CfP: Symposium "Literary Worlds and the Impact of Names"

 Call for Papers for the Symposium "Literary Worlds and the Impact of Names"

This symposium will be held online (November 3–7, 2025) within INTERONOMA - Congresso Internacional de Onomástica. Abstracts proposals (250-300 words) should be sent as an email attachment to the symposium proponents - Luisa Caiazzo (luisa.caiazzo@unibas.it) and Grant Smith (gsmith@ewu.edu) - by 31 March 2025. Proposals can be sent in one of the following languages: English, Italian, and Spanish.

Names may have many functions in real life and affect both individuals and communities in virtue of their potential to take on personal and/or social meanings, depending on their contexts and co-texts of use. These multi-layered meanings are often transferred to literature as they are utilized by authors as a literary resource to represent social conflicts, evoke associations or invoke evaluative positioning. As pointed out by the French literary theorist Michel Grimaud (1989:19), the process of naming is “a deeply social, psychological, and linguistic act,” especially powerful in the literary universe, given the symbolic dimension often associated with names (Smith 2005, 2021). Papers accepted for this symposium will explore how the meaning potential of anthroponyms and toponyms is effectively harnessed to shape literary settings and/or thematic impact within specific works or by specific authors. 

Examples of themes that can be addressed include:

• names and gender identity

• names and minority groups

• names in generational conflicts

• names as markers of social identity

• toponyms choice/invention and their connotations

• toponyms and political/social conflicts

• toponyms as resistance

• toponyms and cultural heritage

Keywords: gender and social identity; toponymic resistance; naming and conflicts