Previous guest lectures and seminars

2022

Public Interview with Kristian Novak

Kristian Novak (1979) is one of the best contemporary writers and a rising star of the Croatian literary scene.

Time and place: Dec. 5, 2022 2:15 PM – 3:15 PM, Scene HumSam, Georg Sverdrups hus

About the event
Novak's most recent book "Ciganin, ali Najljepši" (Gypsy, but the Fairest of them all), was published in 2016 and won the Book of the Year Prize in Croatia and has been translated into several languages.

In Norway, the novel has been translated by Jon Kværne as "The most beautiful, but gypsy" and published by Cappelen Damm. Dagbladet shortlisted it for the best novel published in Norway in 2021.

In this interview, Damjan Božinović (UiO) will talk with Kristian Novak about the topics that are at the heart of his writing: migration, racism, multilingual writing, borderlands; about the author's writing process and his challenging of genre conventions, as well as about his novels' reception in Croatia and abroad.

The event is public and open to all.

About the novel
"Ciganin, ali Najljepši" has a wide scope, entangling several lives between the rivers Drava and Mura in the northernmost part of Croatia.

It is a book where you'll find ISIS and the 2015 refugee wave, forbidden love between a Croatian woman and a gypsy man, a Croatian Homeland War veteran securing peace in his village, a policeman having schizoid episodes in the dusk of his career, an orgy in a weekend house, theory and practice of theft and fist-fight, splendor of language, thought and emotion.

Organizer
Damjan Božinović at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages and Humanities and Social Sciences Library

Guest lecture: "On Untranslation in Argentine Poetry"

A guest lecture by Ben Bollig, Professor of Spanish American Literature (University of Oxford)

Time and place: Nov. 18, 2022 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus: Seminarrom 360

Ben Bollig’s lecture will look at the question of “la no-traducción”—un- or non-translation—drawing on the work of Emily Apter, Edith Grossman, and Pierre Joris; as well more specific reflections on Latin American literature, via some of Jorge J. Locane’s ideas and Bollig’s own work on translations of Argentine poetry in the UK and US. Bollig shall then address more specific examples from his own practice, two large-scale projects: Cristian Aliaga’s travel prose poems; and Sergio Raimondi’s Poesía civil or Civil Poetry and Lexikon, aka Towards a Critical Dictionary of the Language. The talk will conclude with examples from Ezequiel Zaidenwerg’s sonnets, Bichos, to argue, in short, that a translation practice that simultaneously accepts and resists the aesthetic and practical un/non translatability of poetry is necessary today.

***

Ben Bollig is Professor of Spanish American Literature at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Moving Verses: Poetry on Screen in Argentine Cinema. His translations of the poetry of Cristian Aliaga were published by Liverpool University Press as Music for Unknown Journeys in 2021. He is currently completing, with the poet Mark Leech, a volume of translations from the poetry of Sergio Raimondi. He is an editor of Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Hispanic Editor of the MHRA Critical Texts series.

Where do the rules of English come from?

A guest lecture by Professor Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Leiden University Centre of Linguistics

Tid og sted: 31. okt. 2022 16:15 – 18:00, P. A. Munchs hus: Seminarrom 11

Learning English as a foreign or second language inevitably means having to internalise the many rules of this language. But where do these rules come from? And how do they relate to actual usage? In this guest lecture I will try to answer these questions by looking at the final stages of the English standardisation process, codification and prescription, and their typical products, the grammar and the usage guide.

The earliest grammars were not usage based, but have their roots in the Latin grammatical tradition. Inevitably, this clashed with actual usage, which often differed from the rules provided by the grammars. Singular they, an alternative to so-called sex-indefinite he, is a good example of such a clash, just like the split infinitive: why would it not be possible to put an adverb in between to and the infinitive? Also, why can’t we use wrote as a past participle form any more, and is it risky to say “I done that” in a job interview? On the one hand, I will show the grammarians at work trying to codify the language, and on the other hand struggling with the ways in which actual usage differed. In the end it fell to the writers of usage guides to try and keep the old rules adhered to.

English Agonistes: Narrative Design and Language History

A guest lecture by Professor Tim William Machan, University of Notre Dame and former Fulbright fellow at ILOS.

Tid og sted: 24. okt. 2022 16:15 – 17:30, P. A. Munchs hus: Seminarrom 11

Abstract
The history of English is not a ready-made thing – it takes shape only through the critical selection of language forms and usages and through the deployment of these in narratives, which might center on aesthetics, periodization, grammatical structure, usage, or social purpose. The last of these is the focus of English Agonistes: how language history, as a means of both semantic communication and communal interaction, can be framed in relation to and further some social objective. This relation may be understood to be causative, resultative, or simply mimetic, and in each case language change, its origins, and its effects require different explanations and different data, producing different implications for society as well as language. Variation and change in the history of a language may thus be treated as reflections of communal organization; or as evidence of a divine plan in human history; or as a means for social engineering; or as the products of moral character. But in every case, social narratives are those that are underwritten by a kind of theocratic linguistics. Topics include the Tower of Babel, language laws, comparative linguistics, and the global spread of English

Guest Lecture: Literatura y sociedad. Escritores latinoamericanos en los países socialistas europeos

A guest lecture by Prof. Pablo Sánchez (Universidad de Sevilla)

Time and place: Sep. 6, 2022 12:15 PM – 2:00 PM, Niels Treschows hus - Møterom 1016

Honorary Doctor Terence Cave: “Some Live Artefacts”

The University of Oslo appoints Professor Emeritus Terence Cave as Doctor Honoris Causa. His guest lecture centers on literary artefacts.

Time and place: Sep. 1, 2022 4:15 PM – 5:00 PM, Auditorium 3, Sophus Bugges hus

Literary artefacts – the stories people tell, the songs they sing, the scenes they enact, demonstrate the fluidity and adaptability of human cognition. This lecture, arising from Terence Cave’s recent book Live Artefacts: Literature in a Cognitive Environment, will present readings from European literature which illustrate the embodied life of such artefacts. Culture, in this perspective, emerges from and is continuous with nature.

About Terence Cave
Terence Cave is a British literary scholar and Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford.

His main interest is early modern French literature, and he has an outstanding reputation as a comparatist. In 2009 he was awarded the prestigious Balzan Prize for his studies of literature after the year 1500.

Terence Cave is a member of the Academia Europaea, fellow of the British Academy, member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite, was made honorary doctor of the University of London in 2007, and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences.

He has spent a lot of time in Norway, and generously given of his time to Norwegian researchers and research recruits as a commentator, opponent, consultant and mentor. He has been a central figure for several academic communities at UiO for many years, and several researchers at UiO are deeply grateful to him.

Honorary Doctorate
UiO's honorary doctorate is given to prominent, most often foreign, scholars. It is awarded without the candidate having defended a dissertation in a public defense. UiO has had the right to appoint honorary doctors since 1824. They are usually appointed every three years at UiO's annual celebration in September.

The lecture is held in English, and is open to all.
It will also be available live on Zoom.

The Global Novel as a Problem

A guest workshop on the challenges of the global novel by Marta Puxan-Oliva and Neus Rotger

Tid og sted: 25. apr. 2022 10:00 – 12:00, NT Møte- og konferanserom HF-12

This workshop proposes to discuss the global novel as a problem. Considering a growing body of criticism that draws on various disciplinary perspectives, we propose to discuss a constellation of social, political, affective, and ethical concerns that are increasingly present in recent theories of the novel, such as global interconnectedness and violence, cosmopolitanism, a new order of affects, humanitarianism, translatability, and planetarity.

The global novel is neither a homogeneous nor a globally circulated corpus of fiction, but a form of representation that has a series of parameters that allow it to be approached as a problem, and that are at the center of the discussion that we propose here: the tension between the local and the global; the representation, often in thematic or mimetic terms, of a hyperconnected world plagued by social and ecological crisis; the exploration of a new space-time dimension, as well as multiple scales (human and non-human) in the context of the so-called Anthropocene; the "ethical" and "affective" turns as new ways of acting and feeling in the world; or the pressure of the publishing market, with direct implications in terms of legibility, translatability, commercialization and consecration. We wish to advance the discussion of the global novel by crossing formal and material approaches to these problems from a perspective that goes beyond a mostly Anglophone-centered scholarly debate.

Dystopias and catastrophes in Spanish-American literature of the new millennium

A guest lecture by Professor Edoardo Balletta, University of Bologna

Tid og sted: 4. mars 2022 10:00 – 12:00, NT: Møterom 1016 (Niels Treschow's building)

Edoardo Balletta teaches Latin-American Literature at the University of Bologna. His interests focus on Twentieth-century poetry, with special attention to the Argentine avant-gardist Oliverio Girondo, and on the neo-baroque. In recent years he has examined the relationship between cultural artifacts, politics, and history, publishing contributions on political comics, revolutionary imaginaries, and the relationship between photography and memory in Argentina.

2021

Critical Race Perspectives on Anti-Asian Racism

Critical Race Perspectives will explore the different experiences of Anti-Asian racism in the United States and Norway in a panel conversation with important voices, namely Uma Feed Tjelta, Chi Ton, Ka Man Mak, and Curtis Chin, on September 27, 2021.

Time and place: Sep. 27, 2021 4:00 PM–6:00 PM, Zoom

According to World Economic Forum, Anti-Asian hate crimes surged by 169% across 15 major US cities between 2020-2021. Two years ago, the Chinese-Norwegian Johanne Ihle Hansen was murdered by her adoptive brother, and right-wing extremist terrorist Philip Manshaus before he attacked a a Mosque. Unfortunately, we don't have a statistic on the rate of anti-Asian hate crimes in Norway. Still, in recent years, many Asian Norwegians have spoken up about their experiences.

We will address several aspects of this problem with questions such as:
- What are commonalities between the US and Norwegian experiences of people of Asian descent?
- Why does society not take this issue seriously?
- Why are "positive" stereotypes still racist?
- What can the rest of society do to raise awareness about this issue?
- How do we combat anti-Asian racism, and why are solidarity and consciousness important?

In advance, we will make available the film "Vincent Who?" which was produced and directed by one of our guests, Curtis Chin. Curtis will talk about anti-Asian racism in the US and discuss the film in our programme.

Read more about the film here: https://www.vincentwhofilm.com/

Organizer

Institutt for litteratur, områdestudier og europeiske språk - ILOS, African Student Association UiO and Manifold Norway

Critical race perspectives: an introduction

What in fact are critical race perspectives? How do researchers use them in their work, and for what purposes? How do these perspectives influence various academic fields?

Time and place: June 2, 2021 3:00 PM–5:00 PM, Zoom

This zoom webinar will explore these questions and more. Most generally, critical race perspectives allow us to study and transform the relationships between race, racism and power as they operate in many aspects of life, both in the present and historically. Our panelists will address how critical race perspectives shape their own work and the academic world more broadly across a variety of academic fields, as well as across various national contexts, including South Africa, USA and Norway. After each panelist gives a brief introduction to their work, we will engage in a panel discussion followed by audience questions and answers.

More information about the speakers will follow.

This webinar will be held in English. It is free and open to everyone, but we especially encourage students to join. The panel is co-hosted by ILOS (Institute for Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo) and the African Student Association (University of Oslo.)

Organizer

Institute for Literature, Area Studies and European Languages and African Student Association

2020

English Grammar in Schools: the English Experience

Englicious, a resource for teaching English grammar, is an example of how academics might reach out beyond the university. Guest talk by Professor Bas Aarts (University College London)

Time and place: Nov. 18, 2020 3:00 PM–5:00 PM, virtual meeting (Zoom)

Englicious

Englicious is an entirely free online library of original English language teaching resources. Englicious is brought to you by the Survey of English Usage, a world-leading research unit at University College London and has received funding from a variety of sources.

A key team member is Bas Aarts, Professor of English Linguistics; Director, Survey of English Usage; and current Vice-Dean for Enterprise at University College London.

Abstract

One of the catchwords in academia today is accountability. This refers to the idea that universities should not just be teaching students and doing research, but they should also account for how they do so, and how successfully they do it. For a long time the UK has had a Research Excellence Framework (REF) by which all university departments are judged for the quality of their research output. Now there’s also a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), by which departments will be judged for their teaching quality, and soon there will be a Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF).

The REF has a component which assesses whether universities are making an ‘impact’. This refers to the extent to which their research makes a difference in the wider society which they are part of, as opposed to the impact they make within academia. What this means is that universities are expected to make an impact on the economy, public policy, culture and/or the quality of life. When the REF was first announced many academics were unhappy that they had to deliver impact. Many said that they were appointed to do teaching and research, but not to make an impact on society. What’s more, they argued that it is difficult to assess impact. Given the nature of academic research, for many academics it is not always easy to think of ways of making an impact, but it is crucially important, because from the next REF in 2021, 25% of the income that university departments receive from the central government will depend on their impact scores.

In my talk I will argue that delivering impact is not as daunting as it seems, and that there are interesting opportunities for academics to make their work more widely known outside their institutions. I will discuss how a team of linguists at the Survey of English Usage at UCL (University College London) have addressed the impact agenda by developing the Englicious project (www.englicious.org). This is a freely available web-based platform designed for UK school teachers to help them teach English grammar. It contains lesson plans, exercises, projects, videos and professional development materials, and it uses authentic examples from a corpus. In my talk I will demonstrate the functionality of Englicious, and how it can be used in educational settings, including universities.

Organizer

English Language Unit at ILOS

Novel Perceptions. Comparing Literary Values in Different Countries

How do novels’ textual features shape readers' perceptions of literary value? Professor Karina van Dalen-Oskam will present her innovative research on perceptions of literary quality in this open lecture.

Time and place: Nov. 2, 2020 3:15 PM, ZOOM

Which features of a novel help readers perceive it as having high or low literary quality? Can we trace a clear genre hierarchy in the perception of readers, and if so, how are literary novels by female authors valued compared to those written by men?

In this lecture, Professor Karina van Dalen-Oskam will respond to these questions by presenting her cutting-edge research on perceptions of literary value.

Uncovering literary trends

Karina van Dalen-Oskam is principal investigator in the Dutch collaborative project The Riddle of Literary Quality. The project applies a mixed-methods approach to investigate the relationship between a novel’s formal characteristics and literary quality.

Using surveys and stylometry tools (computational stylistics), the group investigates the relationship between readers’ opinions and formal characteristics in a corpus of 400 novels. The results uncover literary trends in the Netherlands which, the collaborators suspect, may be a reflection of still existing inequalities and gender-bias in Dutch society today.

Karina van Dalen-Oskam will describe the methods and findings from the project in more detail. She will also talk about how they are now taking the project globally, starting with the United Kingdom, to see whether a comparable approach uncovers the same or different conventions in other countries.

Karina van Dalen-Oskam is head of the department of Literary Studies at Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and Professor in Computational Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Organizer

Literature, Cognition and Emotions

Contact

Karin Kukkonnen
Marlene Andresen

Book launch: Privateering and Diplomacy, 1793-1807

In late February 1793, a report landed on the desk of Daniel Hailes, the British diplomatic representative in Copenhagen, stating that a French privateer had been sighted off the Southern-Norwegian coastal town of Mandal. This was the start of what would become a long-lasting debate between Great Britain on the one hand, and the dual-monarchy of Denmark-Norway on the other.

Time and place: Sep. 23, 2020 3:15 PM–4:00 PM, Scene HumSam - Ground floor of the library in Georg Sverdrups hus

The central question at stake was the following: Was it acceptable for a neutral country such as Denmark-Norway to allow the privateers of a belligerent country into its ports and, as it turned out, permit them to use these ports as bases for their attacks on the seaways trade of another belligerent country (Britain)? The British thought not, but the question proved remarkably difficult to resolve, and the British-Danish debate soon addressed issues pertaining to the relationship between belligerents and neutrals, beyond the realm of privateering.

Program

Welcome to the launch of Atle Libæk Wold's new book "Privateering and Diplomacy, 1793–1807. Great Britain, Denmark-Norway and the Question of Neutral Ports"!
Book presentation - Atle Libæk Wold
Q&A

Atle Libæk Wold is Associate Professor at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo.

Due to covid 19 restrictions there will be a limited amount of seats available, and all attendees must register at the entrance. The event will be live streamed, more info coming soon!

Organizer

Humanities and Social Sciences Library and Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

Your Brain on Books: Gunnhild Øyehaug’s ‘Dreamwriter'

We know that literature affects us – but how? Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE) hosts a talk with author Gunnhild Øyehaug.

Time and place: Sep. 16, 2020 7:00 PM–8:00 PM, The House of Literature

Discover how your own reading experience comes to life.

We trace the trajectory between the author’s imagination, literary expressions through language and the reader’s brain. Listen to Gunnhild Øyehaug read her short story 'Dreamwriter' and discover how your own reading experience comes to life.

Panel participants: Alexandra Effe, Ylva Østby, Karin Kukkonen and Gunnhild Øyehaug.

Some parts of the event will be held in English.

Due to covid-19 restrictions, organizers must register who is in the audience. Therefore, free tickets must be reserved in advance.

Organizer

Literature, Cognition and Emotions and Forskningsdagene

Advanced course on GIS for literature

Two-days advanced (follow-up) GIS course for humanities and specially literature lectured by Danielle Sanches and Ângela Pité, researchers at NOVA, under the scope of the BILLIG project.

This course is a follow-up of the one in September by Daniel Alves and Danielle Sanches (see course) but can be attended separately (i.e., there are no preconditions to attend).

Time and place: Feb. 5, 2020 9:00 AM–Feb. 6, 2020 4:00 PM, Harriet Holters hus, S 134 and G112

5th February

Recap of what has been taught in the previous course: QGIS basics, layers, joins, visualization options.
geocoding
some data analysis, specifically production of heat maps
building a historical GIS

6th February

data transformation, polygons to points
applying GIS to some case studies
Temporal data: analysis and visualization
Wrapup and discussion

Danielle Sanches is a researcher at the Digital Humanities Lab at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA University of Lisbon, and a member of the Digital Humanities Laboratory of CPDOC / FGV, and of LABOGAD / UniRio. She holds a PhD in History of Sciences from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS / Paris). She has taught new digital methodologies for humanists at PUC-Rio, Brazil, and her research areas include GIS and Network Analysis for the humanities.

Ângela Pité is a researcher at the Digital Humanities Lab at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA University of Lisbon. Her main areas of interest are GIS and Cartography, specially the use of new technologies to study old cartography and also its integration and contribution to Humanities projects. In this context, she has previously collaborated in related research projects and is currently pursuing a master in Territorial Management, specializing in Remote Sensing and GIS, at NOVA University of Lisbon.

2019

The Cultural Politics of Spain's Transition to Democracy

Professor Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds) will present his late research on Culture, Politics, and Democracy in the context of Spanish History and Art.

Time and place: Nov. 7, 2019 11:15 AM–12:00 PM, Georg Sverdrups hus Grupperom 7

What is the relationship between politics and culture? The first part of this talk will use concrete examples to argue that culture not only reflected but also shaped the path from dictatorship to democracy. This context will allow Prof. Wheeler, in the second half, to examine how and why analyzing cultural production and reception might allow us to nuance ongoing debates surrounding agency in relation to both elite pacts and mass mobilisation.

Professor Duncan Wheeler holds the Chair in Spanish Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the editor (Hispanic Studies) of "Modern Language Review" and has published two monographs, two critical editions, an edited volume, and other thirty peer-reviewed articles and chapters. His latest book, "The Cultural Politics of Spain's Transition to Democracy", will be coming out soon with Manchester University Press. In addition to his academic publications, Duncan's work appears regularly in the UK, US and Spanish media through such outlets as "Jot Down", "The Times Literary Supplement", "The Guardian", "Newsweek" etc. He has been visiting Professors/Fellow at UCLA, the Carlos III (Madrid) and the University of Oxford. In 2016, he was inducted into the Spanish Academy of Stage Arts for his research into and teaching of Hispanic theatres.

Organizer

ILOS and Álvaro Llosa Sanz

Workshop: Sentence Grammar, Discourse Grammar

The international workshop Sentence Grammar, Discourse Grammar takes place on 24 - 25 October. Feel free to come and listen to one or more of the talks (see programme below).

Time and place: Oct. 24, 2019 9:00 AM–Oct. 25, 2019 1:00 PM, Blindern

Thursday 24 October, Helga Engs hus, auditorium U35

Nicholas Catasso (Bergische Universität Wuppertal): A comprehensive typology of Verb-Third in Early New High German
Svetlana Petrova (Bergische Universität Wuppertal): Rethinking V3 in Old High German
Kalle Müller (Universität Tübingen): On the distribution of sentence adverbs in present-day German
Ben Sluckin (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): Locative Inversion as a conspiracy
Ans van Kemenade & Christine M. Salvesen (Radboud Universiteit/ Universitetet i Oslo): The information-structural status of topic constructions i Old English and Old French
Remus Gergel & Maike Puhl Puhl (Universität des Saarlandes): How particle-like is English though?
Chiara Bastiani & Marco Coniglio (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia/Georg August Universität Göttingen): Subjunctive in Germanic
Ans van Kemenade & Tara Struik (Radboud Universiteit): Towards a formalisation of the syntax-pragmatics interface

Friday 25 October, Sophus Bugges hus, seminar room 2

Eric Fuß & Roland Hinterhölzl (Ruhr-Universität Bochum/Università Ca' Foscari Venezia): On the historical development of pronouns referring to situations: the case of (expletive) da, es and das
Kari Kinn (Universitetet i Oslo): Pragmaticalised determiners in American-Norwegian
Tina M. Lybekk (Universitetet i Oslo): Negation in Old French
Elisabeth Witzenhausen (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): Negation - Exception - Contrast - the exaptation of ne/en in High German, Low German and Dutch

We gratefully thank ILOS for funding this workshop.

Organizer

Kristin Bech, Christine Meklenborg Salvesen

Master classes on historical punctuation

You are cordially invited to three master classes on the forms and functions of punctuation in Late Middle English and Early Modern English. The classes will present three very different perspectives on punctuation, which remains an understudied area. The classes will be relevant to anyone working on historical texts, also non-English ones, not only for the theoretical perspectives on whether punctuation is prosodic or syntactic, but also because editors (and corpus compilers) have a long history of suppressing what punctuation marks are present in the historical source materials themselves.

The event is in part financed by LingPhil, in part by ILOS, which funding is gratefully acknowledged.

Time and place: Oct. 21, 2019 9:15 AM–Oct. 22, 2019 11:15 AM,

The first known written recipe for ice cream dates from 1665 and is found in the recipe book of Lady Anne Fanshawe. Three different punctuation marks are used in it.

Monday, 21 October

Georg Sverdrup building, Undervisningsrom 3

Jane Roberts, Professor Emerita of Medieval English Language & Literature, King's College London. TOPIC: Punctuation in Late Medieval English manuscripts.
Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, Profesora Titular, University of Vigo. TOPIC: Punctuation in relation to Prescriptivism and the Early Modern Period.

Tuesday, 22 October

Georg Morgenstierne building, Seminarrom 115

María José Lopéz-Couso, (Full) Professor in English Language and Linguistics, University of Santiago de Compostela. TOPIC: Punctuation in relation to compilation and use of corpora.

Organizer

Gjertrud Stenbrenden & Jacob Thaisen

Mind-bending grammars: Guest lecture with Professor Peter Petré, University of Antwerp

Peter Petré has an ERC Starting Grant in linguistics, for a project called Mind-Bending Grammars, which investigates how grammars change in individuals in the course of a lifespan. The data come from the minds of dead people: The project has compiled a 90-million-word corpus of the most productive writers born in 17th-century England.

Time and place: Oct. 18, 2019 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Seminarrom 14, P.A. Munchs hus

Mind-Bending Grammars: Syntactic change in Early Modern English as a socially embedded emergent phenomenon

Language change has typically been studied at the aggregate level, yet it is individuals who change. In this guest lecture I will focus on the role of individual cognition and social networks in explaining syntactic change, as it has crystallized out of the ERC-funded Mind-Bending Grammars project, which is now approaching its finale.

Assuming that language is a complex adaptive system, I will provide evidence of how macro-properties of grammaticalizing constructions can be accounted for as an unintended effect of intentional individual interactions. This dynamics is exemplified by various developments in 17th and 18th century English as represented in 50 prolific writers (brought together in the EMMA-corpus, Petré et al. 2019). I will focus in particular on the grammaticalization of be going to, but will also show related evidence for the copularization of 'get', the increasing productivity of prepositional passives, and the increasing rhetorical use of clefts. For each of these evidence is presented that individuals continue to innovate/adopt innovations beyond adolescence, but do so in different ways, depending on their age and community of practice. These differences lead to a higher degree of variation, which prepares a changing construction for its next leap. Also, leaders of change are followed by both older and younger adopters, but whereas older adopters will conservatively constrain innovative usage in agreement with pre-existing habits, younger language users may significantly elaborate it across the lifespan. Combined these behaviors reinforce the well-known s-curve propagation of change.

To fully understand the various developments, the specific English socio-historical context also needs to be taken into account. The writers in EMMA lived in the long 17th century, which saw the Civil War, plague and Great Fire of London in rapid succession. Such upheaval appears to impact on the rate of change, with signs of changes slowing down in times of extreme stress. General demographics and networks with many weak ties also play a role, with Londoners being generally more progressive.

Yet even within this complex multi-faceted reality, regularities across individuals’ cognitive representations emerge, as visible in recurrent intra-individual orderings of adopting interlinked innovations, or frequency correlations between similar constructions. Eventually, the combination of these individual regularities and their unintended macro-effects should also help explain why English grammar diverged so much from other Germanic languages.

References

Petré, Peter, Lynn Anthonissen, Sara Budts, Enrique Manjavacas, Emma-Louise Silva, William Standing, and Odile A. O. Strik (2019), Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA): Designing a large-scale corpus of individuals’ languages. ICAME Journal 43, 83–122.

Organizer

Kristin Bech

Minutes of action! The language of football match reports in a contrastive perspective
Signe Oksefjell Ebeling, ILOS

Time and place: Sep. 25, 2019 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM-389
Ferguson knew that sports were of no consequence in the long run, but they lent themselves to the written word more readily than most other subjects because each game had a built-in narrative structure … (Paul Auster)

In this talk I will introduce a new comparable corpus – the English-Norwegian Match Report Corpus (ENMaRC) – containing written football match reports from the English Premier League and the Norwegian “Eliteserie”. The reports are from the 2016-2018 seasons and are taken from the clubs' own web pages, written immediately after the matches are finished. By applying corpus-driven extraction methods – word lists, keyword lists, n-grams – the study offers some first explorations into lexico-grammatical features that characterise this particular text type in the two languages. Notably, the study reveals that match reports in the two languages are similar to other text types in the use of time and space expressions in the two languages, while the keyword analysis uncovers some interesting cross-linguistic differences in the language used to report on victories vs. defeats.

Following these more general observations of the corpus data, I will move on to examine a set of time expressions used in online football match reports in English vs. Norwegian. The starting point of the investigation is the most frequently occurring lexical words referring to time, namely minutes and minutter ‘minutes’. By pinpointing the phraseological characteristics of these items, the study seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how time expressions are used to frame events in football match reports. Drawing on insights from previous contrastive studies of English and Norwegian, which have shown that time adverbials are frequent in several text types in both languages (Ebeling et al. 2013; Hasselgård 2014; Ebeling & Ebeling 2017), this study may contribute to a better cross-linguistic understanding of the use of time expressions in English and Norwegian in general.

Although initial observations of minutes and minutter in the material drawn from the ENMaRC show substantial overlap between the two languages in terms of phraseological patterning, there are also some differences worth noting. English has more different recurrent patterns with minutes, i.e. there is less variation in the Norwegian data, and some patterns seem to be unique to English. To narrow the scope, the current study focuses on the predominant pattern in each language, i.e. the English sequence on # minutes (1), and the Norwegian sequence etter # minutter ‘after # minutes’ (2).

... Alexis smashed home a crucial third goal on 83 minutes. (AFC)
Etter 86 minutter fikk vi likevel en god sjanse ... (AaFK)
‘After 86 minutes got we even so a good chance’

Further observations of a subset of the data suggest that there may be interesting cross-linguistic differences in the way in which events at a specific moment in time are reported, notably:

in the preferred placement of the time expression in the clause;
in the tense used;
with regard to which participant is most prominent;
when, during the 90 minutes of a game, the English/Norwegian pattern is typically used.
In my talk, then, I will offer a contrastive analysis of the two main minute patterns in light of these four points.

References

Auster, Paul. 2017. 4 3 2 1: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt.

Ebeling, Jarle, Signe Oksefjell Ebeling and Hilde Hasselgård. 2013. Using recurrent word-combinations to explore cross-linguistic differences, In Karin Aijmer & Bengt Altenberg (ed.), Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson. Amsterdam: Benjamins.177–199.

Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Jarle Ebeling. 2017. A cross-linguistic comparison of recurrent word combinations in a comparable corpus of English and Norwegian fiction. In Markéta Janebová, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski & Michaela Martinková (eds.), Contrasting English and Other Languages through Corpora, 2–31. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Hasselgård, Hilde. 2014. Discourse-structuring functions of initial adverbials in English and Norwegian news and fiction. Languages in Contrast 14(1). 732–3192.

Organizer

Forum for Corpus Linguistics and English Language Research

Monstrous Others: Terrorism, Animality, and Monstrosity in Contemporary Cultural Studies

Time and place: Sep. 12, 2019 1:00 PM–4:15 PM, Styrerommet (1005, 10th floor), Lucy Smiths hus, University of Oslo

Programme

Neel Ahuja (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA), “Reversible Human: Rectal Feeding and Bodily Plasticity in CIA Torture Practice”
Michael Lundblad (University of Oslo, Norway), “Zombie Terrorists, Biopolitics and Animality in World War Z”
Mexitli Nayeli López Ríos (University of Oslo, Norway), “Queering the Grieving Body: Inside the Belly of a War Machine in Silvia Moreno-García’s Certain Dark Things”
Margrit Shildrick (Stockholm University, Sweden), “Monstrous Bodies: Re-imagining representation “

This seminar has been organized in conjunction with the midway PhD assessment for Mexitli Nayeli López Ríos in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo. The seminar is open to the public. Inquiries may be addressed to Professor Michael Lundblad.

Participants

Neel Ahuja is Associate Professor in the Feminist Studies Department and a core faculty member of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Mexitli Nayeli López Ríos is a Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo:
Michael Lundblad is Professor of English-Language Literature in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo
Margrit Shildrick is Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production in the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies at Stockholm University

Organizer

Professor Michael Lundblad, at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

From romanticism to modernism: literary taxonomy for the lusophone novel

Under the scope of the ongoing COST action "Distant Reading for European Literary History", João Marques Lopes will discuss literary historical concepts such as romanticism, realism, naturalism, symbolism and modernism in the Portuguese and Brazilian literary field during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. (This lecture will be in Portuguese.)

Time and place: May 13, 2019 5:00 PM–8:00 PM, PAM 4

The concept of literary school or movement is a common tool in literary studies. Here we look at it for novels written in Portuguese, mainly in the period from 1840 to 1919, which was the one chosen to be dealt with in COST action 16204.

João Marques Lopes will raise and discuss the following questions: Do these concepts form a suitable taxonomy for Portuguese and Brazilian novels? Are the general features of such concepts the same as in France, England and other countries? Or are there Lusophone specifities? Which are the criteria and sources to classify the Lusophone novels of the period? How to discuss the canon and the archive of such novels?

He will also present specific examples and suggestions on how to classify non-canonical novels in Portuguese.

João Marques Lopes, bachelor in Philosophy, holds a Master in Brazilian and African Studies and a PhD in Brazilian literature from University of Lisbon. He was a post-doc scholar in Rio de Janeiro at the Fundação Biblioteca Nacional in 2015 and in Paris at the Fondation Maison Sciences de l'Homme in 2016. He taught Lusophone literature at UiO. He has published several books on Portuguese authors in Portugal and Brazil. José Saramago. Uma biografia (2010) is one of them.

Organizer

Diana Santos and ILOS

Nordic Landscapes, Southern Geographies: Representations of Southern Europe and Nordic Cultures in Literature

ILOS and "Founds in Translation: Southern Europe/Norden" is please to invite you to a half-day seminar with our guest speakers Alessandro Zironi and Espido Freire.

Time and place: May 9, 2019 11:00 AM–1:00 PM, PAM Sem 2

Alessandro Zironi, professor: "Italian place-names in Old Norse texts"
Espido Freire, Spanish writer.

Pre-seminar talk: From 10.15-11.00 in PAM Sem 12, Espido Freire will also meet students and other interested readersfor a conversation in Spanishabout her historical novel "La flor del norte", based on the medieval character and Norwegian Princess Kristina. You are also invited to this conversation.

Alessandro Zironi

Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on Gothic and Lombard languages and literatures; on the reception and rewriting of the Germanic cultural tradition in modern and contemporary times; on the Germanic cultural aspects in early and high medieval texts. He also deals with the relations between Germanic culture within the broader context represented by the medieval European world. It analyzes the Germanic texts with philological, linguistic and comparative methodologies in order to recover the cultural context in which they were produced and / or copied.

Italian Place-Names in Old Norse Texts

The Middle Ages were a period during which people frequently travelled, therefore the geographical knowledge of foreign countries could be sufficiently widespread but stereotyped at the same time. The Italian peninsula exercised a point of specific attraction being a top pilgrimage destination because of the burial place of Saint Peter in Rome and being the embarkation point to the Holy Land. The itinerary of the Icelandic abbot Nikulás is surely the most famous Old Norse text about pilgrimages to Italy and Palestine, but it is not isolated in the Nordic literary corpus. Moreover, Italian place-names are quoted in many other texts pertaining to different genres: fornaldarsögur, biskupasögur, riddarasögurand skaldic poetry. I will try to give a literary geographical map of Italy coming out from Nordic sources, which could help to explain what Nordic people knew about Italy and why those place names are reported in Old Norse works.

Espido Freire

Espido Freire was born in Bilbao in 1974. She published her first novel, “Irlanda”, in Planeta Ed. (1998), when she was only 23 years old. She published Melocotones Helados”, the novel she won the Planeta Award (best known literary award in Spain) with, only half a year later. At that point she was only 25 years old, which meant that she had become the youngest novelist awarded with the Planeta. Since then she has published more novels, essays, young reader´s novel, short stories, poetry and theatre. In 2011 she published “La flor del Norte” (“The flower from the North”, her first historical novel based on 12th Century Norwegian princess Kristina.

She also writes for newspapers and magazines, radio and television programs. She is founder and director of the Creative Writing Master at the International University of Valencia, (VIU).

"In my way to the North: a Nordic universe in a Spanish writer"

Espido Freire will discuss the many ways in which the Nordic culture, history, and mythology has been present in her work, especially in her historical novel "La flor del norte", based on the character of the Norwegian Princess Kristina, who travelled and lived in medieval Spain.

Organizer

Alvaro Llosa Sanz and Elizaveta Khachaturyan
Found in Translation: Southern Europe/Norden Research Group

Literature across Continents

ILOS is pleased to invite you to a seminar with Ranjan Ghosh, Lene Johannessen and Sumana Roy. Open for all.

Time and place: Apr. 29, 2019–Apr. 30, 2019, 12th floor, Niels Treschows hus, Blindern

Ranjan Ghosh

Professor Ranjan Ghosh, Professor of English literature at the University of North Bengal, is an internationally leading scholar in literary and cultural studies.Professor Ghosh will give two lectures linked to four of his latest books; each lecture will be followed by questions and discussion

Lene Johannessen

The seminar will also include a discussion of Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries, edited by Lene Johannessen and Mark Ledbetter (2019). The book will be presented by Lene Johannessen, Professor of American literature at the University of Bergen.

Sumana Roy

On the second day of the seminar, Indian poet and critic Sumana Roy will give a presentation of her book, How I Became a Tree (2017).

Sumana Roy is a leading young poet from North Bengal, India. In this book, Sumana Roy gives new readings of the works of writers, painters, photographers and poets (Rabindranath Tagore and D. H. Lawrence among them) to show how trees and plants have always fascinated human beings.

Mixing memoir, literary history, nature studies, spiritual philosophies and botanical research, How I Became a Tree prompts readers to think of themselves and the natural world that they are an intrinsic part of, in fresh ways.

Monday 29 April

Ranjan Ghosh: Trans(in)fusion. The lecture centres on Ghosh’s trans-trilogy from Routledge (New York)
- Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet (New York: Routledge, 2017),
- Trans(in)fusion: Manifesto for Critical Thinking (New York: Routledge, forthcoming, 2020),
- Transpoesis: Stopping by Robert Frost (New York: Routledge, forthcoming)
Lene Johannessen: Presentation of Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries, ed. Lene Johannessen and Mark Ledbetter (Lexington Books, 2019), followed by discussion

Tuesday 30 April

Ranjan Ghosh: What is Poetic Philosophy? Linked to Ranjan Ghosh, ed., Philosophy and Literature: Continental Perspectives (New York: Columbia UP, 2019)
Sumana Roy: Presentation of Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree

Organizer

Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

Contact

Jakob Lothe

Coda Approximants in British English: A diachronic and synchronic account - Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden, ILOS

Time and place: Apr. 25, 2019 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

Present-Day English (PDE) has four approximants, two semi-vowels (/j/ and /w/) and two liquids (/r/ and /l/). Approximants are phonetically vowel-like with little obstruction to the airstream, but phonologically consonant-like, forming syllabic onsets and codas.

Phonotactically, the semi-vowels are restricted to onsets, which restriction goes back to early Middle English. In most varieties of English in England, the /r/ is restricted to onsets too, after the eighteenth-century process called R-Dropping (Wells 1982). The same process is affecting coda /l/ in many varieties of PDE (L-Vocalisation, Wells 1982). Thus, there seems to be a long-term ‘conspiracy’ in British English (BrE) to bar approximants from codas.

The history of the approximants shows other striking similarities, including their tendency to lengthen preceding vowels, and to vocalise and combine with preceding vowels to form diphthongs. Evidence from earlier English suggests that such phonetic processes have affected English approximants since their earliest history (Jones 1989).

This presentation seeks to outline briefly the historical developments of English approximants; to identify common characteristics; to assess articulatory-acoustic findings from modern processes affecting approximants, and evaluate how these may elucidate historical processes; and to determine which model(s) provide(s) the best account of these changes. Historical evidence is culled from LAEME (A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English) and eLALME (the electronic version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English), as well as from DOEC (The Dictionary of Old English Corpus).

I propose that a model combining both articulatory-gestural and acoustic features is best able to describe what happens to coda approximants (e.g. Ohala and Lorentz 1977; Sproat and Fujimura 1993; Stuart-Smith 2007), and that a model which additionally accommodates syllable structure and re-analysis (e.g. Jones 1989; Borowsky and Horvath 1997) may go a long way towards explaining the peculiar long-term behaviour of BrE approximants.

References

Borowsky, T. and B. Horvath. 1997. “L-vocalization in Australian English”. In Variation, change and phonological theory, edited by F. Hinskens et al., 101-123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jones, C. 1989. A History of English Phonology. London: Longman.
Ohala, J.J. and J. Lorentz. 1977. “The story of [w]: an exercise in the phonetic explanation for sound patterns”. Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: 577-599.
Sproat, R. and O. Fujimura. 1993. “Allophonic variation in English /l/ and its implications for pho-netic implementations”. Journal of Phonetics 21: 291-311.
Stuart-Smith, J. 2007. “A sociophonetic investigation of postvocalic /r/ in Glaswegian adolescents”. The Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: 1449-1452.
Wells, J.H. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: CUP.

Organizer

Corpus linguistics and English Language Research, ILOS

Middle English Abbreviation in the Context of Literacy and Script

Public lecture by Dr Alpo Honkapohja, postdoctor at the University of Edinburgh.

Time and place: Apr. 23, 2019 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Seminar room 8, P. A. Munchs hus

Middle English Abbreviation in the Context of Literacy and Script

Abbreviations are one of the characteristic features of written communication today, ranging from official acronyms like NATO or EU, which are concise and precise at the same time, to ones used in new media YOLO or OMG to save precious time, when typing on WhatsApp, or space, when trying to fit what you have to say within the twitter character limit. Yet abbreviation is anything but new. They were much needed before printing to save precious parchment or time, when writing from dictation. Some abbreviations used today are of medieval origin: two especially common ones are & and etc; others include cf., et al., e.g., ibid. and viz.

This lecture examines abbreviation in the early Middle English period: 1150-1350 with a special focus on the importance of script. The period is of interest as it was a formative one for the writing systems of English. The linguistic situation in England changed dramatically after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced a new ruling class and relegated English to a tertiary role after Latin and Anglo-Norman French. The writing system of English underwent a great deal of innovation and experimentation with new spelling systems introduced by Anglo-Norman scribes and the emergence of a new native cursive script: Anglicana.

The data comes from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME), a corpus of ca. 650,000 words divided into scribal samples of localised Middle English. The methodology is based on corpus linguistics, statistical analysis and historical dialectology."

About the lecturer

Dr Alpo Honkapohja is currently associated with the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh where he is working on a postdoctoral project entitled "A Corpus Approach to Manuscript Abbreviations". The project, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, studies scribal, regional, and chronological variation in the use of abbreviations.

Organizer

The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages: Jacob Thaisen
Dr Alpo Honkapohja, University of Edinburgh Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics

Integrate "close reading" and "distant reading": examples from Literature and History

Based on projects developed in recent years, at the NOVA University of Lisbon, on literary landscapes and urban history, using digital tools, namely geographic information systems, Daniel Alves will discuss the concepts of "close reading" and "distant reading".

Time and place: Apr. 9, 2019 2:00 PM–4:00 PM, PAM 11

Retailing and services in Lisbon according to literary sources

Traditionally, these two approaches, both to historical sources and to literary analysis, have been in separate, sometimes even conflicting, fields. Does it have to be this way? Can digital humanities be an alternative path that establishes the bridge between these two approaches? We may, and perhaps we should, combine these two levels of analysis into a more integrated methodology that also draws on interdisciplinary and collaborative work.

Daniel Alves is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences and researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, both at NOVA, New University of Lisbon. He holds a Master's in History of the 19th Century (2001) and a PhD in Contemporary Economic and Social History (2010). His areas of interest are Economic and Social History, Urban History, History of Revolutions and Digital Humanities. He has published books as well as articles in national and international scientific journals, especially in Economic and Social History and Historical GIS. He recently was a guest editor on the special issue "Digital Methods and Tools for Historical Research" of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing and the special issue "The History of Retailing on the Iberian Peninsula" of the journal History of Retailing and Consumption. He was a Member of the Core Committee of the Working Group 1 (Space and Time) at the Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH), between 2011 and 2015, and member of the Executive Committee of the European Association for Digital Humanities (2016-2017). He collaborates frequently in research projects that use databases and geographic information systems in historical research. He recently collaborated in the projects "Atlas, Historical Cartography" (http://atlas.fcsh.unl.pt/) and "Atlas of Literary Landscapes of Continental Portugal" (http://litescape.ielt.fcsh.unl.pt/). He is currently developing studies on the History of Lisbon and its retail trade at the end of the 19th century using GIS.

Organizer

Diana Santos and ILOS

Dora Pejačević – The most important female composer of Croatian music history

Open lecture by Zdenka Weber, PhD, musicologist and diplomat.

Time and place: Apr. 5, 2019 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Møterom 389, P. A. Munchs hus

Dora Pejačević is considered one of the major Croatian composers, and certainly the most important female composer. She left a considerable catalogue of 58 opuses (106 compositions), mostly in late-Romantic style, including songs, piano works, chamber music, and several compositions for large orchestra, arguably her best pieces. Her Symphony in F-sharp minor is considered to be the first Croatian modern symphony. Most of her music is yet to be published.

Dora Pejačević (10 September 1885 – 5 March 1923, in old documents also Pejacsevich) was born in Budapest, a daughter of Croatian ban, Hungarian-Croatian Count Teodor Pejačević and Hungarian Baroness Lilla Vay de Vaya, herself a fine pianist. Dora began to compose when she was 12. As a child of a nobleman she did not visit public schools so she studied music privately in Zagreb, Dresden and Munich and received lessons in instrumentation (from Dragutin Kaiser and Walter Courvoisier), composition from Percy Sherwood, and violin lessons from Henri Petri in Munich.

About Zdenka Weber, PhD: Zdenka Weber (Varaždin, June 17th 1950) is Croatian musicologist, music publicist, diplomat, lecturer and pedagogue. She has worked at the Academy of Music in Zagreb, the Berlin German Opera (Deutsche Oper Berlin) and has served as a diplomat at the Croatian Embassies in Berlin and Vienna for 19 years. She has thought music history at the Zagreb Academy of Music, Department of Pedagogy at the Osijek University, Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin and has been guest lecturer at the universities in Łódz, Poland, and Pamplona, Spain. Zdenka Weber has also worked at the State Institute for Music Research at Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin.

Zdenka Weber published three musicological books and more then 3500 articles, music critics as well as musicological articles in Croatia and abroad and has received important Croatian, French, Austrian and German awards for her work.

Organizer

The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

Carlo Caruso (University of Siena), Letters from the front: the Italian of ordinary people

Time and place: Mar. 29, 2019 11:00 AM–12:30 PM, Seminarrom 360, P.A. Munchs hus

It is estimated that approximately four billion letters were exchanged between soldiers and their families and friends during the Great War on the North-Eastern Italian front (1915-1918). Part of this correspondence consisted of letters by Italian prisoners of war which had been subjected to Austrian censorship. A significant portion of this corpus, produced by correspondents from all walks of life, was examined by a wartime Austrian censor who was to become a leading scholar in Romance studies – Leo Spitzer (Vienna, 1886 – Forte dei Marmi, 1960). In the works he published on the subject, Spitzer offered a vivid recollection of the circumstances that had led him to analyse that extensive material, where he was able to find evidence of the human being’s inventive approach to language and expression.

Carlo Caruso is Professor of Italian Literature and Philology at the University of Siena (Italy). He is the author of Adonis: The Myth of the Dying God in the Italian Renaissance (2013), the editor of The Life of Texts: Evidence in Textual Production, Transmission and Reception (2018), and the co-editor of Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300–1600 (2009) and La filologia in Italia nel Rinascimento (2018). He has also published critical editions of Paolo Rolli, Libretti per musica (1993); Paolo Giovio, Ritratti (1999); and Diomede Borghese, Orazioni accademiche (2009).

The lecture "Lettere dal fronte: l'italiano della gente comune" will be held in Italian and will start at 11 am. It will be followed by a lunch for the students of Italian at ILOS (12:30). Anyone who is interested is welcome to attend the event.

Organizer

The department of literature, area studies and European languages

Carlo Caruso (University of Siena), Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499): Some New Light from the Earliest Reception?

Time and place: Mar. 28, 2019 4:15 PM, Undervisningsrom 2, Georg Sverdrups hus

Often dubbed as the most famous book of the Italian Renaissance, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (‘The Strife of Love in a Dream’) is a magnificent folio volume published in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1499. It is a work that retains a somewhat mysterious allure. Its author's traits remain in many respects elusive; the allegorical romance narrated in the text is intermixed with encyclopaedic and often abstruse learning; the lavish apparatus of illustrations – 174 woodcuts with inscriptions in various languages, including hieroglyphics – is the superb work of masters whose identity is to this day unknown. Finally, and most importantly, the language – a mixture of Italian vernacular, Latin, and Greek – appears to be a unicum in Renaissance literature. The lecture will examine the work’s earliest reception in an attempt to understand its meaning and significance for contemporary readers.

The lecture will be held in English and is hosted by the research group Textual Traditions and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Anyone interested is welcome to attend and join for coffee and refreshments at 4 pm. The lecture will start at 16:15.

Organizer

Textual Traditions and Communities in Early Modern Europe

2018

Religion, Nationalism, Violence: Middle Volga and North Caucasus in Comparative Perspective

Time and place: Nov. 23, 2018 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Møterom 389, P. A. Munchs hus

Renat Shaykhutdinov obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science at Texas A&M University. His teaching and research interests include comparative and international politics, ethnic politics, and the politics of the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. He has published in numerous academic outlets, including Journal of Peace Research, Politics and Religion, Problems of Post-Communism, Religion, State and Society, Central Asian Survey, European Journal of Economic and Political Studies, and Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. Renat Shaykhutdinov is a native of Kazan in the Middle Volga Region. He currently teaches at the Dept. of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University.

Organizer

Pål Kolstø, Marthe Handå Myhre and ILOS

Rūs or Rus? Or What the Arab Geographers Can Deliver on Slavic Historical Phonology.

Guest lecture by Andriy Danylenko, professor of Russian and Slavic linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Pace University (New York) and Research Associate at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Time and place: Nov. 12, 2018 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, Seminarrom 10, P. A. Munchs hus

The paper looks into a system of ethnic, personal and place names of early Slavs as rendered in the works of the Islamic descriptive school of geography, e.g., Bīrūni (973–1048), “Hudūd al-‘Ālam” (982), Abu Bakr al-Zuhrī (1130–1150), and earlier Al-Mas‘ūdi (893–956), and especially Al-Idrīsī (1100–1165). In addition to a survey of Islamic attestations of Slavic ethnic, personal, and place names, the author looks into the system of Arabic script and its capability to reflect sound changes taking place in Common Slavic and its historical dialects. A special emphasis is placed on the names of Rus’, Varangians, Vepsians, and Kyiv. The author offers recommendations for the use of the relevant material by the historians of Slavic as well as early Islamic-Slavic contacts.

Linguistic Russification in Russian Ukraine: Languages, Imperial Models, and Policies.

Time and place: Nov. 9, 2018 1:15 PM–3:00 PM, Seminarrom 12, P. A. Munchs hus

The paper deals with the vagaries of linguistic russification among the Ukrainians from the mid-seventeenth century to 1914. The author explores the major stages in the implementation of the policies of russification in Russian Ukraine, starting with first bans on books printed in Church Slavonic of the Ukrainian recension via the decrees and edicts issued by Peter I together with the Holy Synod to the punitive measures taken by the tsarist regime against new literary Ukrainian in the second half of the nineteenth century. The author distinguishes three languages (Church Slavonic of the Ukrainian recension, Ruthenian, and new literary Ukrainian) which were consecutively objects of hostile language management of the tsarist administration. Based on the three languages and the system of imperial models, a new periodization of linguistic russification and denationalization is substantiated.

Nicola Watson (Open University) on writer's houses

“Household effects in the writer’s house museum: Johnson’s coffee-pot and Twain’s effigy”

Time and place: Oct. 17, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus: Seminarrom 6

Professor Nicola Watson will be giving a talk based on her current project The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums (forthcoming OUP). She will be exploring how a miscellany of domestic objects have been made to speak of the writer’s life and work within the writer’s house museum. She will be discussing in particular the nature and function of inscription and caption at work in the Dr Johnson Museum in London, the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense, the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove, Dublin, and the Mikail Bulgakov Museum in Kiev, before considering ways in which the author represented in statue or effigy has served to caption the writer’s house in its entirety at Dr Johnson’s Birthplace, Mark Twain’s childhood home, and elsewhere.

Professor Nicola Watson holds a chair in English Literature at the Open University, UK, having previously held posts at Oxford, Harvard, Indiana and Northwestern. She is author of three monographs: Revolution and the Form of the British Novel (1993), England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy, with Michael Dobson (2002), and The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (2006). She is editor of two essay collections, the most recent being Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-century Culture (2009), and many essays and papers. She served as President of the British Association for Romantic Studies from 2011-2015, and founded and presently heads up a new pan-European group of museums and scholarly associations devoted to Romanticism, ERA (European Romanticisms in Association). She is presently Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded network Dreaming Romantic Europe and curator of its virtual exhibition, RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition) http://euromanticism.org. She regularly works with literary museums and projects related to them, and is here as the guest of the research project TRAUM - Transforming Author Museums, http://traum.hisf.no, with whom she has been working since the project’s inception.

Organizer

Johan Schimanski
TRAUM - Transforming Author Museums

Erratic bodies, transitional borders, and recent migration in Europe: Representation and identity negotiations in public discourse, literature, and the arts

Time and place: Sep. 27, 2018 8:00 AM–Sep. 28, 2018 5:00 PM, Hanna Ryggen room, Lucy Smiths hus

The 2015–2016 phenomenon labeled the “migrant crisis” and the “refugee crisis” generated intense discussions in the public spheres of various European societies, as well as in their private spheres. An important part of these discussions was identity negotiations: who are “we” and who are “they”? What do we want our societies and public spaces to be like? What are our values? Migration has caused visible changes in public spaces, and in the ways that receiving and transit countries see themselves, their past and future, and neighboring countries.

A Woman's place in "the House"

A seminar to mark the centenary of “Votes for Women”, the introduction of a female franchise in the UK through the Representation of the People Act of 1918

Time and place: Sep. 18, 2018 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Auditorium 6, Eilert Sundts hus

Caroline Flint is a British Labour Party politician, who has represented the constituency of Don Valley since 1997. During Labour’s last tenure in government, she served as the Minister for Public Health (2005-07), the Minister for Employment (2007-08), the Minister for Housing and Planning in 2008, and the Minister for Europe (2008-09). In Labour’s Shadow Cabinet from 2010 to 2015 she was Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (2010-2011), and for Energy and Climate Change (2011-15).

The seminar is organised by ILOS in cooperation with British Politics Society, Norway

Annalisa Cipollone (Durham University): Exiled Authors, Exiled Texts: Dante's Divine Comedy

The lecture will be delivered in English and is open to anyone who might be interested.

Time and place: Apr. 27, 2018 11:00 AM, Seminarrom 360, P.A. Munchs hus

Exile exercised a perceivable influence over Dante’s intellectual production, with the image of the ‘undeserving exile’ coming afore in patent or subtle ways throughout his oeuvre. Dante’s exile inspired the choice of the subject matter for the Divine Comedy, influenced and shaped his political vision, and offered the imagination of readers a memorable image of the solitary and disdainful poet. Yet did exile exercise any perceivable influence over the transmission and reception of the poem's text as well? This lecture will explore how some assumptions made about the text of Dante's Comedy have recently been put to the test, writing a new and unfinished chapter in the history of textual criticism. The lecture will be delivered in English and is open to anyone who might be interested.

Annalisa Cipollone teaches Italian Literature at Durham University (UK). Her research has mainly focused on medieval poets, Dante and Petrarch. She has recently curated the exhibition and published the book Dante. Hell Heaven and Hope: A Journey through Life and the Afterlife with Dante (2017).

Social movements in the Carnation revolution (Portugal, 1974-1976)

An extra lecture in Portuguese on the social movements in Portugal after the Carnation revolution of 25 April 1974, by Professor Luísa Tiago de Oliveira from ISCTE-IUL.

Time and place: Apr. 26, 2018 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, PAM 3

Some of what she mentions in this lecture can also be read in:

Oliveira, Luísa Tiago de. 2005. "Schools 'without walls' during the Portuguese Revolution: the Student Civic Service (1974-77)", Portuguese Journal of Social Science 4, 3: 145 - 168. DOI: 10.1386/pjss.4.3.145/1

Luísa Tiago de Oliveira teaches Contemporary History and Oral History at ISCTE (Institituto de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa - Lisbon University Institute), one of the main poles of research in Social Sciences in Portugal. She has worked with memory and contemporary voices and testimonies since she wrote her PhD on "The Student Civic Service (1974-1977). Students and People in the Revolution".

This lecture is funded by ILOS and has also received support from Camões - Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua and the Portuguese Embassy in Oslo:

Organizer

Diana Santos, João Marques Lopes and ILOS

Annalisa Cipollone (Durham University): The personages of Dantes Divine Comedy

The lecture will be delivered in Italian and is specifically designed for students at ILOS: "I personaggi di Dante dentro e fuori la Commedia".

Time and place: Apr. 26, 2018 12:15 PM, Seminarrom 360, P.A. Munchs hus

One of the many outstanding features of Dante's Divine Comedy is the wealth and variety of its characters. Whether they be historical, literary or fictional, they are all portrayed with magisterial craftsmanship, in such a way as to make them real people, ready to jump out of the Comedy and receive new life as protagonists of endless rewritings. This is the fate of, to name but a few, Ulysses, Francesca da Rimini, Count Ugolino, Gianni Schicchi and Dante himself. This talk will explore the vitality of the ‘shades’ of Dante’s Comedy and how they gained new physicality beyond the reach of the author’s quill.

The historical and political importance of the Carnation Revolution (25 April 1974) in Portugal

Luísa Tiago de Oliveira from ISCTE - Lisbon University Institute will be talking about the genesis and the consequences of the 25th of April 1974 in Portugal for European, African and global history. (Her talk is available here)

Time and place: Apr. 25, 2018 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, PAM 10

The Carnation Revolution, as it came to be called in Portugal and abroad, put an end to the longest dictatorship in Europe, and brought the end of longest colonial imperial in the world, and the end of the liberation war(s) in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique.

It was also renowned and romanticized by an absence of violence and retaliation.

However, the future of all the countries involved was fraught with difficulties, not least due to other powers in power in the world at large: the Cold war and its hot consequences for Africa, the geopolitical constellation in Oceania and the Far East, and the rise of the European Community (now Union). Luisa Tiago de Oliveira will attempt to give a glimpse of the half a million Portuguese from Africa that Portugal had to integrate in 1975.

This lecture will demonstrate the importance of also hearing the voices and the History from the lusophone (i.e., Portuguese-speaking world) to understand the world of today.

The talk will be given in English. Everyone is welcome!

This lecture has also received support from Camões - Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua and the Portuguese Embassy in Oslo.

Organizer

Diana Santos, João Marques Lopes and ILOS

Borealism and other Imagologies: from South to North

“Found in Translation: Southern Europe/Norden” is a research group at ILOS-UiO dealing with topics on how Northern/Southern cultural and national identities within Europe are negotiated, translated and shaped across different communities, shared spaces and channels.

Time and place: Apr. 24, 2018 10:00 AM–12:30 PM, P.A. Munchs Sem 8

This seminar will be focused on Southern/Northern imagological aspects, from borealism as a way to define the North as a discursive space to an analysis of the epistemologies of the South.

Programme

Sylvain Briens (Université Paris-Sorbonne): "Borealism": Since antiquity the North has fascinated historians, geographers, philosophers and Southern writers, who have projected various forms of discourse onto it, from scientific observations or social and political considerations to dreams, fears and fantasies. This projection can be referred to as “borealism”, by analogy with the term “Orientalism”, as defined by Edward Saïd. Borealism describes the North as a discursive space, produced by and for the South. Unlike orientalism, which is exclusively produced by Occidental discourse, borealism is also sometimes reproduced in Nordic expressions of self-identity.
Peter Stadius (University of Helsinki): "From inventing Southern Europe to epistemologies of the South": The imagology of the North is connected to the imagology of the South. Both directions have their image traditions that also feed each other and interlink in many ways. The promotion of the North during the Enlightenment also meant an invention of ‘the South’, leading up to ‘the southern question’ in many European countries. Today a central strand in the critical academic research on globalization and modernity connects to what is denominated as ‘Southern epistemologies’. The talk will dwell into the meanings given to and instrumental functions of the adjectives ‘southern’ and ‘northern’ in a longue durée historic perspective.
Open conversation with our guest speakers.

Organizer

Alvaro Llosa Sanz and Elizaveta Khachaturyan

Conversation with film director Milcho Manchevski

An open conversation with a renowned film director, writer, photographer and artist.

Time and place: Mar. 9, 2018 4:00 PM–6:00 PM, Sophus Bugges hus

The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS) hosts New York-based Macedonian-born film director, writer, photographer and artist Milcho Manchevski.

Our Q&A-style conversation, open to audience participation, will take place on Friday, March 9 at 16:00 at Sophus Bugges hus (Seminar room 4) in English.

One of the topics to be discussed:

“Every piece of art has to contain the truth. But, not the truth of what happened. It needs to contain the truth of how things are — and the difference between what happened and how things are is what is important. Is it the events (and by extension the facts) of what happened, or is it the emotional and conceptual underpinning and thus understanding of how things are?” — Milcho Manchevski, from Truth and Fiction: Notes on (Exceptional) Faith in Art

Free entrance, all are welcome!

Note: We are cooperating with Cinemateket i Oslo to screen Before the Rain on Wednesday, March 7 at 18:00. The director will offer a brief introduction to his film before the screening.

About the guest

"Milcho Manchevski's Academy-award nominated film Before the Rain (1994) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, along with 30 other awards. The New York Times included it on its 1,000 Best Films Ever Made list. He has directed four other features: Bikini Moon (2017), Mothers (2010), Shadows (2007) and Dust (2001), an episode of HBO's The Wire, and 50 short forms." — see full bio at IMDb

Organizer

Tanya Zaharchenko

Conversation with writer Yuri Andrukhovych

A moderated discussion open to audience participation, with topics ranging from nationhood and war to literature and language — the whole Ukrainian experience, from one public intellectual's point of view. Followed by a literary performance.

Time and place: Feb. 21, 2018 4:30 PM–7:30 PM, Sophus Bugges hus, Seminarrom 1

The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS) hosts renowned Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych.

Wednesday, 21 February 2018

16:30, Sophus Bugges hus, Seminarrom 1

open discussion about Ukraine (in English)
literary performance (in Ukrainian)

The evening is free and open to all. Moderated by:

Tanya Zaharchenko (University of Oslo)
Arve Hansen (University of Tromsø)

About the guest

One of Ukraine's top contemporary writers, Yuri Andrukhovych has been awarded numerous national and international prizes for his novels and activity as a public intellectual. These include the Herder Prize (2001), the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize (2005), the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for European Understanding (2006), the Angelus Prize (2006), the Hannah Arendt Prize (2014), and the Goethe Medal (2016).

Andrukhovych's writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is often credited with renewing the Ukrainian literary scene in the 1980s by co-establishing the renowned Bu-Ba-Bu — the first postmodern literary group in Ukraine. Today he remains vocal in the nation's active socio-cultural arena.

Organizer

Tanya Zaharchenko

Video recording of the discussion

2017

The Fiction of the Rise of Fictionality

Guest lecture by Prof. Dr. Monika Fludernik (Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg) on her recent article on fictionality in the eighteenth century and earlier. All are welcome!

Time and place: May 26, 2017 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Seminar room 7, the P.A. Munch building

Catherine Gallagher's arguments for a rise of fictionality in the eighteenth century, reinventing the rise of the novel as a rise in fictionality, provides a starting point for the article. Gallagher's thesis will be compared to other proposals about the rise of fictionality at earlier (Rössler, Haug, Nelson) and later (Paige) points in time. The article provides a survey of recent work on fiction(ality) and then discusses the proposals by Gallagher, Paige and Françoise Lavocat with an emphasis on the transhistorical and transcultural definition of fictionality.

It will be argued that Gallagher's theses reconfigure Ian Watt's rise of the novel and that the rise of fictionality is actually more the rise of a particular kind of novel protagonist in a novel setting. Secondly, it will be maintained that the novel is not tantamount to fictionality but that fictionality existed prior to the eighteenth century. This will lead to an exploration concerning definitions of fictionality and the criteria for determining its presence or absence at particular points in time. Taking Lavocat's definition of fictionality as its template, the article will then present an argument for the invention of factuality in the eighteenth century as a response to the alleged invention of fictionality during that period.

Organizer

Department of Literature, Area studies and European languages

Guest lecture - The Discourse of the UK Referendum: Evidence from Twitter

Jonathan Charteris-Black is Professor of Linguistics at the University of the West of England, UK. His research interests are metaphor, rhetoric and political discourse.

Time and place: May 15, 2017 11:00 AM–12:30 PM, P. A. Munchs hus, møterom 489

About the lecture

One week before the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union 41 year old Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally slain in a politically motivated murder. A report of twitter postings in the month following her death showed that there were over 53,000 tweets that celebrated her murder from at least 25,000 individuals. Some postings described Mrs Cox as a "traitor" and even referred to her killer as a "hero" and "patriot". Other postings described the language used in the debate as ‘vitriolic’ and contributed to the polarisation of the country into ‘them’ and ‘us’ positions. Direct instances of ‘hate speech’ co-existed with other instances of forceful language – both metaphoric and literal – indicated a set of values to which the poster was strongly committed.

I argue that the Twitter social media campaign contributed to the polarisation of the country in the week leading up to the referendum. I demonstrate how clusters of high frequency and semantically related words enable me to identify both keywords and, subsequently, frames. Frames include both literal and metaphorical uses of words and they provide valuable insight into the cognition of both ‘sides’ in the referendum ‘battle’. I examine Twitter postings for the hashtags ‘Brexit’, ’VoteLeave’ and ‘VoteRemain’ in the one-week period between the slaying of Jo Cox and the date of the referendum to address the following research questions:

What keywords were employed on Twitter on the topic of the UK referendum?
What metaphors were employed on Twitter on the topic of the UK referendum?
What evidence do keywords and metaphors provide of the underlying cognitive frames that characterised the UK Referendum?
Was there any difference in how keywords, metaphors and frames were used by supporters of Brexit and Remain, for example in how Leave supporters represent Remain supporters and in how Remain Supporters represent Leave supporters?

Taken together addressing these questions enables an initial description of the Discourse of the UK Referendum as evidenced through Twitter.

Where possible findings will be classified using the ideological square as a means of demonstrating how frames emerge from lexical choices. In this approach there are four possible categories of lexical use according to two scales: one for intensity/ hyperbole and the other for euphemism. The positioning of clusters of words on these scales allowed me to compare ‘us’ and ‘them’ representations.

Early analysis suggests three key themes

Patriotism, & a Heroic National History
Trust & Betrayal
Freedom and Slavery

About the guest lecturer

Jonathan Charteris-Black is Professor of Linguistics at the University of the West of England, UK. His research interests are metaphor, rhetoric and political discourse. He is the author of Fire Metaphors: discourses of awe and authority (Bloomsbury, 2017); Analysing Political Speeches: Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014); Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor (Palgrave-MacMillan, 1st edition 2005, 2nd edition, 2011); Gender and the Language of Illness (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010); The Communication of Leadership: The Design of Leadership Style (Routledge, 2007); Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2004) as well as numerous other articles and book chapters.

Organizer

Discourses of the Nation and the National
Jo Cox: people tweeted celebration murder

2016

The Iron Lady: the Rise and Fall of Margaret Thatcher

Time and place: Nov. 29, 2016 11:15 AM–1:00 PM, Auditorium 2, Eilert Sundts hus

Dr. Robert Saunders (photo from Queen Mary University of London )

Robert Saunders is a Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary, the University of London.

He specialises in the history of democratic thought in Britain, the political and intellectual history of Thatcherism, and the influence of Europe and America on British political culture.

Organizer

Atle Wold and Juan Christian Pellicer, ILOS

Corpus studies of noun modifiers in early Germanic

By Kristin Bech, ILOS

Time and place: Nov. 24, 2016 4:15 PM–5:15 PM, PAM 389

This (ca. 50-minute) talk is in two parts. First it reports on a collaborative project in which we consider noun phrase modifiers in the early Germanic languages Old English, Old Icelandic, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Gothic. Our starting point is the striking divergence in the literature on canonical order. For early Germanic languages in general, modifier-noun is reported as the default order, while for Old Norse, noun-modifier is allegedly the neutral order. This is unexpected given their common ancestry and similarities in current varieties. We have carried out corpus studies to compare the languages, and find that the only outlier is Gothic.

Since our joint project only considered Old Icelandic, I wanted to find out whether Old Norwegian behaves in the same way as Old Icelandic, so I queried the Menotec corpus located in INESS. The second part of the talk thus focuses on this work (still in early stages), and includes a demonstration of some of the queries used. In general, the talk shows that testing old claims against new corpora might be a good idea.

Organizer

Corpus Linguistics Group

Don't Blame It on the Oil (Entirely): The Origins of Venezuela's Economic Collapse.

Department of Literature, Area Studies and European languages welcomes to a lecture on Venezuela and its economic and political situation.

Time and place: Nov. 21, 2016 12:30 PM–2:00 PM, Seminarrom 360 P.A. Munchs Hus

Professor Javier Corrales, Amherst College will hold a lecture entitled: Don't Blame It on the Oil (Entirely): The Origins of Venezuela's Economic Collapse. With comments from Leiv Marsteintredet, University of Oslo

Corrales is Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. He is the author of "Dragon in the Tropics. Venezuela and the legacy of Hugo Chávez" with Michael Penfold and "Presidents without parties. The politics of economic reforms in Argentina and Venezuela in the 1990s", among other titles. Corrales has written extensively on Venezuela before, under and after Chávez, and on topics such as economic reforms, presidential reelection, constitutional reforms, and politics of sexuality in Latin America, in addition to democracy and the internet. He is a member of the editorial board and a regular contributor to Americas Quarterly, and an active contributor in the US and international media on Latin American politics.

Italian migration literature

Time and place: Nov. 8, 2016 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, Seminarrom 6, P.A. Munchs hus

Silvia Camilotti (PhD) has been a post-doctoral fellow at Bologna University. Her research focuses on Italian migration literature. She taught contemporary Italian literature at the same university and she was research fellow at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where she continues collaborating with the Archive on Migrant Women Writers: with regard to this, she is responsible for teaching the MOOC course on Italian migration literature that was offered for the first time in spring 2016.

She had other work experiences at Ca'Foscari University (Sep 2004-Dec 2007: MA in Migration and Social Transformations); at the Department for Social Policies of the province of Udine (July-Dec 2005); she organized the training courses within the project WEST (Women East Smuggling Trafficking), Padua (March-Dec 2004).

Organizer

ILOS - Institutt for litteratur, områdestudier og europeiske språk

Guest lecture - “Cooking, Feeding, and Nurturing the Nation”: Flagging Nationalism through Food Discourses

Andreja Vezovnik, PhD, is an assistant professor and researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Social Sciences.

The lecture is open to all.

Time and place: Nov. 1, 2016 10:00 AM–11:00 AM, P. A. Munchs hus, møterom 489

About the lecture

The lecture focuses on how apparently “banal” media texts, such as food advertisements, helped construct national identity during the transition from communism to post-communism in Yugoslavia. A multimodal analysis of food advertisements published in the Slovenian lifestyle magazine Naša žena throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are analyzed in order to shed light on how post-communist identity rediscovered retrograde traditionalism and pre-modern Christian values on the one hand and concepts of westernization, globalization, and Europeanization on the other.

About the guest lecturer

Andreja Vezovnik, PhD, is an assistant professor and researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on theoretical and empirical aspects of political and media discourses in Yugoslavia during and after communism. She especially focuses on discourses related to migration, national identity construction, and food consumption. She is currently a visiting researcher at UiO-ILOS, where she is collaborating in the project Discourses of the Nation and the National.

Organizer

Discourses of the Nation and the National

Guest lecture - Yugoslavia after Yugoslavia: Graffiti about Yugoslavia in the Post-Yugoslav Urbanscape

Mitja Velikonja is professor of cultural studies and head of the Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Social Sciences in Slovenia.

Time and place: Nov. 14, 2016 2:30 PM–4:00 PM, P. A. Munchs hus, møterom 252

About the lecture

Twenty-five years after the bloody collapse of socialist Yugoslavia, the urban walls in its successor states are still filled with pro- and anti-Yugoslav graffiti and street art. Based on my longitudinal research and on semiological (quantitative and qualitative) methodological approaches, the main questions of this presentation are how, where, and why Yugoslavia, its socialism, its anti-fascist roots, and its leaders are (de)constructed, praised, and condemned in this specific urban subculture. At the level of denotation, graffiti and street art can be divided into different types of pro-Yugoslav and anti-Yugoslav sentiment, often directly opposed in graffiti battles. At the level of connotation, three major ideological antagonisms appear: socialist federalism versus nationalism, Tito versus his opponents, and antifascism versus fascism. Before presenting the final findings of the research, expressive strategies of such urban production are analysed, such as provocation and criticism, affirmation and continuity, marking territory, constant antagonisation, and semiotic guerrilla warfare.

About the guest lecturer

Mitja Velikonja is a professor of cultural studies and the head of the Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Social Sciences in Slovenia. His main areas of research include central European and Balkan political ideologies, subcultures, and urban cultures, collective memory, and post-socialist nostalgia. His most recent volumes in English are Rock’n’Retro: New Yugoslavism in Contemporary Slovenian Music (Ljubljana, 2013), Titostalgia: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz (Ljubljana, 2008; http://mediawatch.mirovni-institut.si/eng/mw20.html), Eurosis: A Critique of the New Eurocentrism (Ljubljana, 2005; http://mediawatch.mirovni-institut.si/eng/mw17.htm), and Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina (College Station, 2003). He is the coauthor of the book Nebeska Jugoslavija: interakcije političkih mitologija i pop-kulture (Celestial Yugoslavia: Interaction of Political Mythologies and Popular Culture; Belgrade, 2012) and the coeditor of the book Post-Yugoslavia: New Cultural and Political Perspectives (Houndmills, 2014). He has received four Slovenian awards and one international award for his achievements. He was a full-time visiting professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (2002 and 2003), at Columbia University in New York (2009 and 2014), and at the University of Rijeka (2015), and was a Fulbright visiting researcher at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania (2004/2005) and a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar (2012).

Organizer

Discourses of the Nation and the National

Fact and Fiction A Comparatist Approach

By Françoise Lavocat (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3). Open for all.

Time and place: Oct. 17, 2016 3:15 PM, Meeting room "Abels utsikt", Nils Henrik Abels hus (top floor)

The talk’s proposal consists in reassessing the issue of the difference between fact and fiction in a diachronic, comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. It takes into account a long period of time (mainly from the seventeenth century to nowadays), relying not only on literary studies but also on law and cognitive sciences.

A comparative perspective, as understood here, contrasts artefacts pertaining to different times, cultural eras (in particular the Far East and the West) and media. Thanks to these multiple dimensions, fiction is presented as a trans-historical, transcultural and trans-medial phenomenon.

Lavocat characterizes fiction as a possible world, which has its own ontology, focusing on the relationship between the reader and the characters, paradoxes and “metalepses”: this rhetorical figure reinforces the border between fact and fiction, while offering the illusion to cross it.

Organizer

Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

Northern Ireland 10 years after the St. Andrews Agreement of 2006

Talks by Lord Hain of Neath (British Labour Party) and Dr. Peter McLoughlin (Lecturer at Queens University Belfast)

Time and place: Sep. 30, 2016 3:00 PM–5:30 PM, Stort møterom, Georg Sverdrups hus

Lord Hain of Neath is a British Labour Party politician, who was the MP for Neath between 1991 and 2015, and served in the Cabinets of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Among a number of Cabinet posts, he was Secretary of State of Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007. After standing down as an MP at the 2015 general election, he was created a life peer as Baron Hain, of Neath in the County of West Glamorgan. The title of his talk will be:

The St. Andrews Agreement: lessons for conflict resolution.

Dr. Peter McLoughlin is a Lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast. His main research interests are on Northern Ireland and other divided societies, and he has contributed widely to academic and public debates on the peace process and on contemporary political processes in Northern Ireland. The title of his talk will be:

The State of Northern Ireland today

The seminar is organised by ILOS in cooperation with British Politics Society, Norway

Is language a boundary? The case of Kharkiv, Ukraine

Join us to explore whether – and in what ways – languages form or break boundaries in Ukraine today. Free admission.

Time and place: Sep. 26, 2016 6:30 PM–8:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Nedjma

Monument to Taras Shevchenko in Kharkiv. Photo: Patrick Breslin. Illustration: Anders Lien.

What is it like to speak Ukrainian in east Ukraine today? What is it like to speak Russian? What if you wanted to write, publish and perform in either one of those languages in the context of the ongoing war? Join us for a frank discussion with four prolific writers from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s major cultural hub and second-largest city. Their personal experience communicating or performing in Ukrainian or Russian, before the war and now, is the focus of the evening.

This is an open debate with translation into English; the audience is very welcome to participate.

Panelists

Oleh Kotsarev, Andrei Krasniaschikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Serhiy Zhadan
Moderated by Dr. Tanya Zaharchenko (UiO), author of Where Currents Meet: Frontiers in Post-Soviet Fiction of Kharkiv, Ukraine

The following day, September 27, these writers will hold literary readings over free coffee at the Eldorado bookstore (17:30). Note: these readings come without translation.

Organizer

Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

Contact

Dr. Tanya Zaharchenko

Video recording

Are Borders Fictions? Borders in Literature and Film. A Film Showing and a Conversation.

How do novels and films present borders in this age of global contact and migration? Are borders ever real, are they in fact fictions? Where is the border between reality and fiction when migrants and others cross borders? How do we represent migrant experience in an ethical way? Free entrance.

Time and place: Sep. 26, 2016 4:30 PM–6:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Nedjma

We have invited a film-maker and researcher, along with three literary scholars working with borders, fiction and migration, to discuss borders in literature and film.

We begin by showing the film The Color of the Sea: A Filmic Border Experience in Ceuta, directed by Keina Espiñeira within the framework of a major EU research project on borders, EUBORDERSCAPES.

The Color of the Sea is an extended version of the film We all love the Seashore, which has been nominated for the 2016 European Short Film Awards. The Color of the Sea is a lyrical and reflective film made in collaboration with African migrants waiting to cross to Europe from the Spanish territory of Ceuta on the coast of Morocco. The film gives us an opportunity to ask questions about migrants and the role of fiction – not only in the media, but also in their own lives.

Our panel participants will discuss their reactions to the film together with the audience.

How do the choice of media and ways of telling a story affect how we show border-crossings?
How can film and literature negotiate the symbolic spaces of border-crossings?
How to we tell our own stories of border-crossing and how do we experience other people’s stories of border crossing?
Can autofictions in a postcolonial context in Scandinavia tell us something about migration in the Mediterranean today?
How do different techniques for crossing between reality and fiction affect the way in which we see acts of migration?
Do films and literary works provide an alternative to the media spectacle around border-crossing which we see today?
What kind of research is taking place on these borders today?

Keina Espiñeira (Spain) is a scholar and filmmaker. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork from a multidisciplinary approach. Borders have a pivotal role in her work.

Lill-Ann Körber (Oslo/Berlin) is a scholar of Scandinavian Studies at the Universities of Oslo and Bergen with a primary interest in the colonial history of the Nordic countries and their postcolonial relationships with Africa, the Caribbean, and the North Atlantic.

Karin Kukkonen (Oslo) is a scholar of comparative literature with a particular interest in the constant negotiation of the boundaries between literature and life, as stories captivate the imagination of their readers.

Johan Schimanski (Oslo) is scholar of comparative literature at the Universities of Oslo and of Eastern Finland, researching on borders in literature, Arctic literature and literary exhibitions.

Organizer

Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

Contact

Johan Schimanski

Posthumanism and the Posthuman: Competing Perspectives on the Human Condition

Time and place: Sep. 8, 2016 3:00 PM, Niels Henrik Abels hus, 12. floor

Seminar with Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University

Often used synonymously, the posthuman and posthumanism designate two very different orientations in an era of technological invention, climate change and competition for resources. Whereas one is related to transhumanism and an anthropocentric perspective, the other is closely connected to ecocriticism and the Anthropocene.

Drawing on the vivid imagery in Don DeLillo’s recent novel Zero K, the lecture will draw up some of the many differences between the two paradigms, which may not be resolved but can sharpen the debate on contemporary humanism.

Organizer

ILOS

Contact

Karin Kukkonen
Marit Grøtta

Transnational Culinary Discourse

Alexandra Grigorieva, Ph.D., Classics and Food History scholar, core research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

Time and place: Sep. 5, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PAM møterom 252

Diachronic development of national in transnational culinary discourse: case study of 'Russian salad' vs. 'Italian salad' from 19th to 21st century.

When we hear the word Italian salad, or Russian salad what do we generally surmise? Usually, that this is something we can typically eat in Italy, or Russia. However, food names are often much more complicated. It can be quite erroneous to take such national and even relatively less controversy-inducing geographic food names at their face value. Turkey doesn’t come from Turkey, nor does the same fowl - dinde in French - come from India, and Jerusalem artichoke has no claims on Jerusalem.

It becomes even more fraught with difficulty, if a dish of the same name is common to several nations that have a history together. In this case the national identity of falafel in the Middle East, or moussaka in the Balkans may be discussed ad nauseam, because people feel very strongly about their own heritage that informs their personal background and resent the slightest hint of what is in their eyes cultural appropriation.

Since the birth of the nationalism in the 19th century and its enthusiastic acceptance by the European society even such trivial things as food names have become a potential minefield. In my lecture, I propose to explore the evolution of geographical/national food words throughout European history, focusing especially on culinary nationalism. We will also look at its supposed by-products, to figure out how much actual ‘national’ is there. What is national about the Italian salad of greens, anchovies and salami promoted by the French haute cuisine in the post-World War I period? Or Russian salad, popular in Spain, that includes tuna (a fish unfamiliar to most Russians until the last few decades)? How does the national discourse influence our tastes and culinary perceptions?

Alexandra Grigorieva, Ph.D. is a core research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland. She is a Classics and Food History scholar with a particular interest in the history of food words. She has published books on food diversity (a UNESCO project, 2006-2011), wines of Bordeaux (2006-2010) and Burgundy (2010), she has also contributed to the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets (2015). She has been addressing issues of culinary nationalism, ethnicity and bigotry in some of her articles, such as Russian Food Words at Home and Abroad (2010), Naming Authenticity and Regional Italian Cuisine (2006).

She teaches courses on food in Latin literature, history of festival foods and their symbolism, food migration and so on. She is currently working on a diachronic digital database of food words in Latin and other European languages, including Finnish, and writing a book Foods and Food Words from Antiquity to Modern Times: a Gastronomic Thesaurus of Europe.

Organizer

Discourses of the Nation and the National

Symposium: Nation/Boundaries/Place: Reappraising the Global Sphere

A Symposium to be held at the University of Oslo

Sponsored by the Project – Discourses of the Nation and National

Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS)

Time: June 3, 2016 8:40 AM–1:00 PM

About the symposium

In the 1980s and 1990s, the swift decline of the national space as the basis for research in the humanities and the social sciences cleared the way for theories of globalization and globality, and for the subordination of the national.

In the subsequent years, however, we have seen the rise and rise of nationalisms of the right and populist movements of the left that are positioned to challenge the global turn and many associated ideas from postnationalism to glocality and postmodernism. Responses to the new nationalism in social theory have varied greatly: are they simply a backlash against the inevitable march of globalization or a response to an emerging crisis of the political itself?

We invite paper proposals that consider how recalling, reinventing or referencing the nation is challenging the contemporary discursive parameters of the global as structured by understandings of space and time and/or the practical institutional arrangements of globalization, economic interdependence, cultural convergence or global governance. Papers may discuss these issues theoretically or historically, analytically or normatively, from one of several disciplinary or cross-disciplinary viewpoints, and in relation to various realms of discourse, academic or popular – ranging from developments in specific academic fields to public debates in the social media, among politicians or as interpreted by the mass media. Papers may be proposed in relation to specific nations or across national borders.

Thursday 2 June

First Keynote Lecture: Rosario Forlenza (Columbia University, USA) “nation as a ‘home’: anthropological foundations and human needs”
Workshop 1: Civitas and Nation
- Steven Colatrella (Boston College, Parma extension; University of Maryland, University College, extension, Italy)
- “From Hannah Arendt to Malcolm X: Refugees Rights Republics”
- Ole Sneltvedt (University of Oslo, Norway)
- “Constructing Walls around the Social Construction of the Nation:
- Ancient Walls, the Common and Political Preconditions”
- Stefano Adamo (Banja Luka University, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
- “Monuments carved in film: Developing civic awareness through the memory of fallen anti-mafia activists”
Workshop 2: Nation and State Bojan Glavasevic (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
- “Razor wire and the European dream” Jenny Ponzo (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Germany)
- “Contemporary interpretations of Italian national unification: The nation as an anti-model” Boris Vukićević (University of Montenegro, Montenegro)
- “(Re)interpretation of History as an Instrument of Nation Building(s) in Montenegro” Clemens Büttner (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany)
- “Imperial expectations of strong nation-statehood: China’s military modernization strategy in the early 20th century”
Workshop 3: The Biological and Environmental Bases of Nation
- Werner Bigell (University of Tromsø, Norway) “The Environment in a National Frame: The Asymmetry between Global Environmental Problems and National Solutions and Imaginaries”
- Venla Oikkonen (University of Helsinki, Finland) “Ancient DNA and National Belonging”

Friday 3 June

Keynote lecture 2 Piers Stephens (University of Georgia, USA) “What’s Wrong with having your country invaded”?
Workshop 4: Nation Beyond Boundaries Sergio Sabbatini (University of Oslo)
- “Taking the boundaries with you: Italy and the National in the work of Luigi Di Ruscio, Italian migrant writer in Norway” Monica Miscali (University of Oslo, Norway)
- Emigration and nationalism: Italian emigration to Norway in the XIX century. Anna Bączkowska (Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland)
- “Polish diaspora in Norway – commonality and national identity: A discursive study of new media data” Elizaveta Khachaturyan

Organizer

Discourse of the Nation and the National

Guest lecture: When English Came to Norway

Professor Tim Machan will be speaking about the prominence of English in the Norwegian linguistic repertoire.

His speciality is mediaeval language and literature, and historical English linguistics; he has published extensively on a wide variety of topics.

Time and place: May 25, 2016 2:15 PM–3:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 1

About the lecture

In 2016 Norway has more English speakers than many individual US states. And these speakers use English for all manner of their own national activities, including business, education, and entertainment. The prominence of English in the Norwegian linguistic repertoire owes largely to developments of the past two centuries, but the interconnected history of Norwegian and English goes back much farther. Told by writers as diverse as Snorri Sturluson and Mary Wollstonecraft, this is a story crafted as much by linguistic attitudes as by linguistic forms, one in which the social meanings of Norwegian and English have taken shape in relation to one another. Having arrived in Norway, English necessarily became something quite different from what it was.

About Professor Tim Machan

Tim Machan’s teaching and research involve both medieval language and literature and historical English linguistics. Focusing on Norse, Latin, and French as well as English, his medieval scholarship has explored the interplay among a variety of theoretical and practical concerns, including the cultural nuances of physical documents, literary expression, linguistic conventions, multilingualism, contact between English and other traditions, and the historicity of critical approaches. In English linguistics, he has examined individual and institutional responses to language change, the shifting status of varieties within the English linguistic repertoire, and the persistence of language attitudes from the medieval period until the present. His current projects include the editing of a critical anthology Imagining Medieval English (Cambridge University Press) and researching and writing on both Standard English and the impact of Scandinavia on conceptions of the English Middle Ages.

Recent publications include

What Is English? And Why Should We Care? Oxford: OUP, 2013.
“Chaucer and the History of English,” Speculum 87 (2012): 147-75.
“Language Contact and Linguistic Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ed. T. Nevalainen and E.C. Traugott. Oxford: OUP, 2012. Pp. 518-27.

Organizer

Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden

Guest lecture: The Future of English

Professor Tim Machan will be speaking about the future of English in a globalized world.

His speciality is mediaeval language and literature, and historical English linguistics; he has published extensively on a wide variety of topics.

Time and place: May 24, 2016 10:15 AM–11:00 AM, P.A. Munchs hus, seminarrom 1

About the lecture

Today, of a global population of perhaps 7 billion people, 1.5 billion speak English, less than one-third of whom do so as first-language speakers. Not only could this situation not have been predicted when John Cabot led the first Anglophones out of England in 1497, but the linguistic predictions that have been made have been, for the most part, wildly inaccurate. Foreseeing the future of a language unprecedented in the range and number of its varieties, domains, and speakers will prove just as challenging.

About Professor Tim Machan

Recent publications include:

What Is English? And Why Should We Care? Oxford: OUP, 2013.
“Chaucer and the History of English,” Speculum 87 (2012): 147-75.
“Language Contact and Linguistic Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ed. T. Nevalainen and E.C. Traugott. Oxford: OUP, 2012. Pp. 518-27.

Organizer

Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden

Guest lecture: The Cold War history of paper

On 13 May Dr. Jiřina Šmejkalová (Charles University, Prague) will give a guest lecture on the role of paper in Cold War media cultures. The lecture is open to all.

Time and place: May 13, 2016 11:15 AM–12:30 PM, Seminarrom 5, P.A. Munchs hus

About the lecture

The lecture title is Paper Revolution: Paper as an Actor of Socio-Cultural Change (1945-1989): Potentials of New Materialism for Researching Cold War Command Culture.This lecture draws on the search for a strategy for developing the theoretical and methodological framework for a project which investigates practices, performances and ‘intra-actions’ through which paper operated as an actor in making and consequently breaking the command media cultures. It focuses on former Czechoslovakia during the period of 1945-1989.

The lecture will last for one hour. After the lecture there will be time for questions and discussion.

About Jiřina Šmejkalová

Jiřina Šmejkalová is a graduate of Slavonic Linguistics and Czech Literature from Charles University in Prague and holds a PhD in Sociology of Culture. Her research interests lie in the fields of cultural, media and gender studies with a specific focus on book production and reception in Cold War centrally controlled regimes. She is currently a senior staff member in the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, and an Honorary Fellow in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Lincoln, UK. She is the author of Cold War Books in the ‚Other‘ Europe and What Came After (Brill, 2011) and Kniha. K teorii and praxi knižní kultury [The Book: Theory and Practices of Book Culture] (2000).

"Your mum!" Swearing by mother in English, Spanish and Norwegian teenage talk

Kristine Hasund, Universitetet i Agder

Time and place: May 2, 2016 2:15 PM, PAM 489

Access to three audio-recorded corpora of spontaneous teenage conversation provided an opportunity to study the use of 'swearing by mother' in such diverse languages as English, Spanish and Norwegian (Drange, Hasund & Stenström 2014, Hasund, Drange & Stenström 2014). The corpora used were The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm), and Språkkontakt och Ungdomsspråk i Norden (UNO-Oslo). The study is quantitative as well as qualitative. The classification of the pragmatic functions of swearing is based on Ljung (2011), who makes a distinction between ritual insults, name-calling, expletive interjections and intensifiers, all of which are either sexually offending or refer to unattractive personal qualities.

It appeared that, while the Spanish swearing consisted almost exclusively of expressions to do with prostitution, the English and Norwegian swearing was much more varied. Swearing by mother turned out to be particularly common in Spanish, less common in English and extremely infrequent in Norwegian. The reason for the Spanish dominance seems to be that the Spanish expressions have undergone a long process of fixation and routinization. A classic example is puta madre ('whore mother), which has developed from a negative to a positive expression, as in es un tío de puta madre ('he's a fantastic guy'). An interesting finding is that swearing by mother was used by girls as well as boys in all age groups, which is in line with the gender levelling that is going on with respect to swearing in general.

References

Drange, E-M., Hasund, I.K. & Stenström, A-B. 2014. “’Your mum!’ Teenagers’ use of mother swearwords in English, Spanish and Norwegian”. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19:1, 29-59.

Hasund, I.K., Drange, E-M. & Stenström, A-B. 2014. "The pragmatic functions of swearing by mother in English, Spanish and Norwegian teenage talk”. In Rathje, M (ed.) Swearing in the Nordic countries. Copenhagen 6 December 2012. Sprognævnets konferenceserie 2. København: Dansk Sprognævn, 11-35.

Ljung, M. 2011. Swearing. A Cross-cultural Linguistic Study. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Organizer

Corpus LInguistics Group

The role of grammar instruction in second language learning and teaching.

Author: Alessandro Benati (Professor of Applied Linguistics and Second Language Studies and Director of CAROLE, University of Greenwich)

Time and place: Apr. 28, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, PAM Hus Sem, 5

Abstract

Does instruction make a difference? Is there an effective pedagogical intervention to grammar instruction? In the last fifty years, scholars have debated to what extent grammar instruction makes a difference in acquisition of morphological and syntactic aspects of language (VanPatten and Benati, 2015; Benati, Laval, Arche, 2013). Theory and research around the role of grammar instruction seem to indicate that grammar instruction might have a beneficial role in speeding up the rate of acquisition of formal properties of language. Despite the fact that language learners bring to the task of acquisition a variety of mechanisms that override instructional efforts, a type of instruction that is both input oriented and meaning-based might have a facilitative role in second language acquisition (Nassanji and Fotos, 2011; Benati, 2014).

In this paper, research findings on a number of pedagogical interventions (e.g., input flood, textual enhancement, structured input, structured output tasks) will be reviewed. Although, the findings are not completely conclusive on whether these instructional interventions have an impact on acquisition, it is clear that we have witnessed to a shift in the field from the original question “Does instruction make a difference?” to the more specific question “Does manipulating input make a difference?”

Is there an effective pedagogical intervention to grammar instruction? The answer to this question is that there is not one particular type of instructional intervention better than others. However, it must be emphasised that effective types of grammar instruction share common and essential ingredients: (i) input plays a key role; (ii) input is manipulated so to facilitate input processing and grammar acquisition; (iii) grammar instruction should focus on both form and meaning; (iv) output grammar practice should follow input grammar practice.

Grammar instruction should be less about the teaching of rules and more about exposure to form. It ought to be less about manipulating output and more about manipulating and processing input.

Benati, A. (2014). Issues in second language teaching. London: Equinox.
Benati, A., Laval, C., Arche, M. (2013). The grammar dimension is instructed second language learning. London: Bloomsbury.
Nassaji, H., and Fotos, S. (2011). Teaching Grammar in Second Language Classrooms. New York: Routledge.
VanPatten, B., Benati, A. (2015). Key terms in SLA. London: Bloomsbury.

Organizer

Institutt for litteratur, områdestudier og europeiske språk. (Julian Cosmes-Cuesta)

Guest Lecture : Egyptomania

By Allegra Fryxell, University of Cambridge

Time and place: Apr. 25, 2016 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Aud 4 Eilert Sundts hus

Abstract

This paper examines the phenomena of 'Egyptomania' in interwar Britain and its broader cultural significance. Drawing upon contemporary news releases, photographic reproductions of Egyptian artefacts, tomb replicas, museum records, material culture, and enchanted stories like the 'Curse of the Mummy', I argue that 1920s Egyptomania—which coalesced around the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922—does not merely manifest in an art deco fascination with the Orient, but produced an alternate 'enchanted' reality wherein Britons could experience an elision or collapse of time, softening the boundaries between past and present.

The contested nature of Tut's discovery meant that his artefacts could not leave Egypt, prompting the creation of a 'virtual archive' and artefactual reproduction that re-interpreted Egyptian remains on modern(ist) British terms. I suggest that a feeling or belief in such a permeable temporality was central to the proliferation and contemporary understanding of images, objects, and ideas related to ancient Egypt during this period.

Organizer

Atle Libæk Wold

Workshop: Comparative Slavic Syntax and Semantics

At this workshop linguists from Russia and Norway meet to discuss topics related to comparative Slavic syntax and semantics. The workshop is part of the GRAMNORUS project financed by SIU.

All interested are welcome!

Time and place: Apr. 11, 2016 9:00 AM–Apr. 13, 2016 4:00 PM, P. A. Munchs hus, møterom 389

Monday, April 11

Venue: P. A. Munch’s building, room 389 (3rd floor)
Opening remarks. Silje S. Alvestad and Head of Department Karen Gammelgaard
Anton Zimmerling, MSPU
Daniel Tiskin, University of St. Petersburg
Alexandra Anna Spalek, University of Oslo & Barbara Tomaszewicz, Universität Köln and Uniwersytet Wrocławski
Vasily Haritonov, MSPU
Andrei Sideltsev, MSPU
Dag Haug, University of Oslo
Hanne Martine Eckhoff, University of Oslo and University of Tromsø
Oleg Belyaev, MSPU
Silje S. Alvestad, University of Oslo
Workshop dinner, Restaurant Südøst, Trondheimsveien 5

Tuesday, April 12

Venue: P. A. Munch’s building, room 389 (3rd floor)

Atle Grønn, University of Oslo
Tatiana Yanko, Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences
Maria Trubitsina, MSPU

Wednesday, April 13

Forum for theoretical linguistics seminar

Venue: Harriet Holter’s building, room 201 (2nd floor)

Andrei Sideltsev: V2 vs. Quantifier2: Accented constituents in a phonologically defined second position
Oleg Belyaev: Morphologization without grammaticalization: Ossetic nominal inflection between morphology and syntax

Speakers and talks

Alvestad, Silje Susanne, University of Oslo: Aspect in Slavic infinitives and corresponding constructions
Belyaev, Oleg, Moscow State Pedagogical University (MSPU): Number mismatches in adjective coordination: Russian and beyond (joint work with Mary Dalrymple and John Lowe)
Eckhoff, Hanne Martine University of Oslo and University of Tromsø, The history of the Russian po-delimitatives
Grønn, Atle, University of Oslo, Tense and aspect under perception verbs in Russian
Haritonov, Vasily, MSPU, Dative predicatives in the Russian language of the first half of the XIX century: a corpus study
Haug, Dag, University of Oslo, Aspect and prefixation in Old Church Slavonic
Sideltsev, Andrei, MSPU, Quantifier Scope: Syntax and Semantics in Russian vs. Hittite
Spalek, Alexandra & Barbara Tomaszewicz, University of Oslo + Universität Köln and Uniwersytet Wrocławski: Coercion in Polish versus English: On processing of complex lexical content
Tiskin, Daniel, University of St. Petersburg: Borderline cases: movement out of adjunct clauses and correlatives in colloquial Russian
Trubitsina, Maria MSPU: Dative constructions with modal predicatives in Russian
Yanko, Tatiana, Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences: Word Order and Accent Placement in Topics, Foci, and Markers of Discourse Continuity
Zimmerling, Anton, MSPU:Clitic clusters in Slavic: Synchronic and Diachronic Typology

Organizer

GRAMNORUS

Past time in English, Norwegian and German,with a side glance at Swedish and Danish

Johan Elsness, ILOS

Time and place: Apr. 4, 2016 2:15 PM, PAM 489

A great many languages have two major verb forms used to refer to past time: a periphrastic (analytic) present perfect and a synthetic preterite. That is true of all the five languages mentioned in the title of this talk. However, the distribution of the two verb forms varies among these languages: The use of the present perfect is held to be most restrictive in English, most widespread in German. Indeed, in southern dialects of German the preterite seems to be in the process of being ousted by the present perfect, a development which appears to be spreading northwards to other German-speaking areas. In a past-specified English sentence like He came yesterday, the present perfect would be an unacceptable alternative to the preterite, while das Präsensperfekt is straightforward in the corresponding German sentence: Er ist gestern gekommen.

The five languages differ also when it comes to the functional division line between the present perfect and the simple present: German and Swedish, but not (usually) the other three languages, can have the simple present tense in references to left- or length-specified time extending from the past up to, and possibly through, the present time-field: Er wohnt seit 2008 / seit acht Jahren in Berlin, Sedan 2008 / Sedan åtta år bor han i Berlin.

Even the form of the present perfect varies among the five languages: (Present-day) English and Swedish can have only a HAVE verb as the perfect auxiliary; German and Danish use both their HAVE and their BE verbs with the perfect, with a pretty strict, and similar, line of division; while Norwegian also uses both perfect auxiliaries, but with a much less strict division (and that is true of both official variants of Norwegian!).

In the study to be reported in this talk the use of the two verb forms is investigated in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) and in three of the other sections making up the Oslo Multilingual Corpus (OMC), i.e. the sections consisting of English, Norwegian and German original texts plus their respective translations into the two other languages. Some high-frequency verbs are selected for the more detailed analysis, which reveals that, in spite of some pretty marked differences in overall frequencies between the three languages, the variation in the ratio between the present perfect and the preterite follows a remarkably similar pattern in the three languages. This variation seems to have a semantic basis and is explained with reference to the likely telicity of each of the verbs investigated.

The development of the distribution between the present perfect and the preterite is seen in the light of what has been claimed to be a general tendency for the preterite to disappear in Indo-European languages, which in turn can be seen as part of an even more general tendency for languages to develop from a synthetic towards an analytic structure. In the particular case of English, however, higher-level factors are pointed to which can help to explain why that language may seem to be bucking the general trend as far as the distribution between the present perfect and the preterite is concerned.

Organizer

Corpus Linguistics Group

On the spelling of English compounds

Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Time and place: Apr. 1, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PAM 489

A question many language users are frequently faced with when spelling English compounds is whether to use open spelling (drinking fountain), hyphenation (far-off) or solid spelling (airport). The view that the spelling of English compounds is completely unsystematic is frequently expressed in the literature. However, it is challenged by a large-scale empirical study using various types of linguistic evidence, which tested over 60 hypotheses concerning the spelling of English compounds. Following the analysis of a large number of potential determinants of British English compound spelling, spelling algorithms with different degrees of complexity were derived from the significant variables and the predictive accuracy of the algorithms was subjected to various tests. The results suggest that even a very simple algorithm performs as well as educated English native speakers in a decision test on the spelling of biconstituent English compounds. This shows that it is possible to recognise principles underlying the present-day spelling of English compounds, even if these may not be immediately obvious to language users.

Organizer

Corpus Linguistics Group
Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer

Guest lecture - The Sacrificed Body in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Film

Tatjana Aleksić is Associate Professor of Balkan and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.

The lecture is open to all.

Time and place: Mar. 2, 2016 12:00 PM–1:30 PM, P. A. Munchs hus, møterom 252

About the lecture

In her lecture based on her book, The Sacrificed Body, Tatjana Aleksić examines the widespread use of the sacrificial metaphor in cultural texts and its importance in sustaining national discourses in the Balkan region. Aleksić relates the theme to the sanctioning of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder in the name of national homogeneity and collective identity. The Sacrificed Body is based on the theme of the immurement of a live female body in the foundation of an important architectural structure, a trope found in texts from all over the Balkans. The male builders performing the sacrificial act have been called by a higher power who will ensure the durability of the structure and hence the patriarchal community as a whole.

Aleksić explores restrictive national discourse through the theme of sacrifice and exclusion based on gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, or politics for the sake of nation building, most prevalent during times of crisis brought on by wars, weak governments, foreign threats, or even globalizing tendencies.

The lecture will specifically focus on socialist and post-socialist film narratives dealing with issues of gender (in)equality, repressed sexuality and masculine aggressiveness, and their role in post-Yugoslav nationalist discourse.

About the guest lecturer

Tatjana Aleksić is Associate Professor of Balkan and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. She is the author of The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom (University of Pittsburgh Press, Nov. 2013) and editor of the collection Mythistory and Narratives of Nation in the Balkans (Cambridge Scholars, 2007).

Currently she is co-editing a new collection on non-regime media during the Yugoslav dissolution wars in the 1990s, Mediated Resistance, with Aleksandar Bošković of Columbia University (forthcoming from Brille in 2016).

She has published on nationalism, history, violence, film, or the body in performance in Slavic and Eastern European Journal (SEEJ), Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Midwestern Modern Language Journal, The Slavic Review, Journal of Greek Media and Culture, and has contributed articles to many edited volumes.

Her literature and film courses deal with topics of nationalism, literary and critical theory, gender, sexuality, and vampires.

Organizer

Discourses of the Nation and the National

Theological and Literary Interpretation
This seminar, organized by The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS) in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Oslo and the Norwegian School of Theology (MF), will focus on theological and literary interpretation, intersecting some postmodern philosophy with literary criticism and theology.

Time and place: Feb. 11, 2016 10:15 AM–2:00 PM, 12th Floor, Niels Treschows house

Illustrasjon: Colourbox

Programme
10.15–11.00 Paul Fiddes (Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Oxford): Attending to the Sublime and the Beautiful: a theological reflection on Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch.

11.15–12.00 Jan-Olav Henriksen (Professor of Systematic Theology, MF): A Topology of Normativity: on literature and religion as means for orientation and transformation – including the potential for contemporary criticism of religion.

12.00–12.30 Lunch

12.30–13.00 Jakob Lothe (Professor of English Literature, ILOS): Narrative ethics and Levinas’s relational understanding of the human: the example of Hanne Ørstavik’s Presten (2004)

13.15–14.00 Discussion of all three papers

Since the seminar includes a free lunch, please register within 4 February by sending an email to Hanne Katinka Solhaug Please indicate if you have any dietary requirements.

Organizer
ILOS

On loss of case in English

Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden, ILOS

Time and place: Feb. 1, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PAM 489

Most accounts of the history of the English language state that loss of case and other inflectional endings was sudden, and invoke as evidence the earliest Middle English (ME) texts, the Peterborough Chronicle (c. 1120-54) and the Ormulum (c. 1175). This loss, they claim, changed the nature of English dramatically, from a highly synthetic to a highly analytic language (Baugh & Cable 2005).

As for the cause(s) of this loss, a variety of suggestions have been made. One is that the vowels of unstressed syllables were neutralised, blurring their meaning, leading to the development of analytical constructions. Other suggestions point to a language contact situation, in which it is assumed that English inflection was simplified in a pidginisation process (Bailey & Maroldt 1977; Poussa 1982). Yet, evidence of confusion between historically distinct inflectional endings is found even in latish Old English (OE), in texts from an area presumably far away from the scene of Viking or Norman conquest (the Old English Orosius, Bately 1980). Hence, inflectional loss may not have been as sudden as the conventional story maintains. This bears directly on linguists’ demarcation of the OE and ME ‘periods’ and on our understanding of what constitutes OE or ME.

Additionally, the claim that OE was highly synthetic is challenged by Benskin (2001); Cuesta (2004) shows that the alleged discontinuity between Old Northumbrian and Northern ME has been overstated; and Kitson (1997) believes that ‘the ME period’ started later than assumed. Allen (1997) assesses the degree to which inflectional endings survive in early ME texts and are used to convey syntactic and semantic meaning.

This paper seeks to establish (a) to what extent OE and ME differed in terms of being synthetic or analytic, (b) dates for the beginning of the loss of cases and inflectional endings, and (c) the rate at which this loss progressed, making use of e.g. LAEME (Laing 2008).

References

Allen, C.L. 1997. ‘Middle English case loss and the creolization hypothesis’. English Language and Linguistics 1/1: 63-89.
Bailey, C. J. & K. Maroldt. 1977. ‘The French lineage of English’. In: Meisel, J.M. (ed.). Langues en contact: Pidgins,Creoles; Languages in Contact; 21-53. Tübingen: Narr.
Bately, J. 1980. The Old English Orosius. Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series 6. London: Oxford University Press.
Baugh, A.C. & T. Cable. 2005. A History of the English Language. Oxford: Routledge.
Benskin, M. 2001. [Review article] ‘A New History of Early English: Hans Frede Nielsen: A Journey Through the History of the English Language in England and America, Volume I: The Continental Backgrounds of English and its Insular Development until 1154. NOWELE, Supplement volume 19, Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 19: 93-122.
Cuesta, J.F. 2004. ‘The (Dis)continuity between Old Northumbrian and Northern Middle English’. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 49: 233-244.
Kitson, P. 1997. ‘When did Middle English begin? Later than you think!’ In: Fisiak, J. (ed.) Studies in Middle English Linguistics; 221-269. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Laing, M. 2008. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html
Poussa, P. 1982. ‘The Evolution of Early Standard English: The Creolization Hypothesis.’ Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 14: 69-85.

Organizer

Corpus LInguistics Group

2015

The political climate in Ukraine after Euromaidan. Internal and external challenges.

The University of Oslo's Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS) is proud to invite you to a guest lecture:

Sergii Leshchenko: The political climate in Ukraine after Euromaidan: Internal and external Challenges.

The event is open for all.

Time and place: Nov. 19, 2015 1:00 PM–3:00 PM, Auditorium 2, Georg Sverdrups hus

About Sergii Leshchenko

Sergii Leshchenko is a Kiev-based journalist, blogger and freedom of the press activist, and since 2014 also a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament. In 2013 Leshchenko was awarded a Press Prize by the Norwegian Fritt Ord Foundation and the German ZEIT Foundation, as well as other awards over the past years. Being engaged in freedom of the press activism and anti-corruption work, he started a lecture course on journalism in Lviv-based Ukrainian Catholic University and anti-corruption course in National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2015. Sergii Leshchenko publishes on a regular basis opinion articles in Norwegian newspapers and international journals.

On Thursday November 19th he visits the University of Oslo to hold a guest lecture on the Political climate in Ukraine after Euromaidan: Internal and external Challenges.

Organizer

ILOS and Geir Flikke

Contact

Geir Flikke
Maria Øderud Danielsen

Green Politics in a National Framework

Guest lecture by professor John Barry. Open for all.

Time and place: Nov. 6, 2015 11:00 AM–12:00 PM, P. A. Munchs hus, room 489

Green politics is often framed as (and also reflected in dominant self-understandings of itself), a form of 'acting locally, thinking globally' in which the national level is usually omitted.

Hence much of green thinking is cast in very local terms (community or town/municipal based such as the Transition Towns movement or the sustainability potentials of city-regions), or global terms such as UN Climate diplomacy, global justice or various sorts of 'cosmopolitan' thinking.

However, without rejecting this local-global focus, there are reasons (both practical and normative) that can be advanced for green politics to view the positive potentials of the institutions of the nation-state and associated ideas of national identity to contribute to the transition from unsustainability. One such potential direction is a 'green civic republican' defence (and reform) of the nation-state so that it may be 'fit for purpose' for he challenges and opportunities of this transition.

John Barry is a Professor in Politics, Queens University, Belfast

Organizer

ILOS

Contact

Mark Luccarelli

Sext: A Symposium on Sexuality and Literature

Talks and presentations on the intersections of sex and literature. Open to all.

Time and place: Nov. 5, 2015 12:15 PM–4:45 PM, Arne Næss auditorium, Georg Morgenstiernes hus

The English-language Literature section at ILOS are excited to present Sext: A Symposium on Sexuality and Literature, featuring lectures on the intersections of sex and literature by international speakers and contributions from English literature students.

Sext is generously funded by Anders Jahres Humanitære Stiftelse.

All are welcome to attend the talks, the presentations, and the reception afterwards. Coffee, fruit and cake will be served in the breaks.

Schedule

Lecture by Dr. Katherine Angel (QMUL): ‘In Order To Have No Face: Writing The First Person Sexual Self’
Lecture by Prof. Catherine Bates (Warwick), ‘“Only rich in mischief's treasure”: Sidney, Astrophil and the Masochistic Pleasure of the Text’
Student research presentations by Felicitas Scheffknecht, Kenneth Bareksten, Marianne Svarstad, Ane Gilje, Hanna R. Løseth and Elise Lystad
Wine reception

Organizer

The English-language Literature section at ILOS

Contact

Erika Kvistad
Tina Skouen
Rebecca Scherr

Jewish Child Survivors in Poland: History and Memory

In her ground-breaking lecture, Dr Michlic seeks to integrate the voices of Polish Jewish child survivors themselves into the historical narrative. Open for all.

Time and place: Nov. 4, 2015 5:00 PM–7:00 PM, 12th floor Niels Treschows hus.

Postwar child survivors were long deemed incapable of transmitting their lived experiences or information about their own history accurately.

Through investigating their world of being, thinking and feeling as they emerged from the Holocaust, Dr Michlic aims to present it through the child’s gaze and thus illuminate the ‘world of the inarticulate.’

About Joanna Beata Michlic

Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian at Bristol University. Her publications include Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (2006), and Bringing the Dark to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (2012).

Organizer

ILOS

Contact

Knut Andreas Grimstad

Towards Resilience and Experimentation: The Negotiation of Indigenous Australian Identities in Contemporary Aboriginal Prose

On 6 October Associate Professor Jan Alber will give a guest lecture at the Faculty of Humanities. The lecture is part of the PhD programme at ILOS, but all are welcome.

Time and place: Oct. 6, 2015 12:00 PM–3:00 PM, 12 etg Niels Treschow

Programme

The session starts with an informal lunch at 12.00. Please register to Hanne Katinka Solhaug by 29 September if you want to attend the lunch.

The lecture starts at 13.00.

About the lecture

Narrative representations allow us access to identity constructions: they enable us to get a sense of how people see themselves and how they conceive of others. In this talk, Alber analyzes representations of four indigenous Australian identities of the late twentieth century, namely My Place (1987) by Sally Morgan; Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung: A Seductive Tale of Sorcery, Eroticism and Corruption (1990); Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) by Doris Pilkington/Nugi Garimara; and Kim Scott's Benang: From the Heart (1999).

He focuses on the ideological ramifications of the narrative strategies that these prose texts use to negotiate the multiple different ways of 'being Aboriginal.' Alber sees the deployed techniques as narrative modes that are engaged in the process of cultural construction, and try to find out why these four narratives deploy the specific strategies that they use (rather than different ones).

As he will show, one can observe two developments in Aboriginal narratives of the late twentieth century: on the one hand, there is a movement away from the victimization paradigm towards the foregrounding of more rebellious Aboriginal characters. On the other hand, one can detect a gradual increase of playful experimentation in narratives that explore indigenous identities.

About Jan Alber

Jan Alber has been an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Freiburg since October 2006. He is currently working at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS), Denmark. During his AIAS Cofund Junior Fellowship, Alber will be working on the project "Ideology and Form: The Experimentalism of Recent Australian and Indian-English Prose Narratives".

Organizer

ILOS

Symposium "National Symbols across Time and Space"

This symposium is part of the project “Discourses of the Nation and the National”

Time and place: Sep. 17, 2015 9:00 AM–Sep. 18, 2015 5:00 PM, Lucy Smith's house, Rådssalen

This symposium is part of the project “Discourses of the Nation and the National” which focuses on a comparative study of various aspects of the national across various discourses.

Participation upon invitation.

Organizer

Discourses of the Nation and the National

John Higgins: Rereading the Canon: A Blake Lyric

Professor John Higgins will be looking at some material from Nicolas Roeg's film Bad Timing, as well as a discussion about xenophobia. The lecture is open for all.

Time and place: June 17, 2015 2:15 PM–3:00 PM, Seminar room 360, P.A. Munchs hus

About John Higgins

John Higgins holds the Arderne Chair in Literature at the University of Cape Town. He was elected a Fellow of UCT in 2003, a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2009, and a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study in 2011.

His monograph Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism (Routledge 1999) won both the Altron National Book Award and the UCT Book Prize; and Blackwell published his Raymond Williams Reader in 2001. He was founding editor of the influential journal, Pretexts: literary and cultural studies (1989-2003).

John Higgins's main research interests are in contemporary literary and cultural theory, and debates in and around the politics of higher education. Academic Freedom in the New South Africa was published by Wits University Press in 2013, with a US edition appearing from Bucknell University Press in 2014.

Organizer

ILOS

Andrew Wilson: “Causes of the Ukraine crisis”

What are the causes that have unleashed and drive this serious crisis? Open for all.

Time and place: June 12, 2015 3:15 PM–4:30 PM, Auditorium 3, Sophus Bugge's house

The war in Eastern Ukraine is claiming new lives every month, and relations between Russia and the Western world have reached the lowest point in decades. What are the causes that have unleashed and drive this serious crisis?

Andrew Wilson is the author of the widely acclaimed book Ukraine crisis: what it means for the West. (Yale University press New Haven, 2014).

Wilson will cover both the events leading up to the Euromaidan revolution, as well as the Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine.

The lecture is open to the public. The lecture is part of the “post-Soviet tensions” PhD training program under the EU funded Marie Curie scheme and organized by Department of Literature, Area studies and European languages (ILOS), University of Oslo.

Elvira Lindo: The translation and reception of the Manolito Gafotas books.

Author Elvira Lindo will address taboos in her bestselling and widely translated (also censored) Manolito Gafotas books. Open for all. Registration required.

Time and place: June 11, 2015 11:00 AM–1:00 PM, Seminarrom 360, P.A. Munchs hus

Elvira Lindo will on June 11 talk about her bestselling group of children's novels, Manolito Gafotas.

The celebrated Spanish author and public figure Elvira Lindo will participate in a seminar about her provocative and extremely funny Manolito Gafotas books - with reference to the Norwegian, Danish, English, German, Dutch, French, Italian and Japanese translations.

Lindo's Manolito Gafotas novels tell the adventures of a kid in Caranbenchel, a popular suburb of Madrid.

Programme

Introduction and question time: on the Norwegian, Danish, English, French, Dutch and German translations of Manolita Gafotas.
Elvira Lindo replies. Discussion.
Elena Abós (University of Köln): translators on translating Manolito Gafotas into Japanese, Italian, French, German and English.
Questions and dialogue.

Organizer

ILOS

Contact

Jeroen Vandaele

Magical Historicism: Literature of Post-Soviet Nation-Building and Destruction

Alexander Etkind talks about post-Soviet literature. Open for all.

Time and place: June 10, 2015 10:30 AM–12:00 PM, P.A.Munchs hus, Room 389
Combining catastrophic past, pathetic present, and dangerous future, early twenty-first-century Russia is a greenhouse for ghosts, revenants, and other spectral bodies. These post-Soviet devils seem more real and also more frequent than their predecessors in the classical Russian and Soviet literatures; but in contrast to the unfading interest in the Gothic motifs of Russian and European letters, critics and scholars have barely noticed the literature of the post-Soviet uncanny.

Bizarre literary magic of post-Soviet fiction is manifestly different from Western, mostly Anglo-American genres such as the gothic, science fiction, and fantasy. Differences are many, but the most important of them is that the true emphasis of this post-Soviet genre is on bizarre historical conjectures rather than on weird magical creatures.

Whatever post-Soviet authors project into the past or the future, their goal is usually the understanding of the central trauma, or rather the catastrophe, of the Soviet period.

About Alexander Etkind

Alexander Etkind is Professor of History at the European University Institute at Florence, where he has moved after many years of teaching at the University of Cambridge. Etkind was born in St. Petersburg and defended his PhD at the University of Helsinki.

He has authored or edited many books, including Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (2011), and Warped Mourning (2013); the most recent is a biography of William Christian Bullitt (2014). Etkind is working now on a new project, A Cultural History of Natural Resources: Postsocialist and Postcolonial Perspectives.

Organizer

ILOS

Research project

This lecture is part of the project Discourses of the Nation and the National.

Impossible Sutures: Loss, Mourning, and the Uses of Catalonia's Immigrant Past in La Mari

What uses of the immigrant past is the drama series La Mari making, and to what effect? Open lecture by Josep-Anton Fernandez.

Time and place: June 9, 2015 10:30 AM–12:00 PM, P.A.Munchs hus, Room 252

Few issues in Catalan culture are as contentious and pregnant with contested meanings as immigration.

This is partly because the antagonisms related to immigration have a triple temporal dimension:

the past (the struggles over the narratives of 20th-century migratory processes and their legacy)
the present (discourses and policies dealing with recent waves of immigration)
and the future (the formulation of competing projects for Catalan society within the current phase of the conflict between Catalonia and Spain).

The complexity, and indeed the intractability, of this issue is compounded by the scarcity of representations, both literary and audiovisual, of Spanish-speaking immigration within Catalan culture.

Drama series La Mari

Through the vicissitudes of the eponymous character, an Andalusian woman who migrates to Barcelona in the 1960s, Televisió de Catalunya's drama series La Mari (Jesús Garay, 2003) represents the experience of a whole generation of new Catalans who settled in Catalonia, contributed to its progress, and became involved in the struggle against Franco’s dictatorship.

But given the ideological complexity of the issue of immigration, it is unsurprising that a series like La Mari should have both the power of attracting large audiences that seek an effect of recognition in the fiction, and the inability to please everybody.

While some criticise its “assimilationist” discourse that privileges the figure of the “good immigrant”, others attack it for its reproduction of the stereotypes of the poor, left-wing, Spanish-speaking immigrant vs. the nationalist, bourgeois Catalan; while some praise its “faithful” depiction of the social reality of immigration under Francoism and the recuperation of the memory of this period, others castigate it for its “sugary”, melodramatic tone; finally, its use of Spanish in a Catalan-language channel and its problematic depiction of social uses of language have also been contentious issues.

Clearly it is important to analyse the ideological processes involved in the production of meanings of a series like this. However, such an analysis will be fatally limited if it does not take into account what the series might be helping audiences work through. The representation of the loss and mourning involved in the immigrant experience in the 1960s might operate a process of working through other losses and kinds of mourning in Catalan society at the start of the 21st century: a context of rapid social change, a new wave of immigration, and new developments in the conflict between Spanish and Catalan nationalisms.

What kind of incompleteness or lack, what kind of social antagonism is La Mari trying to suture over? If this suture is at once necessary and impossible, how does it fail? And what are the effects of its failure? This presentation will try to elucidate some of these questions by reference to psychoanalytic and television theory.

About Josep-Anton Fernàndez

Josep-Anton Fernàndez holds a Ph.D in Modern Languages from the University of Cambridge, and a degree in Catalan Language and Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Since 2007 he is associate professor of Catalan Studies in the Arts and Humanities Department at the Open Universuty of Catalonia (UOC), where he is responsible for modules in contemporary Catalan literature, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality within the undergraduate programme in Catalan Language and Literature. Also at the UOC he is academic director of the MA in Catalan Studies, where he convenes subjects on culture and subjectivity, modern Catalan narrative, and research design.

Until 2006 he was Senior Lecturer in Catalan at Queen Mary, University of London, where he founded and directed the Centre for Catalan Studies. He is a specialist in 20th-century Catalan literature and culture, and in gender and sexuality studies. He is particularly interested in the process of construction of subjectivities, and in how theoretical discourses such as psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory help us account for these processes and explore them in cultural production.

He is the author of El malestar en la cultura catalana: La cultura de la normalització 1976-1999 (2008) [Catalan culture and its discontents: The culture of normalisation 1976-1999] and Another Country: Sexuality and National Identity in Catalan Gay Fiction (2000); he is editor of El gai saber: Introducció als estudis gais i lèsbics (2000) [Introduction to lesbian and gay studies] and co-editor (with Adrià Chavarria) of Calçasses, gallines i maricons: Homes contra la masculinitat hegemònica (2004) [Men against hegemonic masculinity].

He has published numerous essays on contemporary literature and culture, film, and television. He is currently involved in the funded research project "Functions of the past in contemporary Catalan culture: Institutionalisation, representations, identity ". He is a member of the Board of the Plataforma per la Llengua, the main NGO in the field of language rights in Catalonia.

Organizer

ILOS

Research project

This lecture is part of the project Discourses of the Nation and the National.

Guest lecture: Thinking about Evidence and Method in Book History

On 3 March Professor Michael Suarez will lecture on "Thinking about Evidence and Method in Book History: A Case Study from the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries"

Time and place: Mar. 3, 2015 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, 12 etg Niels Treschow

About the lecture

In this highly illustrated lecture, Michael Suarez, Director of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, will examine the proliferation of the image of the slave ship Brookes in England, Continental Europe, and America. Examining a rich variety of materials from abolitionist broadsides to almanacs and children's books, Suarez raises important questions about how we use evidence in book history -- and how book history might most usefully contribute to other areas of humanistic inquiry.

About Michael Suarez

Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is University Professor and Director of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. A Jesuit priest, Suarez is currently co-General Editor of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO). Prof. Suarez’s two 2014 publications are The Book: A Global History (co-edited with H. R. Woudhuysen), and a scholarly edition of The Dublin Notebook of Gerard Manley Hopkins (co-edited with L. J. Higgins). As the 2014–15 J. R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford University, he will deliver a course of lectures entitled: “The Reach of Bibliography.”

The lecture is part of the PhD programme at ILOS, but all are welcome.

The lecture will be followed by an informal lunch. Please register to Kirsti Sellevold

Guest lecture: The birth and death of language

Professor Kersti Börjars, University of Manchester, talks about the birth and death of language. The lecture is specifically aimed at students, but all are welcome. Prof. Börjars is known as a good lecturer, so you are invited to take this opportunity to learn about a topic that is not usually taught in our regular courses.

Time and place: Mar. 2, 2015 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, seminarrom 14, PA Munchs hus

Abstract

Human language is of a profoundly different level of complexity compared to the communication systems of other animals. How did it come to be that way; was it a slow adaptation or an abrupt change? Both positions have been defended in the literature and in this talk I compare them both and look at some different potential explanations for how it happened.

Once humans had language in principle, how did we get to the point we are now at, with an estimated 6000 different languages, and how long did it take to get to this point?

Though new languages are still “born”, the number of languages spoken in the world is actually decreasing quite rapidly. We look at the factors that influence a language’s survival chances, and consider what can be done to support the endangered languages.

Sword, Cross and Eagle: The Aesthetics of Nationalism in Interwar and Contemporary Poland

Ulrich Schmid will show how the nationalist project was constructed in literature and the visual media in Poland in the 1920s and the 1930s. Open for all.

Time and place: Feb. 25, 2015 4:15 PM–5:00 PM, 12th floor, Niels Treschovs hus

In the 1920’s and 1930’s time, space and society were conceptualized by the movements of the political right in an organic way:

The historical process had to reinstate the glorious past.
The territory of the state needed to be organized according to the inherent logic of geography.
The societal body was to develop from Polish-catholic traditions.

In this lecture special attention will be paid to the current renaissance of interwar nationalist movements like The All-Polish Youth (MW) or National Radical Camp (ONR).

A case in point is also the recent debate around Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s (Political poems, 2010).

About Professor Ulrich Schmid

Ulrich Schmid is Professor of Russian Culture and Society, at the University of St. Gallen. He is currently the director of the research project "Region, Nation and Beyond. An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconsideration of Ukraine" (St Gallen & Harvard).

Organizer

ILOS

Patrick Hanks: Corpus Pattern Analysis: verbs vs. nouns

Corpus linguistics group - gjesteforelesning

Time and place: Feb. 5, 2015 2:15 PM, Seminarrom 6 PAM

In this talk, I focus on some of the differences in function and meaning between nouns and verbs, as revealed by corpus analysis. The grammatical framework used is based on Halliday's "slot and filler" approach of the 1960s, which has proven more useful for lexical analysis than other approaches such as generative grammar. (See Halliday 1961 "Categories of the Theory of Grammar".) A useful starting point is that the central and typical function of nouns is to create referring expressions – terms that either refer to objects in the world or denote abstract concepts. The central and typical function of verbs, on the other hand, is to create propositions, in which nouns and noun phrases play roles that are mediated by a verb. According to the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (Hanks, 1994, 2004, 2013), a verb has only meaning potential (not meaning per se) until it is put in context. There is no 'semantic invariable' that is common to all normal uses of a verb such as blow. 'A gale was blowing', 'They blew up the bridge', 'He blew his nose', and 'She blew the whistle on government malpractice' have little or nothing in common, but all four sentences represent realizations of conventional lexico-syntactic patterns of English.

A consequence of this is that quite different questions must be asked about nouns from verbs, and quite different apparatuses are required for corpus analysis of the two categories. If shower is used as a noun, we can ask, how many different kinds of shower are there – rain showers, snow showers, spring showers, bathroom showers, etc. – and what distinctive properties or common features do they have? On the other hand, if shower is used as a verb, relevant question are prompted by the collocates in the various clause roles in relation to the verb: Is it normal to say in English, "It was showering all afternoon"? Or we might notice the frequency of patterns with certain prepositions, and ask, Who showers what on whom? Who showers whom with what? What, if any is the semantic and syntagmatic relationship between these two prepositional structures?

In this way, we can inch our way painfully towards compiling an inventory of patterns of word uses that is already available to the unconscious minds of most users of the language.

Organizer

Corpus Linguistics Group

About the speaker

Patrick Hanks is a visiting professor at the Bristol Centre for Linguistics (BCL, University of the West of England), and the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP, University of Wolverhampton). He is a renowned lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. For ten years (1990–2000) he was chief editor of current English Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. More recently, he has held research posts and taught linguistics and lexicology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Britain, America, and the Czech Republic. He is a frequent invited plenary speaker at international conferences on lexicography, corpus linguistics, figurative language, and onomastics.

Science, Religion, & Poetics with Brian Cummings

“Science, Religion, & Poetics” will address the problem of knowledge in the early seventeenth century. All are welcome!

Time and place: Jan. 19, 2015 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Niels Treschow, 12 etg

Brian Cummings (Anniversary Professor, University of York) is the author or co-author of 6 books and over 40 scholarly articles, including his celebrated study of The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford UP, 2007).

With Dr. Freya Sierhuis, he is currently engaged in the Oxford Edition of the complete works of the English Renaissance poet Sir Fulke Greville (1554-1628).“Science, Religion, & Poetics” will address the problem of knowledge in the early seventeenth century.

It will consider poetry both as a form of knowledge, and as a mediation between what we now think of as scientific and religious modes of thinking.

The main text under examination will be Fulke Greville’s long philosophical poem Of human learning (A Treatie of Humane Learning, accessible via Luminarium: http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/fulkebib.htm)

Greville's work and wider significance will be discussed in relation to the history of science from Sir Francis Bacon to the Royal Society.

Organizer

Tina Skouen and Jon Haarberg

2014

Round table on Mozambique

Mozambique is one of the African countries which receives more external aid from Norway. The seminar will be held in Portuguese and dicuss Mozambique’s future. Open for all.

Time and place: Nov. 27, 2014 2:15 PM–3:15 PM, P.A.Munchs House, room 15

An independent country since 1975, after a long independence war (1964-1974), Mozambique is in an election period, which we deem a good time to discuss its future.

We are lucky to have two scholars, one Norwegian, another Brazilian and Portuguese, who have lived and worked there for extended periods and which will share their knowledge with the audience.

About the guest lecturers

Torun Reite is an economist and independent consultor with wide experience in international development, not least from African countries (complete list: Angola, Mozambique, Timor-Leste, São Tome e Prïncipe, Tanzania, Malawi, Rwanda, Swaziland, Zambia, Nigeria, Gabon, St Vincent e Grenadines, Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Comorros). She is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Stockholm, and belongs to the internatiobal Grupo de Estudos linguísticos Afro-Latinos. She has also a MA in Portuguese at ILOS with a thesis on Mozambican Portuguese. Torun Reite lecture (PDF)

Gustavo Toshiaki Lopes Sugahara is associate collaborator of the Institute of Social and Economic Studies (IESE) in Mozambique, and associate member of Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL), DINÂMIA’CET-IUL, Portugal. Gustavo has a Masters degree in economics and public policies from ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal, and a degree in economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil.

A global ageing specialist, Gustavo has been working as a consultant for many international organizations including the United Nations and the World Bank. Gustavo Toshiaki Lopes Sugahara lecture (PDF)

The round table will be moderated by Diana Santos (organizer), thanks to ILOS support. Diana Santos lecture (PDF)

Organizer

Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

Contact

Diana Santos

The abortion debate in Latin America

Latin America is still a stronghold for the pro-life movement. In most Latin American countries abortion is a crime punished by law. This guest lecture discusses why this is so, and looks to the future. Open for all.

Time and place: Nov. 21, 2014 12:00 PM–1:00 PM, P. A. Munchs building, seminar room 14

According to the World Health Organization, 21.6 million women experience an unsafe abortion worldwide each year, 18.5 million of these occur in developing countries. The voluntary interruption of pregnancy is one of the most important issues dividing South and North.

How can we explain that situation in Latin America? What are the consequences? What can we expect from the future?

About guest lecturer Gustavo Toshiaki Lopes Sugahara
Gustavo Toshiaki Lopes Sugahara is associate collaborator of the Institute of Social and Economic Studies (IESE) in Mozambique, and associate member of Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL), DINÂMIA’CET-IUL, Portugal. Gustavo has a Masters degree in economics and public policies from ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal, and a degree in economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil.

A global ageing specialist, Gustavo has been working as a consultant for many international organizations including the United Nations and the World Bank.

Organizer

Julian Cosmes-Cuesta and Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

Racial tensions in Brazil

In this guest lecture the main historic aspects of the construction of the myth of racial democracy will be presented, and contemporary challenges on racial issues in Brazil will be up for discussion. Open for all.

Time and place: Nov. 14, 2014 12:00 PM–1:00 PM, P. A. Munchs building, seminar room 15

Brazil is often pictured as an example of racial tolerance and cultural mix. The supposed openness and mixture between the european white and african black cultures would result in an harmonious and creative environment.

From the typical carnival images to the success of Bossa Nova, the success of the Brazilian racial democracy is still part of the imaginary of many, including Brazilians themselves. A more in detail look into the Brazilian society might reveal a completely different picture.

Questions for debate:

How is Brazil doing in terms of racial inequalities?
What about affirmative action policies?

About guest lecturer Gustavo Toshiaki Lopes Sugahara

A global ageing specialist, Gustavo has been working as a consultant for many international organizations including the United Nations and the World Bank.

Organizer

Julian Cosmes-Cuesta and Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

Jean Boase-Beier: Translation of Holocaust poetry

Jean Boase-Beier illustrates some of the challenges of translating Holocaust poetry, focussing in particular on the poetry of German-Romanian poet Paul Celan.

The talk is open to all.

Time and place: Oct. 30, 2014 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Auditorium 2, Georg Sverdrups hus

In understanding the Holocaust, the importance of its poetry should not be underestimated, especially now that few witnesses remain.

A large part of the importance of Holocaust poetry lies in its cognitive effects on the reader, but how can we be sure these effects are still possible when the poetry is read in translation?

Holocaust poetry rarely, if ever, is merely documentary. It makes readers question and re-think their views. Translating it is challenging but necessary. In this talk, Jean Boase-Beier illustrates some of these challenges, focussing in particular on the poetry of German-Romanian poet Paul Celan and its translation into English.

About Jean Boase-Beier

Jean Boase-Beier is Professor of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia, where she runs the MA in Literary Translation. She has written many academic works on translation, poetry and style, and especially on the translation of Holocaust writing: recent publications include Stylistic Approaches to Translation (2006, St Jerome Publishing) and A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies (2011, Continuum).

She has just completed the research and public engagement project “Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust”, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Jean Boase-Beier is also a translator of poetry from and into German; her poetry translations include Ernst Meister: Between Nothing and Nothing (2003, Arc Publications) and (with Anthony Vivis) Rose Ausländer: While I am Drawing Breath (2014, Arc Publications); she is also editor of the Visible Poets and Arc Classics series of bilingual poetry books.

Organizer

Seminar for translation studies: An open group where we discuss different aspects of translation, spanning from the literary perspective to contrastive linguistics, through lectures or group discussions.

Participants are invited to raise questions for discussion or present ongoing or completed projects, and we will also invite speakers from outside the University of Oslo.

Contact

Eva Refsdal or Siri Fürst Skogmo

Angus Robertson: Independent Scotland?

The event is held against the backdrop of the forthcoming independence referendum in Scotland. Open guest lecture by Angus Robertson, MP.

Time and place: June 2, 2014 4:30 PM–6:00 PM, Domus Academica, Auditorium 6

British Politics Society has the pleasure of inviting its members and friends to a seminar with Angus Robertson, MP on the future of Scotland.

Mr Robertson’s lecture will map out the party’s positions on foreign and defence matters and its prospects for closer cooperation with the Nordic countries in the event of a ”Yes” to independence on 18 September.

About Angus Robertson

Robertson has been a Member of Parliament since 2001, representing Moray. He is the Scottish National Party’s Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, its Parliamentary Leader in the House of Commons, and party spokesman on Defence and Europe.

Organizer

British Politics Society Norway at ILOS

A Polish-Jewish Queer: Julian Stryjkowski

Public lecture with dr. Piotr Sobolczyk about the Polish-Jewish writer Julian Stryjkowski.

Time and place: Apr. 9, 2014 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, P.A.Munchs House Seminar room 8 (136)

The Polish-Jewish writer Julian Stryjkowski (1905-96) brought to life the old shtetel world of Eastern Galicia, in today’s Ukraine.

His most famous novel, Voices in the Dark, depicts the breakdown of the impoverished small-town Jewish community under the impact of modern political ideas, and it has been compared to the prose of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

But Stryjkowski had other issues on his mind: having come out as gay at the age of 90, he wrote the astonishing short story “Silence”. Here he discusses his attitude – as an atheist and a communist Jew – towards communism, Palestine and homosexuality.

Stryjkowski is also the author of the forgotten (and unperformed) play Sodom, which offers original insights into the history of religion, proto-Judaism and sexual mores in the Middle East.

About Piotr Sobolczyk

Piotr Sobolczyk (f. 1980) Polish literary scholar, writer and translator. Studied at the Universities of Cracow and Barcelona. At present, based Institute of Literary Studies (IBL), Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw. Recipient of several literary and scholarly awards.

Organizer

ILOS

2013

Guest lecture on Anglo-Norman

The lecture is intended to provide an introduction to the French that developed in England after the Norman Conquest.

Time and place: Nov. 7, 2013 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Sophus Bugges hus, seminarrom 2

Dr Tony Hunt will give a guest lecture entitled "The Establishment of Anglo-Norman", and has been arranged in connexion with the ILOS course on Language and Settlement in Early England. All are welcome.

The lecture is intended to provide an introduction to the French that developed in England after the Norman Conquest, and will offer a critical review of the founding scholarship as well as of the present state of Anglo-Norman studies.

Tony Hunt

Dr Hunt is an emeritus Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford. One of the leading authorities on Anglo-Norman, he is the author of Teaching and Learning in Thirteenth-Century England, Plant Names of Medieval England, The Medieval Surgery, and has published numerous papers on these topics as well as on courtly literature. Among his many editions of Anglo-Norman texts are Anglo-Norman Medicine, Popular Medicine in Thirteenth Century England, Three Receptaria from Medieval England: The Languages of Medicine in the Fourteenth Century, "Cher alme": Texts of Anglo-Norman Piety, Three Anglo-Norman Treatises on Falconry, An Anglo-Norman "Practica Geometriae", and (this year) Les Paroles Salomun. Dr Hunt is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi.

Organizer

Michael Benskin and ILOS
- ENG2160 - Language and Settlement in Britain, ca. 200-1000 A.D
- ENG4160 - Language and Settlement in Britain, ca. 200-1000 A.D

The Discourse of the National in the Humanities

Is there still a future for fields premised on the national in a post-national world?

Time and place: May 29, 2013 10:00 AM–5:00 PM, 12th Floor, Niels Treschows Hus, Blindern
American Studies as an institutionalized field was established in Europe at the heels of a war that was all about nations, and who belonged where.

The national was rallied on both sides, and the national was the “natural” delimitation of the study of history and of literature. Sigmund Skard claimed at the time that establishing a joint British and American Institute at the University of Oslo would be as unnatural as establishing a joint Dano-Norwegian Institute.

The Humanities were still the nation-building disciplines, both in research and in teaching. Now, however, Humanities disciplines find their critical potential in opposition to fixed canons and older national identity markers.

Those same fields and disciplines are moving toward the study of transnational currents and forces - both supranational forces and sub-national physical and digital movements. The nation as a given and natural cultural unit is thoroughly deconstructed, and with this development has followed a great shift in both status and perceived public usefulness of the Humanities, and “methodological nationalism” is seen as a sign of parochialism.

The Discourse of the National in the Humanities: The Case of American Studies
This one day symposium will bring together historical, analytical and polemical talks from disciplines and research fields recently accused of methodological nationalism (such as literature and history) as well one, American Studies, premised on a version of methodological nationalism, to discuss the discourse of the national in the Humanities.

The language of the symposium will be English. There will be time for discussion between and after the talks. Coffee and snacks will be provided.

Open for all.

Programme

Boris Vormann: Nations after the fact? A Social Science Perspective
Elisabeth Oxfeldt: The Novel, the Nation and the World. Scandinavian Literature from a Postnational Perspective.
The post-war humanities in Norway: from "circuits of learning" to "research communities"?
Donald Pease: How Transnational Perspectives have Reconfigured U.S. American Studies
Winfried Fluck: American Studies and the (Changing) Realities of America

Panel Discussion on the Discourse of the National in the Humanities.

Organizer

NORAM, ILOS

2012

Seminar: Norway and Britain - Opportunities and challenges

British Politics Society is proud to invite its members and friends to an exclusive seminar with the Rt Hon Dr Liam Fox, Conservative MP for North Somerset and former Defence Secretary.

Time and place: Oct. 29, 2012 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Auditorium 2, Georg Sverdrups hus

Norway and Britain: Possibilities and challenges in Europe and the High North
Dr Fox will talk about current and future challenges in British politics and discuss the relationship with Norway, paying particular notice to the European question and to the High North.

Liam Fox has been a Member of Parliament since 1992, representing North Somerset (until 1992 known as Woodspring). He served as Secretary of State
for Defence under David Cameron from May 2010 to October 2011. In the decade preceding 2010, he held successive key positions in the Shadow Cabinet.

Dr Fox is a prominent voice within the Conservative party and the British public at large, notable for his views in foreign and defence policy as well as in broader ideological debates related to his party.

All members and friends of British Politics Society are very welcome!

Organizer

British Politics Society Norway and Atle Wold, ILOS

Guest Lecture: Modern Literary Theory

“Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe (and Why Is It Now Dead?)?”

Time and place: Sep. 17, 2012 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, 12th floor, Niels Treschow hus

Lecture by Galin Tihanov, Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London.

With the participation of Jostein Børtnes, Professor Emeritus of Russian, University of Bergen.

In the second decade of the 21st century we seem better positioned to recognise and admit the demise of literary theory as a distinct discipline of scholarship. Even the most dedicated proponents of theory are busy spelling out the dimensions of its irrevocable crisis.

In retrospect, one could locate literary theory within a period of nearly eighty years, from its inception in the late 1910s until the early 1990s. The beginnings of the discipline were marked by the activities of the Russian Formalists, its end by Wolfgang Iser’s turn in the late 1980s and the early 1990s from reception theory and phenomenology of reading to what he called “literary anthropology” and by Yury Lotman’s death in 1993 at the end of a career, in which he gradually came to embrace semiotics as a global theory of culture rather than as a narrowly conceived literary theory.

In this lecture, I ask why modern literary theory originated in Eastern and Central Europe. I am also interested in how exile became a formative power in the rise of other relevant discourses in the interwar period.

Galin Tihanov holds the George Steiner Chair of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He was previously Professor of Comparative Literature and Intellectual History and founding co-director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at the University of Manchester. His most recent research has been on exile, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism. He is the author of The Master and the Slave: Lukacs, Bakhtin and the Ideas of their Time (2000) and the co-author of A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil (2010) and Critical Theory in Russia and the West (2011).

Guest lecture: Archival resources for literary translation in English.

Archival resources for the investigation of twentieth-century literary translation in English, by Jeremy Munday, Professor of Translation Studies, University of Leeds.

Time and place: Sep. 13, 2012 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Niels Treschows hus, top floor

This talk will describe the author’s recent research in prominent archives of literary translation in English: the Archive of British Publishing and Printing (Reading, UK),
the Penguin Classics Archive (Bristol, UK), the British Centre for Literary Translation (Norwich, UK), the University of Princeton Library Latin American Special Collection and the Harry Ransom Center (Austin, Texas).

The translator

The focus will be on the role, status and background of the translators and their interaction with other participants in the translation process, notably editors, publishers
and literary agents.

Specific case studies will be discussed, principally of translators of Latin American boom writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.

The lecture is open to all students and employees at the Faculty of Humanities.

Organizer

Seminar for Translation Studies, ILOS, University of Oslo

Belarus: A “Hard Case” in Europe?

Belarus stands out as a unique case in Europe. Jonas Gahr Støre is keynote speaker in this short seminar that highlights and discusses policies towards Belarus, internal politics in Belarus and European policies toward Belarus.

Time and place: Sep. 7, 2012 9:30 AM–10:30 AM, Auditorium 7, Eilert Sundts hus

The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the University of Oslo in collaboration with the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs have the pleasure of inviting you to this seminar.

Programme

Knut Andreas Grimstad, Head of Studies ILOS, UiO/ Ulf Sverdrup, Director NUPI Belarus in Europe
Jonas Gahr Støre, Minister of Foreign Affairs Norway The Case of Belarus as a challenge to European foreign politics
Dr. Anatoli Mikhailov, Rector European Humanities University Belarus: the national identity conundrum
Geir Flikke, senior researcher NUPI and ILOS Q&A
Moderator: Knut Andreas Grimstad, ILOS

Organizer

NUPI, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ILOS

PhD seminar on Ingmar Bergman and censorship in Franco's Spain

Dr. Daniel Sánchez Salas, from the Department of Communication Sciences of Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid (Spain), will be reviewing and commenting a draft of Rosario Garnemark’s PhD dissertation from his point of view as an expert in Spanish film history.

Time and place: June 19, 2012 10:00 AM–12:00 PM, Seminarrom 9, P.A.Munchs hus
Garnemark is doing her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Jeroen Vandaele and Dr. Cecilia Alvstad, both from ILOS.

The aim of this seminar is to conduct an academic discussion around Garnemark’s text in order to improve its quality. It will cover methodology and academic writing, hence being of special interest for PhD and master students in Spanish. Bachelor students who are planning to continue at master level are also encouraged to attend.

The seminar will be conducted in Spanish. Open to all academic staff and students.

Please contact Rosario Garnemark if you want a copy of her draft (also written in Spanish) - or require any further information.

Organizer

Rosario Garnemark

XPrag workshop: Norway 2012

The EURO-XPRAG Network aims to support Experimental Pragmatic research through collaborations, workshops and conferences in order to provide leadership for this field worldwide.

Time and place: June 8, 2012 9:00 AM–June 9, 2012 4:00 PM, Seminar room 2, Georg Sverdrups hus

Invited keynote speakers

Peter Bosch, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück
Peter Gärdenfors, Department of Philosophy, Lund University
Ivan Toni, Radboud University Nijmegen, and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
Deirdre Wilson, University College London, and CSMN, Oslo University
Workshop participants
Coming soon

Attendance is by invitation.

Friday 8th June

Welcome
Ivan Toni: Mind-oriented movements
Kyriakos Antoniou, Napoleon Katsos, Kleanthes Grohmann, Stella Vorka, Maria Cambanaros: The relations between bilingualism, executive control and pragmatic ability in early school-aged children.
Noga Balaban, Yoad Winter & Naama Friedmann: Learning about the linguistic consequences of theory of mind impairment
Laia Mayol, Elena Castroviejo-Miró & Elizabeth Allyn Smith: An experimentally-based theory of direct and indirect denial
Peter Gärdenfors: The meeting of minds: How pointing scaffolds communication and language learning
Ye Tian, Richard Breheny & Bob van Tiel: Local exhaustification: evaluating competing accounts in an act-out paradigm
Judith Degen, Michael Franke & Gerhard Jäger: Optimal Reasoning About Referential Expressions

Saturday 9th June

Deirdre Wilson: Explaining irony
Steven Frisson, Andrea Krott, Petra B. Schumacher & Hanna Weiland: What do different psycholinguistic measures tell us about the processing of metonymy?
Ira Noveck, Simone Shamay-Tsoory & Nicola Spotorno: Establishing a neural link between ToM and irony
Valentina Bambini, Marta Ghio, Petra B. Schumacher & Lewis Bott: Steps of the mind over figurative meanings
Peter Bosch: What do we know about demonstratives?
Napoleon Katsos, Jessica Soltys & Marina Terkourafi: Why imply something when you could say it explicitly?
Round up discussion · chaired by Ira Noveck

The local organiser is Bergljot Behrens, with help from Nicholas Allott and Tomas Midttun Tobiassen.

Organizer

ILOS, Bergljot Behrens

Aims of EURO-XPRAG

Get linguists more invested in experimentation and experimentalists in semantics and pragmatics
Demonstrate how collaboration can energize a field
Make Europe the recognized innovator and continuing leader of Experimental Pragmatics worldwide
Disseminate findings and techniques

Giorgio Agamben and the Poetics of Indifference

The lecture will outline the relation between Agamben’s work in the field of poetics and his wider philosophical project.

Time and place: Mar. 22, 2012 2:14 PM–4:00 PM, Aud. 7, Eilert Sundts Hus
Open lecture with professor William Watkin, organized by The Seminar of Aesthetics.

William Watkin is professor at Brunel University London. His most recent book is The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis (Continuum, 2010).

Organizer

The Seminar of Aesthetics - An interdisciplinary forum for new research at the intersection of aesthetic theory, philosophy and art.

2011

Women Writers in History: Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture

Time and place: Sep. 19, 2011 10:15 AM–6:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, Blindern AND Rådssalen, Lucy Smiths hus, Blindern

Guest lecture and seminar within the framework of COST action IS0901 “Women Writers in History. Toward a New Understanding of European Literary Culture”.

The guest lecture is open to everyone.

Women’s influence

The aim of this COST action is to lay the groundwork for a new history of European women’s participation in the literary field of the centuries before 1900.

What was these women’s influence? Which active roles did they play as authors and readers in the broadest sense of the word, i.e. including their roles as transcribers, translators, mediators and educators?

What happened to them when they fell into the hands of 19th-century canonizers? How is their disappearance from literary history to be explained?

The action will further develop the database Women Writers (http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/) into a broad research infrastructure, allowing researchers to stock and manipulate data concerning the contemporary reception of women’s writing, and to apply different research models to these data.

Particular attention will be paid to women’s participation in transnational cultural dynamics and to the overlooked role of “smaller”, less internationally known literatures within the larger European context. This interdisciplinary research will lead to a new way of looking at Europe’s literary past – male and female –, which also implies a different perspective on Europe’s present.

The guest lecture

10.15 – 1200, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts hus, Blindern

Suzan van Dijk, Huygens Institute, Netherlands, chair of the COST action: "’Women Writers In History’: the relevance of studying literature.”

The seminar

“Scandinavia within the European context: Women's contributions to European literary culture before World War I.”
12.15 – 18.00 Rådssalen, Lucy Smiths hus, Blindern

Papers

Torill Steinfeld, University of Oslo: “Personal voices and unaffected writing: Camilla Collett, Rahel Varnhagen,Therese von Bacheracht”
Petra Broomans, University of Groningen: “Awards and networks. A secret formula for the canonization of a cultural transmitter? On Swedish women´s literature in Dutch translation”
Tone Selboe, University of Oslo: “Male Melancholics and Female Fighters: Camilla Collett on George Sand”
Marie Nedregotten Sørbø, University College of Volda: “Genius and housewife: The Norwegian nineteenth-century reception of George Eliot.”
Janet Garton, Norwich: “Amalie Skram and her German translators”
Viola Capkova, University of Turku: “Finnish Women Writers as Translators and Mediators of Writing by European Women at the Turn of the 18th and the 19th Century”
Ragnhild J. Zorgati, University of Oslo: “From Denmark to the hammam: the international female networks of the Danish – Polish painter Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann”

Organizer

Tone Brekke, STK, Anne Birgitte Rønning, ILOS, Torill Steinfeld, ILN

COST

COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is one of the longest-running European instruments supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe.

Aesthetic seminar with Thierry de Duve

Time and place: Apr. 29, 2011 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, helga Engs hus, Auditorium 2

The celebrated and controversial German artist, Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), is as well known for his claim that “every human being is an artist” as for his sculptural oeuvre made of such unusual materials as fat and felt. He will here be put in a historical context, going back to the German Romantics, that reveals what his awesome and disquieting artistic and political ambition has been.

Thierry de Duve is a Professor of aesthetics and art history at the Département d’arts plastiques de l’Université Lille 3.

He has been a visiting professor at Sorbonne, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University, and was the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Distinguished Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania.

His books include Pictorial Nominalism; On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1993, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, Editions Dis Voir, 1996 and Kant After Duchamp, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

Organizer

Ina Blom, IFIKK / CSMN

Guest lecture: The Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements

Translating texts from elsewhere: Reflections inspired by the 1607 translation of Euclid's Elements into Chinese

Time and place: Apr. 1, 2011 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, P.A. Munch's building seminarroom 10

Karine Chemla, University Paris Diderot, will give a lecture on the Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements.

Her goal is to outline what could be an approach to translating as a historically situated operation and to this translation as a historical object.

Organizer

Karen Gammelgaard, KULTRANS

Aspects of Translation – An International Symposium

Time and place: Mar. 10, 2011 9:15 AM–Mar. 11, 2011 4:00 PM, Meeting room 12th floor, Niels Treschows hus, Blindern

Thursday, March 10

Cultural Aspects

Moderator: Antin Fougner Rydning, ILOS
Prof. Em. Marianne Lederer, ESIT: Translation, Translation Studies and Culture
Panel debate: Frode Helland, Senter for Ibsenstudier, ILN, Karl G. Johansson, ILN, Guiliano d’Amico, ILOS, Nina Zandjani, NO/NFF

Gender Aspects

Moderator: Eva Refsdal, ILOS
Prof. Miriam Schlesinger, Bar-Ilan University: His translation or her translation – does it matter?
Panel debate: Anne Birgitte Rønning, ILOS, Torill Steinfeld, ILN, Knut Andreas Grimstad, ILOS, Thomas Lundbo, NO

Friday, March 11

Literary aspects

Moderator: Karin Gundersen, ILOS
Prof. Patricia Godbout, University of Sherbrooke: Translating prose and poetry from Québec and English Canada
Panel debate: Torstein Bugge Høverstad, NO, Astrid Nome, ILOS, Jon Gunnar Jørgensen, ILN, Cecilia Alvstad, ILOS, Rosario Garnemark, ILOS

Social aspects

Moderator: Bente Christensen, ILN
Prof. Michael Henry Heim, UCLA: Guidelines for the translation of social science texts
Panel debate: Bergljot Behrens, ILOS, Jon Rognlien, NFF/NO, Elizaveta Khachaturyan, ILOS, Johan Tønnesson, ILN

Ian Hancock: The present linguistic situation of Romani in Europe.

Time and place: Feb. 24, 2011 10:15 AM–12:00 PM, Undervisningsrom 1, Georg Sverdrups hus

Professor Hancock works at the Department of Linguistics, the Department of English and at the Romani Archives and Documentation Center, all at University of Texas in Austin.

He is a distinct scholar and author in the field of Roma and Romani studies and has to his credid a great number of publications. Moreover, he is an engaged activist for the cause of Roma rights and member of numerous Roma-related organisations.

Ian Hancock has been invited to Oslo by the Norwegian Student Society and there will be also a discussion at Chateau Neuf on Wednesday the 23rd, at 7pm. There Ian Hancock will be discussing the situation of the Roma people in Europe, along with journalist and author Jahn Otto Johansen – and eventually with the Student Peace Prize laureate Dusko Kostics.

Organizer

Claus Peter Zoller, IKOS

2010

Kristin Melum Eide, Professor at NTNU: How (and why?) English is different: On finiteness and V2

Time and place: Nov. 26, 2010 10:15 AM, Seminarrom 13, P.A Munchs hus

The lack of overt inflectional markings encoding finiteness is the single most important trait separating Present Day English (PDE) from Middle English (ME) and modern Mainland Scandinavian languages (MSc).

This leads to a range of syntactic differences between MSc and PDE, e.g. ±V2. Recent studies of L2 Norwegian (Hagen, 2001 and seq.), suggest that the finiteness distinction is the most crucial and yet most difficult feature to acquire for L2 learners, resorting instead to a simplified paradigm with no finiteness distinction.

McWhorter (2005 and seq.) claims that many grammatical features existing in PDE are typical of languages being used “more as a second language than as a first” over a longer period of time.

I will argue in my talk that the loss of the morphological finiteness feature and the related loss of the V2 rule fit like a glove within the picture painted by McWhorter for this part of the history of English.

ISWOC - Information Structure and Word Order Change in Germanic and Romance Languages

This project studies the relationship between information structure and word order change in the earlier stages of English, Norse/Norwegian, German, Portuguese, Spanish and French.

Organizer

ISWOC

Guest lecture: Ewa Dąbrowska - From linguists' grammar to speakers' grammars.

Empirical Investigations of the mental status of rules

Time and place: Nov. 22, 2010 3:00 PM–4:30 PM, Seminarrom 1, PAM

Ewa Dąbrowska, Northumbria University, UK: Linguists have traditionally set great store by the principle of economy.

General rules and principles are almost universally preferred to more specific ones; and any rule or principle that can be subsumed under a more general statement is deemed redundant, and hence unnecessary.

Most linguists also assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that language learners extract the most general rules compatible with the data they are exposed to, and, consequently, that speakers of the same dialect extract the same rules.

This general methodological stance, as well as the specific assumptions that follow from it, have been challenged by usage-based approaches to language. Proponents of such approaches (Langacker 1988, 2000; Bybee 2005, 2010; Barlow and Kemmer 2000) maintain that in mental grammars, low-level rules and specific exemplars co-exist with more general rules; and to the extent that linguistics aims to be a cognitive science, adequate linguistic description must reflect this.

In this presentation, I will review the psycholinguistic evidence bearing on this issue. I will argue that low-level schemas are easier to extract, and thus play a particularly important role in language acquisition. However, adult speakers continue to rely on local generalizations even when these can be subsumed under more general rules; and while many adults also have more general representations, these are not necessarily shared by all speakers.

Research Interests

The research of Ewa Dąbrowska covers three main areas: cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.

She is Professor of Cognitive Linguistics at Northumbria University, UK.

Organizer

ILOS

Voice in Film Translation is a Translation Studies symposium.

Time and place: Nov. 11, 2010 1:00 PM–Nov. 12, 2010 12:15 PM, Niels Treschows hus, 12th floor, Niels Henrik Abels vei 36, Blindern

As part of the Voice in Translation project, it explores the idea that the concept of “voice,” partly imported from other disciplines, can be a powerful tool to describe translation practices and intercultural discursive identity.

The symposium brings together scholars discussing the following topics:

audiovisual translation as manipulation and re-enunciation
the translation of socially stigmatized language
the voice-over translation of characters
the perpetuation of linguistic stereotyping in animated film translation
the “original’s voice” as an argument in times of censorship
the translation of scripted and unscripted voices in documentary film
the voices in the film market, the transnational construction of queer voice
the impact of technological change on subtitling practices and communities

Invited speakers

Jorge Díaz-Cintas (Imperial College London): "I Subtitle, You Subtitle, We All Subtitle"
Aline Remael (Artesis University College): "The Audiovisual Translator as Re-enunciator"

Organizer

Convener: Jeroen Vandaele and Convener: Rosario Garnemark
Tags: Translation, Voice, Retranslation, Film

Published Feb. 11, 2022 6:00 PM - Last modified Feb. 1, 2024 12:25 PM

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