Final programme is now available

Dear participants,

You can now download the fully updated programme of the conference.

Looking forward to welcoming you to Ploieşti!

Arrival to Ploiesti

Dear participants to EPL 2012,

Please fill in your name, confirm the dates and approximate time of your arrival (when you get to the airport, train station etc.) and tick the meals that you need in the table below (if you are a vegetarian, please state so).

If you are interested in going on a trip on Saturday afternoon (starting 12.45, arriving to Ploieşti late in the evening), please state so as well. (Costs of the trip are not included in the conference fee and will be available soon).

Please also take into account that the cocktail on Thursday evening will take place in the University main hall and the dinner on Friday evening will be at Hanul Dacilor (3 kms outside the city). For this, you will need a taxi (fares are on the site) – expected fare if you use the companies we recommend is around 10 lei (less than 2 euro) for a taxi. Please note that dinner is included in the conference fee; however, you will be charged for any alcoholic consumption. We will soon provide you with several menu options for the dinner on Friday and you will be asked to state your preference.

Here you can find the table to be downloaded, filled in and sent by Monday, October 1st. Please send your options to conference.upg@gmail.com

SWIFT code

Dear participants,


Please check with your bank the SWIFT code for the payment of the fee. The correct code is INGBROBU.

Payment methods

Please check the updated section Abstract submission and registration, where you will find details about the payment methods.

Extended Call for papers

Please note the extended deadline for proposals: 15 June 2012. Follow this link to read the original Call for papers.

Link to Call for papers

In case you have difficulty in finding the original Call for papers, please follow this link.

Abstract submission

You can find an additional method of abstract submission in the News and updates section.

Version française

Ici vous pouvez voir la version française de l'annonce de la conférence

Call for papers

The Department of Philology, University of Ploieşti

 in collaboration with

School of English, Communication and Philosophy – Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, United Kingdom

and

Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, Bern University, Switzerland

invite you to the international conference

ETHOS/ PATHOS/ LOGOS

The Sense and Place of Persuasiveness in Linguistic, Literary and Philosophical Discourse

18-20 October 2012

Ploieşti

In his Rhetoric, Aristotle defined the act of persuasion as the interaction between three elements: ethos (Greek for ‘character’, which designated the image of the self built by the orator to inspire trustworthiness and credibility), pathos (the arousing of emotions in one’s audience), and logos (referring both to discourse and reason). While these notions have remained conceptual cornerstones in major intellectual endeavours of western thought, ethos in particular developed in a distinctly different direction (from the individual to the collective or national) in the nineteenth century, from Hegel’s understanding of the German word for ‘ethics’, Sittlichkeit, as what binds the members of a community to a place. Similarly, with the advent of Heideggerian ontology and its rediscovery of pre-Socratic heritage, logos, hitherto restricted to ‘logic’ and reason, and classically opposed to muthos (fable, fiction, therefore untruth) by philosophy against poetry, was given a more existential dimension as what the Being-in-the-world inhabits (‘Language is the house of Being’ in Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’) by the German philosopher, for whom ‘Poetically Man Dwells’.

While linguists (Austin and, later, various pragmatist schools), sociologists (Bourdieu: his notion of 'habitus' and his critique of a purely linguistic performative in Austinian theories) and rhetoric- or discourse-focused critics (Amossy) mediating between them, have endeavoured to analyze discursive exchanges in oral as well as written situations within this broadly post-Aristotelian framework, no conference has yet explicitly tried to re-address this conceptual triad in the light of these more ‘modern’ philosophical re-orientations.

The aim of this symposium is therefore to investigate how a post-Hegelian (as well as Derridean) construction of ethos as indissociable from a sense of place, coupled with a more extended and generous notion of logos no longer opposed to 'fiction' or synonymous with persuasive truth, can be brought to bear on how both rational ideas and emotions (pathoi) are expressed, both in public forms of address (e.g. political discourses) and literary texts pertaining to different generic conventions. If, as Derrida famously claims in ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’ - including in defence of persecuted writers - 'literature is the right to say everything/anything' (‘le droit de tout dire’), how can this right be exercised with an 'ethical' sense of place and with an awareness of the 'cultural pathologies' of a given audience? More generally, how can one construct a different concept (and pragmatic operation) of 'persuasion' across linguistic and literary genres?

Possible session topics:

• Ethics and rhetoric of discussion and argumentation
•  Techniques of (per)suasion from consensus to coercion
• Alternative constructions of implication, implicature (Grice), ‘implicitness’ (implied narrator, implied author) in linguistic and literary discourses
• Citation as a ‘parasitic’ act or as an act of hospitality
• Comparative approaches between ‘face-to-face’ encounters in oral discursive situations and narrative or dramatic polylogues
• The status of confessional and testimonial narratives: fiction and/ or truth
• The affective role and discursive construction of loci memoriae (Nora’s lieux de mémoire)