with literary artworks that promote interdisciplinary explorations and conversations with past, present, or future literary concerns and movements.

&Now's 2012 theme "Exchanges and cross-fertilizations" addresses the idea of innovative literary art in terms of importation from and thriving on different genres, forms, fields and media. When today's art clearly exposes many a traditional literary and more generally artistic category and notion as obsolete, how is art to be described, criticized and reviewed? Should categories be done away with altogether and new modes of speaking about works, representing and promoting them be invented, as well as innovative modes of conveying the aesthetic and artistic experience? This special Paris edition of the &Now Festival will also tackle the issue of exchanges and influences across the Atlantic and throughout time, exploring and continuing a long-lasting tradition of mutual fertilization and respect.

(Source: Conference website)