In a globalized world of softened and apparently more easily crossed borders between states, ethnic groups, languages, cultures, disciplines, ideologies, poetics, genders, political agendas, economic orders, domestic and foreign, aesthetics and politics, a need for stable meaning, established values and legalized zones of thinking and acting has increasingly been emerging. In other words, in our liquid modernity, under the alleged threat of an overwhelming wave of fluidity and mutation and of supressing of the residual forms of authenticity, there is a cry for the rehabilitation of firmer boundaries. It is believed that their re-consolidation would paradoxically restore the freedom to fence ourselves off and provide the opportunity to free ourselves from the slavery of the so-called trans-ideologies that force us to reconcile with the precarious and the temporary, in truth with all forms of impermanence that result from the revocation of clear and solid demarcations. In light of the frequent and irreconcilable controversies that have arisen in our complex world with respect to boundaries - starting from the assumption that on the one hand boundaries limit and discipline us, and on the other hand, allow us free, creative and even oppositional thinking and acting in and beyond the fenced zones - in this conference, we want to discuss the origin and roles of boundaries both in the historical perspective and in contemporary society. What is a boundary, where and when does it appear, how does it work, under what conditions can it be crossed, weakened or annulled, what kind of power is overcome by it, what kind of power is freed by it, and which aesthetic, ethical, political, worldview and ideological values are related to the establishment of boundaries or to their transgression? Since we are trying to stimulate the analysis of the concept of boundary, experts without limits are invited, from all fields, branches and disciplines of humanities and social sciences: literary historians, literary theorists, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, linguists, sociologists, scholars in the field of stylistics, cultural geographers, historians and art historians, psychologists, theologians and political scientists.
Some of the possible topics are:
- Boundaries of speech, dialects, languages
- Boundaries of morphemes, words, sentences
- Boundaries of standard language and standard varieties
- Boundaries of semantics and pragmatics
- Boundaries of poetics, styles, genres
- Boundaries between lines and stanzas, verse and prose
- Boundaries of text and context
- Boundaries of literary and artistic periods
- The stage as the boundary of worlds
- Boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, aesthetics and uses
- Gender and sexual boundaries and transgenderism
- Boundaries of cultural zones
- Boundaries of oral and written culture
- Boundaries and migrations
- Boundaries as a disciplinary mechanism
- Boundaries as a necessity
- Boundaries and freedom
- Thinking beyond boundaries or thinking with the help of boundaries
- Are the boundaries of language the boundaries of the world?
- Disciplinary boundaries and transdisciplinarity
- The Sublime: boundaries of aesthetics and cognition
- The Uncanny: boundaries between domestic and foreign, self and otherness
- Boundaries of artistic representation and the unrepresentable
- Unboundedness of God and religious restrictions
- Satire, burlesque, carnival and grotesque - breaking down or confirming boundaries
- Boundaries and geopolitics
- Boundaries of human and transhuman