Call for Papers for an Online Symposium

Saturday 7th September 2024

London as Literary Babel: Voices and Vernaculars

What does it mean for the city to speak? What capacity does the literary arts possess for capturing voices, accents, and communication in a city where at least 300 languages are spoken every day.

In this digital symposium, we will explore London as a city of voices. This includes gestures, non-verbal cues, jarring traffic, public announcements (“mind the gap”), snippets of birdsong, noisy neighbours, rhythmic shuffling footsteps, pounding rainstorms, buzzing of electric vehicles – all these traces make up the texture of ordinary lives played out in London’s ‘roaring cauldron’.

We welcome proposals for 10-15-minute short papers, which consider any period or genre of literature about, set in, inspired by, or alluding to central and suburban London and its environs, from the city’s roots in pre-Roman times to its imagined futures. While the main focus of the conference will be on literary texts, we actively encourage interdisciplinary contributions relating to the creative arts, performance culture, poetics, acoustics, urban planning, sustainability, orality, sound, music, and film.

Themes for consideration may include (but are not limited to):

• Soundscapes, acoustics, and the sounded/unsounded components of space. 
• ‘Envoicing’ urban places, localities, and domestic interiors.
• The grain of London speech: cockney cultural identity; characterological and typological qualities of speech; colloquialisms, dialect, idiolect and slang.
• Speech diversity: multicultural London English (MLE), hybridity, patois and ‘nation language’.
• Urban auscultation and the listening body: modes of attunement to London voices, beats and sonic qualities.
• The body poetic and speech projection: slam and spoken word, prose monologues, rapping, song culture and ‘orature’.  
• Speech prejudice, social group salience, code switching and accent discrimination. 
• The genealogy of elocution, speech training and linguistic imperialism.
• Oral histories, testimony work and transmitting the resources of cultural memory through real and imagined narratives of lost voices.
• Public speaking, protestation, and proclamation: voices of dissent and outrage, vs. voices of authority and social control.
• Political discourse, sociability, civility and modes of debate and rhetorical expression.
• Echoing urban encounters in literary discourse: polyphony and heteroglossality; conversation, gossip, and sociability.
• Speech effects in literary texts: ventriloquism, glossolalia, mutism, parapraxis, fluency/disfluency, speech disabilities and sound disorders.
• The impact of innovations in recorded sound and communication technology: acoustic, electrical, mechanical and digital – including the interaction between computerised, machinic, or AI voices and ‘natural’ human speech.
• Acoustic ecologies: ways that natural and non-human entities find utterance in the city. Anthrophony, geophony and biophony in urban environments; filtered sounds, sustainability and noise pollution.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words, with a brief bio (no more than 50 words) to literarylondonconference@gmail.com by the deadline of Friday 9 August. Please include your surname in your proposal filename.

This conference replaces the Literary London Society’s in-person annual conference which was unable to take place this year due to constraints in capacity of the events team and venue costs. The events organising committee are as follows: Rebecca Steinberger, Simon Goulding, Elena Nistor, Tyne Sumner and Peter Jones.