THE LITERARY AND SOCIAL CIRCULATION OF THE WORD IN COLOMBIA AND THE AMERICAS: MEDIA, VOICES, AND MEDIATIONS
This symposium proposes to study the literary and social circulation of the word in Colombia and the Americas through the media, voices, and mediations by which American societies have produced, transmitted, preserved, archived, disputed, and transformed their memories. In dialogue with the theme of the 59th International Congress of Americanists, “Tradition and Innovation: The Memories of the Americas,” the proposal understands the word not only as a linguistic unit or textual expression, but as a historical, poietic, aesthetic, material, educational, political, cultural, and archival practice.
The symposium starts from a central question: how does the word circulate in literary worlds and in social life, and what effects does this circulation produce in the configuration of memories, archives, identities, hierarchies, communities, conflicts, and forms of authority? From this perspective, both the modes of circulation of the word in society (orality, letters, manuscripts, the press, magazines, books, the telegraph, radio, school, libraries, archives, sermons, political speech, podcasts, and digital media) and its forms of circulation within literary works are of interest. In short stories, novels, poems, chronicles, plays, or essays, the word moves among narrators, characters, represented readers, fictional spaces, and institutions through conversations, rumors, letters, confessions, sermons, silences, celebrations, reading scenes, book loans, proper names, nicknames, and forms of social address.
The purpose of the symposium is not to address communication in a general sense, but to analyze concrete situations in which the word moves, is fixed, is archived, is transmitted, is interpreted, or is transformed. For this reason, it proposes to attend to three interrelated dimensions. The first corresponds to the media: the material, technical, or symbolic means that allow the word to be preserved or transmitted, such as the book, the letter, the newspaper, the magazine, the archive, the telegraph, the radio, or digital platforms. The second corresponds to the voices: individual or collective subjects who speak, write, narrate, read, preach, archive, teach, murmur, translate, or interpret. The third corresponds to the mediations: institutions, practices, and spaces that make the circulation of the word possible, such as school, church, the printing press, the library, the press, the literary salon, festivities, the classroom, public reading, or publishing, as well as the instances of social life, formal or informal, that build and safeguard archives, whether fixed by rules or thrown into disorder.
Papers will be accepted that study the circulation of the word in Colombian, Latin American, and American literature; in orality and social memory; in letters, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, archives, and print culture; in schools and the formation of readers; in religious, political, and public life; in communication technologies such as the telegraph, radio, and digital media; and in phenomena of naming such as proper names, pseudonyms, nicknames, place names, and the names of institutions or publications.
By linking literature and social life, tradition and innovation, materiality and memory, the symposium seeks to bring together research that helps us understand how the word has organized forms of
