Call for Papers for the conference Transnational literature(s) in a polyphonic world: multilingualism as a source of literary creativity

In the German-speaking cultural landscape, festivals that celebrate music, art and film and offer a stage for artists are well established and socially well received. But also festivals for literature, in which the written word is made audible and the topics dealt with in the books can be discussed with the authors themselves, are becoming increasingly important.

globale° – Festival für Border-Crossing Literature exists in Bremen since 2007, and started as “GLOBALE festival for transcultural contemporary literature”. Its aim was to contribute to the debate about the so called “migration literature”, a label that was widely used in the German-speaking context of the 1990s and 2000s, and was often related to the works of authors who wrote in German but had a different mother tongue, like Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Artur Becker and Marica Bodrožić.

The influence of migration literature on the German-language literary panorama is also visible in the German cultural scene: in order to support writers of “non-German language origin”, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize was established in the 1980s, then discontinued in 2017, and has been awarded again in a modified form since 2018. It is thus evident that the debate about the language of literature, the contextual connections of the authors’ origins, and how to make them visible to the public is not over. Globale° festival has been providing a forum for this discussion for 17 years. Readings, workshops and panels are organized, and there are ongoing collaborations with various institutions in Germany, Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Ukraine.

In this context, organized in cooperation with the Italian inter-university research center POLYPHONIE, a conference on globale° shall explore the dimensions of its festival and the impact of the therein addressed literary phenomena on society and its creative industries.

The inter-university research center POLYPHONIE was founded on the initiative of colleagues from the Universities of Genoa and Catania, and is closely linked to the research project „Polyphonie. Mehrsprachigkeit_Kreativität_Schreiben“ (“Polyphony. Multilingualism_Creativity_Writing”). The latter was born in 2009 from the collaboration of Italian and Austrian scholars who pursued a common research interest, namely the connection between multilingualism and creativity in writing. The web portal http://www.polyphonie.at represents the concrete implementation of this research project. Its objective is the systematic and interdisciplinary research of the manifold connections between multilingualism and creativity in writing, in order to investigate the more or less close relationship between individual/social multilingualism and creativity in writing in general, and in particular literary creativity. The multilingual portal includes a platform that, as a scientific journal, offers a chance to publish scientific contributions (ISSN: 2304-7607). The conference proceedings will be published there as a special issue on globale°.

Therefore, the aim of the conference is the scientific examination of globale°

and of topics that are both embedded in the festival and in the research focus of

POLYPHONIE. We encourage proposals on the following questions: