The
thematic issue of BELL 2006 will focus on "common senses".
This is, obviously, a broad theme which offers many possible
approaches. First there is "common sense", the idea
of a "healthy" approach to life, and the notion of
"native wit". But normality can also become imperative
(and imperialist) in its imposition of a norm.
More specifically in the context
of the problematic issue of "Englishness", contributors
may tackle the question of "common sense" as an English
ideology and/or empirical discourse that functions as the 'Other'
of continental/theoretical models. "Common sense" can
also be linked to the idea of a commonweal (state) and its common
wealth; the history of the Commonwealth may fit here too. The
concept of commonness also has an emotional component, as the
common can be charming or irksome. Interactions between the traditional
versus the "original" can be envisaged here too. Of
course there is also the tension between the "common"
versus the "élitist"; every culture has its
in-built hierarchies.
Inspired by the above, researchers
in ELT may want to address the following questions and related
issues :
How do we delineate or define communality?
How is it formed by certain traits
in communication?
How do communication and communion
relate?
How do the insider and the outsider
experience "a common culture"?
How are the reactions to the uncommon
pictured, the common and its liminalities? Researchers in Critical
Discourse Analysis are also aware that "common sense"
is problematic as unthematized ideologies are at work in texts.
The five senses, of course, cover
a wide field.
There is the question of "taste"
in its many meanings: when are manners, arrangements, interactions,
in good /bad taste? Though the Romans maintained that "de
gustibus et coloribus non disputandum est", we can and do
dispute matters, not only concerning taste and colours but also
in the other senses.
What about the implied hierarchy
in the senses? Is not the optical often less important than the
auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory?
Sensory perception is a matter
of shades; is it possible to delineate sensitivity, sensibility,
sensuousness, sensuality etc?
The literary space used to be described
in terms of topoi, like the pleasant and the terrible place (locus
amoenus, locus terribilis), in which the senses were very important.
Are contemporary authors still inspired by these motifs?
For linguistics, too, the subject
can be approached in many ways.
One could look at the power of
cognitive verbs.
How do "sense and sentence"
relate?
Working with thesaurus categories
can reveal interesting questions; the verb or noun sense can
be investigated, sense relations, sense and polysemy,Saussurean
"sense"
How do we make sense of corpus
data ?
And, finally, the sense of language
differences is interesting to us all, from whichever disciplinary
or subdisciplinary point of view, such as pragmatics, functional
grammar, discourse and genre analysis.
The aim is to chart these possible
enquiries and assess their importance from the perspectives of
ELT, linguistics and literature.
Please send papers to Keith Carlon,
the managing editor of BELL, at carlon@ilv.ucl.ac.be, making
sure you carefully follow the stylesheet to be found on the BELL
website.
Length : 7,000 words maximum.
Deadline : 15 February 2006
