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2019 – Opole

The Sound of Silence in American Literature, Culture, and Politics
October 23-25, 2019, Opole
University of Opole

2019 Conference ProgramDownload

Conference proceedings: https://resrhetorica.com/index.php/RR/issue/view/26

The XXXI Annual Polish Association for American Studies conference included fifty-four speakers and seventy scholars in total from the following countries: Poland, the United States of America, Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, Spain, Ukraine, Greece, Portugal and Italy. Keynote addresses were delivered by: Professor King-Kok Cheung, University of California, Los Angeles; Professor Dominika Ferens, University of Wrocław and Professor Jadwiga Maszewska, University of Łódź. The American Embassy in Warsaw graciously supported the conference with a grant and the American Consulate in Cracow sent their delegation led by Ms. Amy Steinmann, the United States Consul.

The thematic focus of the conference fell on cadences of speech and silence in American literature, culture and politics. In one of its significations captured by the 1964 Simon and Garfunkel song, “the sound of silence” stands not only for thwarted communication, inability of people to communicate, the dissonance between speech and silence, but also alternative, non-verbal means of communication, hinting at a whole myriad of possibilities that the original curse of silence does not immediately suggest. Manifold lines of investigation into the conference topic illustrated Susan Sonntag’s observation that “silence is never neutral,” including variations upon the following research themes:

  • communication and dissonance traced in communication,
  • verbal and non-verbal representation,
  • silence as an alternative means of communication,
  • suppression of the voice and reclaiming of the voice,
  • the unspeakable,
  • the subaltern,
  • the significance of speech and silence in American Ethnic Literature,
  • the Postmodern denigration and appraisal of various senses,
  • gender studies related topics,
  • submerged narratives,
  • storytelling,
  • reading between the lines,
  • innuendo,
  • shame,
  • affect,
  • survivor studies,
  • trauma studies,
  • word,
  • image,
  • sign,
  • the aural and the auditory versus the visual,
  • transnational studies related topics,
  • narratology,
  • mnemonic techniques in oral poetry,
  • rhetoric,
  • the significance of speech and silence in public discourse and negotiations.

The conference was held on the grounds of the main University building, Collegium Maius, University of Opole, in the very city center of Opole, just a stone’s throw away from the XIII century-town-hall square, the Piast Tower, all major monuments and city attractions. Conference participants had an opportunity to further interact during a conference reception on the opening day and at a banquet on the second day of the conference.

Post-conference articles were published as a special issue of the Res Rhetorica journal: Rhetoric of Silence in American Studies 7 (4) 2020.

The Organizing Committee:
Dr hab. Klara Szmańko, Prof. UO, Chief Organizer
Dr hab. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, Prof. UO Co-Organizer
Prof. dr hab. Ryszard W. Wolny, Director of the Institute of Literatures
Dr Tomasz Lebiecki

Dr Tomasz Gadzina
Dr hab. Tadeusz Lewandowski, Prof. UO
Dr Sławomir Kuźnicki
Kamil Pacuda, M.A.

American Studies Specialists in Opole

From 23 to 25 October 2019 the Faculty of Philology of the OU hosted the participants of the thirty-first annual conference of the Polish Association for American Studies (PAAS).

The Conference, which takes place at a different academic centre every year, was organised this time by the English academics from the Institute of Literature Studies, with the support of researchers from the Institute of Linguistics.

The main theme for the researchers’ deliberations was the slogan “Sound of Silence in Literature, Culture and Politics”, which referred to the motives of silence, but also to the types and strategies of verbal and non-verbal expression, suppression of the voice and reclaiming of the voice, or the issue of censorship. Since silence is never neutral in its message (according to Susan Sontag), it can be perceived as a symptom of what in culture is unspeakable, passed over in silence or assumed, and thus usually not articulated, but rather left in speculation.

The session was opened by Professor Ryszard Wolny, the Director of the Institute of Literary Studies, and Amy Steinmann, U.S. Consul, who stressed the importance of a close alliance and cooperation between Poland and the USA in terms of security, deepening economic relations and research exchange, as well as Professor Tomasz Basiuk, President of PAAS from Warsaw.

Plenary lectures at the conference were delivered by: Prof. King-Kok Cheung – a well-known Asian-American literary researcher from the University of California, Los Angeles; the founder of PAAS and an outstanding translator and anthropologist of American literature Prof. Agnieszka Salska; Prof. Dominika Ferens from the University of Wrocław and Prof. Jadwiga Maszewska from the University of Łódź.

The conference was attended by over fifty speakers from Poland and abroad, including the USA, Israel, Taiwan, Germany, Spain, Ukraine, Greece and Italy. Part of the costs of the conference was covered by the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, thanks to a grant obtained by the main organizer and originator of the conference Prof. Klara Szmańko from the ILS.

Text: Prof. Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, Source: https://uni.opole.pl/page/3148/american-studies-specialists-in-opole

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