InterCulturalia #7, an intersection of 5 languages and several fields, organised by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in partnership with the Faculty of Geography and Geology, the Faculty of Law and the University of Medicine and Pharmacy ”Grigore T. Popa” of Iaşi took place on the 11th and 12th of April this year.
Despite the chilly weather, its spirit was as enthusiastic as ever. The topic of interrogating centers, margins and norms in the age of the (post)-canon challenged the participants and the keynote speakers to look into it and chart a vast and complex territory through interdisciplinary methods. In the German Studies, the literary canon and xenotransplantation were tackled together. Thus, the humanities and the medical sciences engaged in a dialogue.
There were 2 English panels and a British Studies panel that brought to the fore issues of the narrative force of science fiction, deterritorialization as a tool to decanonize the literary canon, a reexamination of Benjamin’s aura in the age of the social media, the theme of power in a large array of literary works and genres, Gothic transgressions of the canon, the figure of the Victorian gentleman as a dynamic force of social change and its literary avatars, the case of George MacDonald as a writer who crossed from one canon to another.
The dialogue expanded across panels and languages. In the Gender Studies panel, the issues of feminine voices in art and literature, lesbian narratives between margins and center in contemporary Romanian prose were parallelled by power and freedom in Bob Dylan’s songs, and systemic racism and subversion of the canon. Two talks, one on an existential approach to O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and another on Arthur Miller’s symbolism of place and home in Death of a Salesman revisited key texts in the American canon. With approaches to cultural representations in French teaching textbooks, the gamification of language teaching, and a series of translation and media studies topics, the French panel of linguistics, teaching methodology, translation and media threw the concept of canonicity into question. The talks in the panel of literatures written in French delved into the unmaking of the canon in Moroccan literature, frontier literature, breaking cultural and linguistic frontiers through literature, etc. Critical and theoretical approaches to literature were interrogated in two panels that mirrored their concerns with metalanguage in the French and the Anglo-Saxon model in the age of the (post)-canon. There was also a large panel on medical humanities, which engaged the medical science, law, arts and literature in an interdisciplinary dialogue. The Italian Studies panel and the Spanish Studies panel looked into colloquial language and the (post)-canon, the esperpento genre, the myth of Sisyphus in contemporary cinema, etc. The keynote speeches in English and German pleaded for an inclusive and expanded canon. In lieu of a lecture, the French organising team offered an entretien between Benjamin Bourlange, French lecturer at the Faculty of Letters, and Miguel Shema on the topic of health and political inequity. During the two days of the symposium the fields of literary studies, linguistics, translation studies, teaching methodology, law, environmental studies intersected in the 5 languages.
At the end of the first day, Mihai Bulai gave the participants and volunteers a tour of the city of Iaşi, which has always been one of the highlights of InterCulturalia. Here’s to this year’s spirit, till next year!
Written by:
Professor Dana Bădulescu
