English Studies 2025: Discourse and Society
International Student Conference
This conference aims to provide a platform for students to present and discuss their research in English Studies, focusing on the role of discourse in language, literature, and cultural representation. Objectives include fostering interdisciplinary conversations, bringing together students and scholars from various English Studies disciplines, and encouraging critical analyses of language impact on societal norms, values, and cultural narratives. To actively encourage student participation and engagement, the conference is offered free of charge.
Contributions are invited that align with but are not limited to the following thematic areas: linguistics (pragmatics, discourse analysis, media linguistics), literary studies (narratives and discourse in literature, postcolonial discourse, critical theory and discourse), cultural studies (discourse and culture, discourse and identity, representation in popular culture), cross-disciplinary approaches (intersections of language, literature, and culture; multimodal discourse analysis).
Speakers
Malachi Black
University of San Diego, USA
Łukasz Grabowski
University of Opole, Poland
Laura Vilkaitė-Lozdienė
Vilnius University, Lithuania
Kotryna Garanasvili
Vilnius University, Lithuania
Adlina Ariffin
International Islamic University Malaysia, Malaysia
Andreas Mahler
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Malachi Black
University of San Diego, USA
About the keynote speaker
↗️ Malachi Black is a 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar to Lithuania and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.
↗️ He is the author of Indirect Light, recently published by Four Way Books, and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky).
↗️ Malachi Black is also the author of two limited-edition chapbooks: Quarantine (Argos Books, 2012) and Echolocation (Float Press, 2010). Black’s poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Believer, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Narrative, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God; Discoveries: New Writing from The Iowa Review; The Poet’s Quest for God; and A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry.
Keynote presentation On ‘Literariness’: Revising Roman Jakobson
↗️ A little more than a century ago, the young Roman Jakobson endeavored to posit a concrete basis for literary epistemology: “the subject of literary scholarship is not literature but literariness (literaturnost'), that is, that which makes of a given work a work of literature.” Over the course of his long and storied career, Jakobson would return to this concern at various intervals, elaborating a framework through which the “aesthetic” or “poetic function” of language—constitutive of literariness—could be seen and understood. Germane but adjacent to recent scholarly contributions to the study of fictionality (cf., Benedict S. Robinson’s “The True Story of Fictionality”), this lecture returns to Jakobson’s premise, reevaluates his model for understanding the “poetic function” of language, and aims to articulate a novel parameter for literariness as such.
