The Said and the Unsaid

First International Conference on Language, Literature and Cultural Studies

Department of Foreign Languages Faculty of Humanities University of Vlora “Ismail Qemali” Vlore, Albania 11-13 September 2010 Deadline for proposals: 1 June 2010 “Enough, one must go on, these are things that one thinks but does not say.” Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz Levi’s quotation naturally reminds us that the unsaid engages the area of thinking, of silence, whereas the said that of utterance and language. Interpreted in these terms, the said and the unsaid occupy a presence – absence position, which proposes, to use a structuralist term, a binary opposition between thought and language. Generally speaking, although language is conceived as materialization of thought, they are not necessarily the same. It happens that other barriers (mental, psychological, social, ethical etc) interfere and do not allow our mouth to give shape to what our mind thinks. The unsaid becomes in this way a kind of subtext, an unconscious that exerts great power for interpretation. The conference welcomes papers which involve issues exploring the relationship between silence and speech, language and thought and their representation in areas of linguistics, literature, cultural studies etc. Papers are welcomed from but are not limited to: o Discourse analysis o Pragmatics o Linguistics o Semiotics o British and commonwealth literature o American literature o Literary theory o Literary criticism o Cultural studies o Translation studies The conference language is English. All papers will be considered for publication in the conference proceedings. Further information is available on our conference website: [url=http://univlora.edu.al/fe/lang/al/konf/Home.html]http://univlora.edu.al/fe/lang/al/konf/Home.html[/url] Please send your abstracts (about 250 words) for papers (20 min) as an MS word attachment to the following Email-address by 1 June 2010: sau2010@univlora.edu.al Abstracts should include: 1. title of paper 2. name and affiliation 3. e-mail address 4. section 5. 3-5 keywords