Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE)

Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE)
8th International Conference

“The Letter of the Law”
Law Matters in Language and Literature
http://www.cc.uoa.gr/english/HASE8

5-8 May 2011
University of Athens, Greece

Call for Papers

In the last few decades, the intersections of literature, language and law constitute an expanding field of study across the disciplines of legal studies and the humanities. The study of how literary modes figure in legal texts coincided with the study of literary texts that are concerned with law and justice, while the cultural and social spaces where law and language overlap have become increasingly important in attempts to forge new judicial tools. As the contemporary global culture poses the imperative to address and redress the coarticulation of law and justice; as the authority and legitimacy of the law are bound up with questions of ethics, often at odds with the judicial contexts of the application and interpretation of the law, this conference seeks to consider the formulation and the violation of laws and reassess the intersections between the lexis and the lex.
The conference is interested in exploring literature as a juridically-defined commodity and reassessing the impact of law on literary history, as the emergence of the modern concept of literature was determined by the formulation of copyright laws and censorship. We are also interested in the pragmatics of rhetoric and legal discourse, as well as in new research in the field of forensic linguistics, manifested in both written (e.g., judgements used in juridical settings, legislation, contracts) and spoken forms of discourse (e.g., lawyer client consultation, counsel-witness examination, interview techniques).
The conference welcomes panel and paper proposals from across the field of literary studies, critical theory, and linguistics, exploring and rethinking the complex mediations between law, language, and literature. Possible lines of inquiry may focus on (but not be limited to) a variety of themes, perspectives and approaches:

• consent and dissent
• conformity, subversion, transgression
• authority, integrity and responsibility
• lawlessness
• legal and literary constitutions of identity in colonial and postcolonial contexts
• witnesses, victims, perpetrators, judges, lawyers and legislators
• the trial as performance and the court as performance space
• interrogations and depositions
• evidence and pronouncing sentences
• human rights
• application of phonetics in forensics
• reconstructing mobile phone text conversations
• creativity vs. rigidity of legal discourse
• authorship identification
• identifying cases of plagiarism
• trademark and other intellectual property disputes

Plenary Speakers: Malcolm Coulthard (Aston University, co-author with Alison Johnson of An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence, and The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics), Costas Douzinas (Birkbeck College, University of London, author of Postmodern Jurisprudence and Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism), Lorna Hutson (University of St Andrews, author of The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama)

The conference will be held at the Central Halls (Historic Building) of the University of Athens from 5th to 8th May 2011.

The deadline for the submission of proposals for panel sessions (no longer than 500 words) and proposals for individual 20-minute papers (200-250 words) is September 20, 2010.
Panel and paper proposals should be sent to Mata Dimakopoulou (sdimakop@enl.uoa.gr)


Conference organisers:
Mata Dimakopoulou, Christina Dokou, Elly Ifantidou, Efterpi Mitsi, Angeliki Tzanne
Scientific Committee: Bessie Dendrinos, Maro Germanou, Sissy Velissariou
Faculty of English Studies
School of Philosophy
The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Zographou University Campus
157 84 Athens, Greece








Add Post To: | Digg| Technorati| del.icio.us| Stumbleupon| Reddit| BlinkList| Furl| Spurl| Yahoo| Simpy|