Isomorphism of Knowledge: Scientific Projections on 20th and 21st Century Literature

Venue: Instituto Cervantes of Bucharest (38 Elisabeta Street) and at the Faculty of Law, University of Bucharest (36-46 Mihail Kogalniceanu Street)

International Conference organized by the Department of Romance Linguistics, Ibero-Romanian Languages and Literatures, Italian, Classical Philology and Modern Greek; Center of Comparative Linguistics and Cognitivism; and the Humanities division of the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (IRH-ICUB).

Invited Speakers: Christine Baron (University of Poitiers), Amelia Gamoneda (University of Salamanca), Francisco González Fernández (University of Oviedo), Pilar Alonso (University of Salamanca).

Invited Writers: Ion Manolescu, Vicente Luis Mora, Germán Sierra https://literaturaysaberes2019.wordpress.com/escritores-invitados/

Description:

Les opérations de l´esprit vont pouvoir nous servir, avant qu’on les ait appelées divertissement ou loi, théorème ou chose d´art, et qu´elles se soient éloignées, en s´achevant, de leur ressemblance.

(Paul Valéry, Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, 1894)

The aesthetic and discursive strand of contemporary thought has set out the transversal unification between epistemological domains (Baron, 2007), blurring the lines between science and literature. The conceptual mappings that suggest an active role of literary forms and structures in the articulation of the scientific thought, and the underlying scientific and technological references building the fictional worlds constitute an intertwined field of meaning intended to give an account of the empirical universe as part of a new humanism, called by some the third culture (Fernández Buey, 2013).

The main purpose of this international conference is to approach the study of 20^th and 21^stcentury literature from an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective in order to understand the necessity of a definite rapprochement between exact sciences and humanities. It is primarily concerned with highlighting structural analogies between literary discourse and scientific domains (mathematics, physics, life sciences, economics, law, etc.), from the methodological approach of epistemocriticism: algorithms, complex networks, fractal geometry, big data, chaos theory, neuroscience, biology etc.  The focus lays on approaching narrative patterns and metaphorical mechanisms in scientific texts as a possibility for producing and expressing new meaning. Special attention is paid to the fundamental role of literary theory as the science of literature for defending its cognitive abilities. The emergence of a third epistemic domain conceptualized as an integrated space generated through conceptual projections between pre-structured experiential and knowledge domains (Alonso 2014), could be a means to account for the way human beings build and maintain certain narrative patterns to observe and represent the surrounding world.

Conference languages: Spanish, French, English

For further information, please contact: literaturaysaberes2019@gmail.com