Dear O&L members, colleagues and students of Literary Onomastics,
because of the current global COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to postpone our O&L Conference to October 2021. As planned for this year, the conference will be held in Cagliari and the topics tackled will be the same (see below). In any case, we will inform you about further updates.
Meanwhile, research activity will go on. Therefore, we would like to invite you to participate in the upcoming issue of our journal Il Nome nel Testo. This issue has no specific theme, so we welcome articles presenting any topic that falls within Literary Onomastics.
Considering that many library locations are likely to be still closed to public access in the upcoming months, the deadline for sending your contribution is February 28, 2021.
If you wish to submit your paper to the Editorial Board of the journal, il Nome nel testo, please send it to
Donatella Bremer (donatella.bremer@unipi.it).
Stay safe!
Best wishes,
O&L, Editorial Board
For further information, please contact also:
Maria Giovanna Arcamone: magiarc@gmail.com
Giorgio Sale: giosale@uniss.it
XXVth International O&L Symposium
will be held at the University of Cagliari
in October, 2021 (further information will follow).
The topics to be discussed in the Symposium are:
Names – inadequate, insulating or insulting names
As is well known, in real life certain names end up by taking on connotations of infamy or stigma for the bearers (for Christians, the name, ‘Judas’; for those of anti-totalitarian convictions, the names of the “great dictators” of the twentieth century; the names of Jews in Nazi Germany; not to mention “foundling names”, or the name/numbers branded onto the forearms of deportees in the labour camps, etc.)
Titles of literary works as proper names
The title as ‘premise/promise’, which can either be kept, or blatantly overturned, and which always leaves a trace in the mind of the reader (think of the suggestiveness of the titles of Amélie Nothomb’s early fiction).
Names in dedications
Proper names appearing in the dedications of literary works are often placed there not for biographical purposes; nor are they to be seen in the light of a foreword or having some other extraliterary role. For example, in his Novellino, Masuccio Salernitano seems to choose the name of his dedicatee first, and only later brings the text of his novella in line with the biographical profile of this dedicatee; the dedicatees in Matteo Bandello actually play a key part in a complicated narrative structure, while, in the ‘Proemio’ of Orlando Furioso, the function of the name ‘Ippolito’ (the reference is to Ippolito, Cardinal of Este) is not purely encomiastic.
Method
As in the last few editions of the Conference, a special section is dedicated to the methodology of onomastic research. This year space will be given, in particular, to reflections on names by philosophers, writers and artists.
Regional literary onomastics.
As always, a slot will be made available for papers on the literature of the region hosting the Conference.