Empirical Study of Literature

Climate fiction—literature explicitly focused on climate change—has exploded over the last decade, and is often assumed to have a positive ecopolitical influence by enabling readers to imagine potential climate futures and persuading them of the gravity and urgency of climate change. Does it succeed? And whom does it reach? A qualitative survey of 161 American readers of 19 works of climate fiction finds that these readers are younger, more liberal, and more concerned about climate change than nonreaders of climate fiction. Drawing on concepts from ecocriticism, environmental psychology, and environmental communication, this article suggests that " cli-fi " reminds concerned readers of the severity of climate change while impelling them to imagine environmental futures and consider the impact of climate change on human and nonhuman life. However, the actions that resulted from readers' heightened consciousness reveal that awareness is only as valuable as the cultural messages about efficacious action that are in circulation. Moreover, the affective responses of many readers suggest that most works of climate fiction are leading readers to associate climate change with intensely negative emotions, which could prove counterpro-ductive to efforts at environmental engagement or persuasion. Based on one of the first studies to empirically examine the reception of environmental literature, this article demonstrates a novel interdisciplinary approach to environmental literature (empirical ecocriti-cism) and points the way to future research in this vein.

Die hier vorgelegte Arbeit versucht im Wesentlichen zwei Forschungs-desiderate aufzuarbeiten und Asymmetrien in der bisherigen Auseinander-setzung mit diesen Bereichen auszugleichen:
- Es lässt sich ein markanter Kontrast beobachten zwischen (a) den Be-mühungen, Rezeptionsforschung und -theorie als wissenschaftlichen Ansatz theoretisch zu fundieren, und (b) der Situation, dass bis heute kein grundsätzlicher Versuch unternommen wurde, die aus diesen Po-sitionen (und nahezu allen anderen literaturtheoretischen Positionen) hervorgehenden Lesermodelle systematisch zu erfassen und hinsicht-lich Vergleichbarkeit herstellender Kategorien in Relation zueinander zu setzen.
- Darüber hinaus zeigt sich ein nicht geringeres Ungleichgewicht zwi-schen (a) dem Aufwand, mit dem die Editionsphilologie eine metho-disch standardisierte oder zumindest explizit reflektierte Sicherung von Primärtexten als Vorbereitung der Textinterpretation betreibt, und (b) der philologischen und editionsphilologischen Aufmerksam-keit, die Sekundärtexten eingeräumt wird, wenn es sich um einen ebensolchen Umgang mit ihnen handelt.
Während im Kernbereich dieser Dissertation Lesermodelle verglichen und hinsichtlich ihrer Funktionalisierbarkeit für eine historisierende Literatur-wissenschaft geprüft werden, formuliert der diesen Kern umschließende Teil der Arbeit eine theoretische Begründung und einen methodischen Entwurf der historisierenden Rezeptionsanalyse selbst. Diese soll als sys-tematische Quellensichtung, -sicherung und -reflexion verstanden werden und Rezeptionszeugnisse realer Leser für hermeneutische, aber auch im weitesten Sinne empirische Ansätze der historisierend ausgerichteten Lite-raturwissenschaft vorbereiten und fruchtbar machen.

Emotions have a life beyond the immediate eliciting situation, as they tend to be shared with others by putting the experience in narrative form. Narrating emotions helps us to express, understand, and share them: the way we tell stories influences how others react to our emotions, and impacts how we cope with emotions ourselves. In Emotion and Narrative, Habermas introduces the forms of oral narratives of personal experiences, and highlights a narrative's capacity to integrate various personal and temporal perspectives. Via theoretical proposals richly illustrated with oral narratives from clinical and non-clinical samples, he demonstrates how the form and variety of perspectives represented in stories strongly, yet unnoticeably, influence the emotional reactions of listeners. For instance, narrators defend themselves against negativity and undesired views of themselves by excluding perspectives from narratives. Habermas shows how parents can help children, and psychotherapists can assist patients, to enrich their narratives with additional perspectives.

In this article, we profile what we define as an " empirical cognitive poetic " approach to immersion in digital fiction by combining text-driven stylistic analysis with insights from theories of cognition and an empirical study. We provide empirically substantiated insights to show how immersion is experienced cognitively and site-specifically by using Andy Campbell and Judi Alston's (2015) digital fiction installation WALLPAPER as a case study. Our approach is unique in that it marks the first systematic attempt at analysing immersive features in digital fiction using a replicable method and, perhaps more importantly, at empirically investigating these immersive features. While current theories of immersion suggest that it is a completely absorbing experience, we show that immersion is an intermittent process, stimulated by multiple immersive features which interact. We also argue that any investigation into immersion in digital media must address the doubly-embodied nature of that reading experience and propose the category of 'doubly-deictic I' to define first-person pronoun use that signals double-situatedness. We empirically verify that immersion in digital fiction can be categorised as either narrative or ludic immersion. However, we also show that spatio-temporal immersion must take place before any other forms of immersion can. We also offer a new analytical method for immersive features in digital fiction by developing deictic shift theory for the affordances of digital media. We add the categories of 'interactional deixis' and 'audio deixis' to account for the multimodal nature of immersion in digital fiction. We also show how extra-textual features can contribute to or enhance immersion and thus propose that they should be accounted for when analysing immersion across media. While we focus on one case-study in this article, we suggest that the analytical framework and reader response protocol we have developed can be applied to other texts.

This study investigated the effects of text genre (expository, life narrative, literary narrative), personal factors (trait empathy, personal experience, exposure to literature), and affective responses during reading (most relevantly: sympathy/empathy with the character) on two types of empathy: empathic understanding and pro-social behavior (donating). Participants (N = 210) read two texts within the same genre, about depression and grief, with one week between sessions. A genre effect was observed for pro-social behavior in the case of depression, with more people donating in the life narrative condition. Personal experience predicted empathic understanding and prosocial behavior for depression, but not for grief. Empathic understanding was further predicted by trait empathy, exposure to literature, and sympathy/empathy with the character. These results demonstrate the relevance of looking at readers’ personal characteristics and suggest a repeated exposure effect of literature on empathic understanding.

Literary works of fiction about climate change are becoming more common and more popular among critics and readers. While much research has indicated the persuasive effectiveness of narrative storytelling in general, empirical research has not yet tested the effects of reading climate fiction. This paper reports results from the first experimental study to test the immediate and delayed impacts of climate fiction on readers' beliefs and attitudes about climate change. We found that reading climate fiction had small but significant positive effects on several important beliefs and attitudes about global warming-observed immediately after participants read the stories. However, these effects diminished to statistical nonsignificance after a one-month interval. In this paper, we review the relevant literature, present the design and results of this experiment, and discuss implications for future research and practice.

Does environmental literature lead readers to be more aware of environmental injustice? To empathize with climate migrants? Who reads a book of climate fiction, and why? This article, part of a thematic cluster of Empirical Ecocriticism, offers empirical answers to these questions through a survey of 86 American readers of The Water Knife (a 2015 novel by Paolo Bacigalupi) and a parallel survey of 183 Americans who regularly read fiction. Its methodology includes a novel measure for evaluating an individual's awareness of environmental or climate injustice. It finds that The Water Knife was effective at reaching a diverse group of readers, raising awareness about climate injustice, and leading readers to empathize with climate migrants. However, its violent, dystopic future led some readers to fear climate migrants, which might lead to support for reactionary responses to climate change. These results are situated within relevant scholarship from ecocriticism, environmental communication, the empirical study of literature, and environmental psychology.

Comics are complex documents whose reception engages cognitive processes such as scene perception, language processing, and narrative understanding. Possibly because of their complexity , they have rarely been studied in cognitive science. Modeling the stimulus ideally requires a formal description, which can be provided by feature descriptors from computer vision and computational linguistics. With a focus on document analysis, here we review work on the computational modeling of comics. We argue that the development of modern feature descriptors based on deep learning techniques has made sufficient progress to allow the investigation of complex material such as comics for reception studies, including experimentation and computational modeling of cognitive processes.

Michael Kimmel and Thomas Eder brought together established experts and younger researchers at the University of Vienna in May 2008 to reflect on and contribute to the »cognitive turn«, a major development in recent cultural theory and criticism. This turn, as the conference program said, grounds literary reception in general human psychology and everyday knowledge without losing sight of the specificity of literary aesthetics. It addresses central topics of literary structure and response in new ways. I will briefly contextualize the conference’s themes, review the papers and comment on them, then discuss them in light of some recent debates in the Journal of Literary Theory.

Although personal relevance is key to sustaining an audience’s interest in any given narrative, it has received little systematic attention in scholarship to date. Across centuries and media, adaptations have been used extensively to bring temporally or geographically distant narratives “closer” to the recipient under the assumption that their impact will increase. In this review article, we review experimental and other empirical evidence on narrative processing in order to unravel which types of personal relevance are more likely to be impactful than others, which types of impact (e.g. aesthetic, therapeutic, persuasive) they have been found to generate, and where their power becomes excessive or outright detrimental to reader experience.

Associations between anthropology and literature are usually expressed in either of the two aspects: as a literary anthropology or anthropology of literature. The present text offers a discussion on a third area where these disciplines can meet . namely, anthropology of literary reading which focuses on empirical readers. I start my presentation of this approach from situating anthropology of literary reading amongst other domains dealing with empirical recipient (i.e. psychology and sociology of literature). The following sections methodologically analyse psychological, sociological and anthropological accounts of literary reception, focusing on the manner in which these approaches reciprocally complement one another. I subsequently show the opportunities provided by anthropology of literature in the field of analysis of reception, owed to inclusion in the research horizon of issues connected with the context of reading and its role in recipients. everyday life. I conclude by considering potential usefulness of such research to literary science.

Literary fiction has been credited with considerable power to improve attitudes toward out-groups. It was even argued that it has been an important factor behind the global decline of violence against various minorities in the last centuries. Could it also help to reduce the human-inflicted suffering of animals? To test this, we studied the attitude toward animal welfare of n = 921 (experimental group) people of both sexes who read a short fragment of an unpublished novel with a motif of the physical abuse of an animal. The control group (n = 912) read a fragment of a similar length but not related to animals. After reading the text all subjects filled out an on-line questionnaire with seven items (camouflaged among many others items) measuring attitudes toward animal welfare. The questionnaire included also demographical questions, such as whether the subject keeps pets. We found that in comparison with the control group, the experimental group was significantly more concerned about animal welfare. This result indicates that literary fiction can influence attitudes toward other species. It is also worth noting that our study is characterized by a high level of ecological validity, i.e. a relatively high extent to which its results can be generalized (or extended) to real-world settings. Due to its specific design, which involved the cooperation of a best-selling author and his publisher, the study approximated the typical conditions in which people read fiction in a remarkably accurate way. Finally, our research has potential practical implications for promoting animal welfare.

This fine collection of papers is the successful outcome of an international research project carried out by advanced undergraduate and graduate students from four different countries. Exceptionally, the papers do not rehash old ideas or themes but offer a fresh approach to a wide range of topics from language, literature and culture. This innovative attitude is the result of newly devised empirical methods of research, which clearly show that these students are well on their way to becoming inventive and resourceful researchers. Indeed, their papers must be a source of methodological inspiration for students (and their teachers!) all over the world struggling with the question of how to conceive and carry out a research project on a linguistic, literary and cultural topic. [Peter Verdonk / Emeritus Professor of Stylistics at the University of Amsterdam]

This volume connects three important themes and acts upon them. First, it provides empirical studies of literary texts and experiences, once again proving the value of empirical studies of literature. It thereby nicely forecasts the future of literary studies. Secondly, it highlights the connections between research groups in different continents, showing the strength of international collaborations. It thereby nicely forecasts the future of intercultural research. Thirdly, it presents work from students, illustrating upcoming talent. It thereby nicely forecasts the future of academia. This volume presents research that should excite anybody working in literary studies. Moreover, this is a volume any undergraduate and graduate student in this area of research should read – for its interdisciplinary ideas, for its intercultural message and for the path it paves for exciting research in language and literature. [Max Louwerse / President of the International Society for Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL)]

Der Satz »Text T hat die Bedeutung B« lässt sich in dieser Form durch keine Empirie stützen. Anders der Satz »Text T hat für mich die Bedeutung B«. Dieser Satz erhält seinen Sinn aus der Berufung auf die eigene Erfahrung. Auch ein Satz der Art »Autor A meinte B mit Text T« (oder »Autor A meinte mit Text T nicht P«) lässt sich in vielen Fällen durch Selbstzeugnisse des Autors plausibilisieren. Hier kommen Quellen ins Spiel, Hinweise auf Erfahrung anderer, ›Daten‹ also, die als solche erst einmal ›erhoben‹ werden müssen. Wir beschäftigen uns in der folgenden Darstellung mit einem etwas weiter gefassten Typus von Bedeutungszuschreibungen, nämlich mit Aussagen vom Typus »Für den Zeitgenossen Zn hatte Text T die Bedeutung B« bzw. »… nicht die Bedeutung P«. Der Autor wird in dieser Betrachtungsweise ebenfalls als »Zeitgenosse« geführt, d. h. mit einbezogen, aber nicht als Bürge einer irgendwie wahreren oder besseren Bedeutung des Textes privilegiert.

Związki antropologii z literaturą są zazwyczaj ujmowane w dwóch aspektach: jako antropologia literacka lub antropologia literatury. Niniejszy tekst przybliża trzecią płaszczyznę spotkań tych dyscyplin, jaką może być antropologia odbioru literatury, koncentrująca się na czytelnikach empirycznych. W kolejnych częściach artykułu poddaję analizie metodologicznej psychologiczne, socjologiczne i antropologiczne badania odbioru, prezentując możliwości, jakie daje antropologia literatury na polu analizy odbioru dzięki włączeniu do horyzontu badawczego zagadnień związanych z kontekstem lektury i jej rolą w życiu codziennym odbiorców.

Throughout history, it has been often claimed by activists, writers, and scholars that narrative em-pathy for animals influences social attitudes toward other species. The problem is that there are no experimental data to support this opinion. Our study aimed to address this limitation. Involving 209 participants and three different narratives, it sought to experimentally establish whether narrative empathy for animals can improve attitudes toward animals and their welfare. The results were positive, and in the conclusion we discuss their implications, situating them in the context of research on the prosocial effects of narrative empathy.

In order to get to the point where one would understand just what his statement actually meant and referred to, one would have to know much about the true nature of royalty. And, that, is a very complex subject. As I have been explaining in other papers, just as we have a 1% today, this same “condition” existed for a very long time – a very long time. And the reason that it had remained so, is because those ancient royal individuals saw to it that it would; by creating many methods and means in which to secure that position for their own kind or 'race' (the condition, is now called 'Royal Supremacy'). [II]

What I have been educating people to is the existence of a ancient (unified) royal oligarchy. [III] They saw themselves as a separate race. That's right. A separate 'race'; the royal race. [IV] And, as I had said, this has been so for a very long time. The creation of an 'empire' where even 'officially' and publicly, the leaders of the religious faction helped to secure that position for the elite within that system, was created when the Holy Roman Empire was created (and actually, even before that time). [V]

Artykuł prezentuje wyniki badania kategorii klasyfikujących blogi w dużych, polskich serwisach blogerskich. Celem badania była próba odnalezienia wyznaczników gatunkowych blogu na poziomie potocznym, tj. ustalenie, jak sami blogerzy klasyfikują swoją twórczość. Badanym kategoriom przypisano pięć głównych wyznaczników: tematyczny, formalny, komunikacyjny, gatunkowy i stylistyczny. Potoczna klasyfikacja blogów odwołuje się głównie do kryteriów tematycznych i trudno na ich podstawie wyróżnić jakieś gatunki blogowe (poza odwołaniami do form dobrze ugruntowanych, jak np. pamiętniki). Sposoby kategoryzowania blogów w serwisach przywodzą na myśl klasyfikację książek czy przekazów medialnych.

Popular fiction is expelled from literary canons and is usually treated as a form of ludic or emotional relaxation and an escape from daily problems (Nell 1988; Radway 1984).  Drawing on the results of my study on Polish readers, I claim that reading popular fiction, as an everyday-life activity, is much more than a simple leisurely activity, and plays a vital role in the way readers cope with their surrounding environment. Employing the framework of phenomenological sociology I argue that reading popular fiction can be described in terms of a rational action undertaken in order to achieve specific pragmatic goals, such as emotional tuning or search for subjectively important information.

Article in Literary Hub summarizing some of the lessons from my three empirical studies on the influence of climate fiction on real-world readers. The hyperlinks didn't get included in the PDF, so it's better to read it online at https://lithub.com/does-climate-fiction-make-a-difference.

Woolf's work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. These investigated the way in which different perspectives coexist and alternate in her writing, suggesting that the use of such techniques often results in ambiguous perspective shifts. However, there is hardly any empirical evidence as to whether readers experience difficulty while reading her narratives as a result of these narrative techniques. This article examines empirically readers' responses to extracts from Woolf's two major novels-To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway-to provide evidence to whether Woolf's techniques for the presentation of characters' voices, thoughts and perspectives represent a challenge for readers. To achieve this, a mixed-methods approach that combines a stylistic analysis with a detailed questionnaire has been employed. Selected extracts that were hypothesised to be complex due to the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue were modified by substituting these with less ambiguous modes of consciousness presentation, such as direct speech or direct thought. Readers' responses to the modified and unmodified versions of the same extracts were compared: results show that the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue increases the number of perspectives identified by readers, suggesting that this technique increases the texts' difficulty, laying a more solid ground for future investigations.

The philosophy of history in Boris Yotsov's interpretation describes how the empirical study of the literary history seeks the non-empirical arguments of its experience and subject. The literary historian focuses on the philosophy of history to show the relation between the research and its social message. The analysis of B. Yotsov's studies makes possible to reconstruct the public expectations towards university knowledge and its social roles in the first half of the twentieth century, both in Bulgarian and European contexts. The philosophy of Bulgarian and European history is defined by Boris Yotsov in analyses of Paisiy Hilendarski, Tomáš G. Masaryk and the idea of Slavic (literary) reciprocity.

СОВРЕМЕННОГО ЗАРУБЕЖНОГО ЛИТЕРАТУРОВЕДЕНИЯ 1 В статье дается обзор идей эмпирического направления современной зарубежной рецептивной критики (Empirical Studies of Literature). При этом акцент делается на том, как приверженцами этого направления определяется эвристический статус эмпирической информации и решается проблема, связанная с эпистемологической и институциональной двойственностью опытного знания в исследовании восприятия литературного произведения.

In this article, we profile an empirically grounded, cognitive approach to immersion in digital fiction by combining text-driven stylistic analysis with insights from theories of cognition and reader-response research. We offer a new analytical method for immersive features in digital fiction by developing deictic shift theory for the affordances of digital media. We also provide empirically substantiated insights to show how immersion is experienced cognitively by using Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s (2015) digital fiction piece WALLPAPER as a case study. We add ‘interactional deixis’ and ‘audible deixis’ to Stockwell’s (2002) model to account for the multimodal nature of immersion in digital fiction. We also show how extra-textual features can contribute to immersion and thus propose that they should be accounted for when analysing immersion across media. We conclude that the analytical framework and reader response protocol that we develop here can be adapted for application to ...

This chapter aims at describing the networks within the Research and Development in Empirical Studies (REDES) Project, an intercultural enterprise aimed at promoting empirical studies of culture. Probably the first and only international project in the Humanities which prepares new researchers through online communication, the experience is believed to be scalable to other areas as it enables students to acquire the methodological techniques needed to undertake and carry out research in an environment totally different from the traditional University classroom. The chapter traces the history of the project from its foundation in 2002, explains in detail how it was set up and evaluates the contributions of this joint effort. The problems met along the way are also pointed out. The chapter concludes with the challenges still to be faced. This case report stands as a proof of the impact of technology in preparing human resources for the Humanities.

Fiction, more than expository text, nurtures intimate connections between text and the reader’s life experiences. This dimension of reader response is underexplored in relation to children. Adapting methods from Empirical Literary Studies to educational research objectives, we employed the concept of ‘remindings,’ i.e. reminiscing prompted by text, in studying children’s life-resonant responses to self-selected leisure books. Six workshops were run in primary classrooms during which participants (N = 148; age 8–11) engaged in remindings and mental imagery. Written remindings were then analysed for systematic variation across fiction book genres (Real-world vs. Fantasy; Relationships vs. Adventure). We found that Real-World Adventure books prompted remindings of discrete life events, while Real-World Relationships books prompted remindings of more diffuse experiences. Fantasy Adventure books were the least likely to prompt remindings. Further genre-based differences emerged in the distribution of themes within remindings. We consider the consequences of these insights for supporting young readers.

Analyses of the worldviews presented by texts have identified grammatical
patterns in terms of the transitivity system outlined in systemic-functional
grammar (Halliday, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014). While
contributing to different interpretations of mind style and ideology in
different contexts, these patterns and interpretative effects often bear
fundamental similarities. In this article, I investigate this underlying
similarity in transitivity analyses, or ‘interpretative “lowest common
denominator”’ (Simpson, 1993: 105), from a cognitive stylistic perspective. This article attempts to characterise this low-level effect and test it
empirically. It takes as its starting point a body of analyses in stylistics and
critical discourse analysis, which repeatedly link comparable sets of
grammatical features (e.g. goal-less intransitive clauses and metonymic
agency) to a diminished sense of intentionality, awareness and control in
the human agent responsible (e.g. Halliday, 1971; Kennedy, 1991;
Simpson and Canning, 2014; Trew, 1979). I argue that the shared
interpretative effects of these stylistic choices can be understood in terms
of Cognitive Grammar’s model of construal (Langacker, 2008). Specifically,
I propose that the effects of transitivity choices are fundamentally effects
for our attribution of mental states, or ‘mind-modelling’ (Stockwell, 2009)
of participants, as part of a construal. Finally, I describe an online reader
response experiment which tests this proposal among a wider sample of
readers. Combining methods from experimental studies of mind attribution
in psychology with a controlled alteration of texts by Conrad and
Hemingway, this research reveals predictable cognitive effects of
transitivity choices across contexts.

O título do presente volume, Avaliações & perspectivas: estudos empíricos em Letras, já sugere a sua relevância para os pesquisadores da área. Resultante de evento promovido pelo grupo de pesquisa internacional REDES (Research and Development in Empirical Studies), o livro oferece um material crítico significativo, seja no âmbito dos estudos literários e linguísticos, seja no nível de articulação entre estes campos de estudo e a sociologia, a psicologia, a educação, e as tecnologias da comunicação.

As pesquisas empíricas aqui coletadas possuem um princípio norteador: a vinculação entre a produção de conhecimento e a sua ressonância no contexto social amplo, de modo a transcender o espaço físico da sala de aula. São pesquisas que possuem uma relevância para além do contexto acadêmico porque são guiadas por parâmetros de autonomia, consciência crítica e experiência criativa e criadora. Outra característica importante diz respeito à atenção dada ao processo de construção do conhecimento, que não dispensa as atitudes questionadoras, as experiências sensoriais e cognitivas, e o valor da emoção, da memória narrativa singular e coletiva do educador.

Os textos que compõem o livro são instigantes porque revelam também o compromisso e entusiasmo dos pesquisadores com seus objetos de estudo, que incluem reflexões sobre o ensino de literatura, a força persuasiva das narrativas, as possibilidades educativas na formação de professores, a potencialidade do texto literário na formação subjetiva do leitor, atitudes efetivas que possam contribuir com o desenvolvimento e aprimoramento do processo de leitura.

Em época de saturação de informação e desmantelamento de crenças, faz-se necessário e urgente valorizar o poder transformador das ciências humanas, dentre as quais, aquelas que lidam visceralmente com as linguagens e seus modos de construir significados. Este livro evidencia que a produção de conhecimento é inseparável de sua função social. [Genilda Azeredo / Universidade Federal da Paraíba]

In recent years, researchers have conducted empirical studies in reader response, which have either contested or confirmed earlier theories. Indeed, the 1970s and 1980s saw the shift from interpreting the page to looking into reading processes, but the studies remained on the level of abstraction. Our study follows the trend towards evidence-grounded investigations by examining real readers' reactions to poetry and innovates by looking into cross-cultural receptions of a poem in its original and translated versions. To verify whether responses to poetry are universal or culture specific, a rigorous method was adopted: 500 humanities undergraduate students from two different countries (Brazil and Ukraine) were asked to read Poe's "The Lake" and to gauge their reactions using a questionnaire with a fifteen-item semantic differential scale. Participants read either the original version in English (i.e., a foreign language to them) or its translation into their mother tongue (Portuguese, Russian, or Ukrainian). The results point to statistically significant differences within and between the groups. The findings indicate that first-hand responses to poetry are largely culture specific and that the translations also influence reactions.

This call for papers is proposed by the PhD Students in Foreign Literatures and Languages of the University of Verona with the support of the Project of Excellence in Digital Humanities. The conference aims at bringing together current and prospective PhD Students and early-stage researchers who wish to share and discuss their work around the themes of past, history and memory.