Call for contributions (International Multidisciplinary Miscellany): Tempus Tacendi. When silence communicates.
Silence punctuates much of our lives. Our everyday life is marked by increasing noise generated by the ‘net’ (R. Simone’s mediasphere, “Caught in the Net,” M. Bettini’s phonosphere, “Voices,” R.M. Schafer’s soundscape, “The Soundscape”) in which we are inevitably increasingly trapped. Silence thus acquires new connotations and meanings when it interrupts the constant background noise.
From this contemporary perspective, silences are often qualified as ‘deafening’ because they constitute an exception to the overexposure of the spoken and the written.
Throughout history and in various cultures, silence has taken on meanings that are also profoundly distant. Not only that, the distances are even more sensitive when looking at silence from different perspectives. In the arts, in music, in oral and written culture, in the performing and figurative arts, in cinema, silences communicate different meanings. Provocation or creative pause, existential necessity or creativity-generating womb, taboo or assent, these are just some of the meanings that silence can take on in the situations of our lives.
The “Tempus Tacendi” miscellany aims to collect visions, uses and meanings of silence in relation to space and time and in various cultures. Drawing inspiration from the recently published miscellany on hidden scriptures (“Hidden Scriptures, Invisible Scriptures. When the medium does not “pass” the message,” edited by Campus, Marchesini, Poccetti 2020), this new multidisciplinary volume considers the various meanings expressed by silence, or rather, by silences.
The miscellany accepts contributions from linguistics, philology, literature, history, epigraphy, archaeology, visual, figurative and performing arts, music, choreography, architecture, anthropology, and urbanism, with a view to comparing the conception and perception of silence expressed by different peoples, cultures, and eras. Transdisciplinary contributions are also welcome.
By way of example we cite some reference themes:
– intentional silence
– the unspoken, the unwritten (reading between the lines)
– tabu, assent
– silent reading
– silence as a rhetorical tool
– silence in artistic performance
– silence in the temporality of spaces
– religious, spiritual, liturgical aspects.
Interested parties are requested to send an abstract between 1,500 and 2,000 characters (including spaces) to info@alteritas.it by Sept. 15, 2021.
The work will be published as an open access e-book equipped with ISBN, evaluation by “double-blind” system and DOI.
Timetable
– proposals: by September 15, 2021
– acceptance: by September 30
– collection of contributions: by January 30, 2022
– e-book publication: by December 2022.
Sponsoring Entities
Alteritas, Trinity College Dublin, University of Naples “L’Orientale,” University of Rome
“Tor Vergata.”
Scientific Committee
Alfredo Buonopane (University of Verona, Alteritas), Alessandro Campus (University of Rome “Tor Vergata”), Anna Chahoud (Trinity College Dublin), Roberto Gini (musician), Gianmario Guidarelli, (University of Padua), Gianfrancesco Lusini (University of Naples “L’Orientale”), Andrea Manzo (University of Naples “L’Orientale”), Simona Marchesini (Alteritas Verona), Christine Morris (Trinity College Dublin), Maria Clara Rossi
(University of Verona, Alteritas).
