The Diálogos conference, the Graduate Student Advisory Committee’s most important event of the year, brings together all members of the Spanish and Portuguese community at IU. For graduate students, it is a professional development opportunity, a forum for sharing research, and also an opportunity to network with graduate student scholars from other institutions.
Please contact the organizers at gsac@iu.edu if you have any questions regarding the Diálogos XXI conference.
Call for papers in Linguistics and Literature for Diálogos XXI, February 24th-25th
Denise DuPont (online keynote):
In her diverse writings, pioneering Spanish feminist Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) often used the word “cloister” as a metonym for monastic life, particularly in relation to female characters who retreat from the world by entering into this sheltering space. But the term “cloister” also refers in a number of texts by this Galician author to a liminal zone – an interior patio, an enclosed structure, a familiar landscape outside a bedroom window – seen by one of Pardo Bazán’s characters in a moment of self-reflection, self-definition, or change of direction. I highlight the word “seen” because in this paper, I will contrast the cloister as seen in Pardo Bazán with spaces created by Spanish philosopher María Zambrano (1904-1991), who calls herself an “escucha” (witness, eavesdropper, or even spy), for (over)hearing self-referential discourse by women such as Antigone in her cave, and Mary at the Annunciation. In the texts of Pardo Bazán and Zambrano, the “seen” or “heard” space also has a temporal quality that forms a part of the feminist agenda of the two authors: both Pardo and Zambrano give women space and time to speak the truth they live, as selves in process. I will close by relating the spatial-temporal opportunity of the cloister to the freedom from being held hostage by one’s own suffering, as discussed in Here Lies Bitterness: Healing from Resentment (2023), a recent translation of a study by French philosopher and psychoanalyst Cynthia Fleury.
Scott Schwenter (in-person keynote):
While address forms have been widely studied across languages, including Spanish and Portuguese, the principal focus has been squarely on 2SG forms (tú, usted, vos, su merced) while nearly no studies can be found on 2PL forms such as vosotros and ustedes. Terrell Morgan and I have published two articles on these latter forms (2016, 2021) and claim that there is much to be said—and learned—from these forms. In this talk, I will present some reasons why 2PL forms have been ignored, some of our main research findings, and some of the outstanding challenges remaining for 2PL research. My hope is that this presentation will spur on additional research on the use of 2PL forms in other varieties of Spanish, Portuguese, and beyond.
Eduardo Ledesma (online keynote):
Over the decades Augusto de Campos has transfigured his early Concrete poems by deploying the newest media technologies to dream up a poetry that, in his words, “longs for the future.” Through the transcreation or creative translation of his poems across different media, works that originated in static formats such as paper became increasingly material, three dimensional, sonorous, and kinetic – in essence they became what William Carlos Williams understood poems to be, little machines with words as gears, bearings, and pistons in motion. With technology De Campos manipulates poetic time and space, actualizing a kineticism that was previously only virtually present through metaphor, optical illusions, and suggested movement. His earlier poems articulated the foundational dynamic principles and were the motors propelling a poetic sensibility that blurred generic and semiotic distinctions between symbolic and iconic systems of representation. His later works mobilize the plastic and filmic nature of the digital and allow the actualization of the metaphors of movement of the early period, endowing the poetic image with new visualization capabilities. A symbiosis between image and script, human and machine, digital and analog become central themes in De Campos’ later transcreations. The poet’s restless quest to find the perfect way to integrate the various dimensions of poetry (image, sound, texture, movement) is itself a metaphor of perpetual movement which corroborates the existence of a dynamic principle in De Campos’ poetry, a poetry that is perpetually in (forward) motion.
The College of Arts