(FR)ACTUALITIES FRAGMENTS IN THE PRESENT TIME: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY REFLECTION ON LINGUISTICS, LITERATURE, IDENTITY, AND NARRATIVES OF MODERNITY

UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES L’ORIENTALE  

PhD PROGRAMME IN LITERARY, LINGUISTIC AND COMPARATIVE STUDIES 

GRADUATE CONFERENCE 2025  

Naples, December 1st–3rd, 2025 

(FR)ACTUALITIES 
FRAGMENTS IN THE PRESENT TIME: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY REFLECTION ON LINGUISTICS, LITERATURE, IDENTITY, AND NARRATIVES OF MODERNITY 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 

The dynamic relationship between modern times and fragmentation offers a way to explore connections between individuals and communities, specificity and universality, in today’s complex reality. The relationship between the contemporary and fragmentation can be observed from two perspectives: the fragment intended as a self-sufficient entity or as a part of a larger, more complex reality. 

The first perspective aligns with the etymological dimension of the word ‘fragment’, encapsulating the notion of rupture, which characterizes both its genesis and its state of autonomy and/or isolation. As such, the fragment emerges from the collapse of the reality it reflects, emulating its debris (Blanchot 1980). 

The second perspective suggests a constant dialectical relationship between fragments and their whole. Despite its partial nature, the fragment finds its meaning in relation to the context while maintaining a balance between independence and relationality. This duality reflects the human condition, where the desire for totality coexists with the recognition of life’s inherent incompleteness (Derrida 2014).  

In contemporary society, these perspectives find varied expressions across an array of macro themes. Capitalist and neoliberal systems influence identities, shaping both individuals and collectives (Harvey 2005). Contemporary dynamics of fragmentation include privatization, individualism, marginalization, and the creation of "wasted lives" (Bauman 2004).  

While the interconnectivity fostered by Web 2.0 has intensified globalization and positioned individual identities within layered networks that span geographical, digital, and literary spaces, the divide between digital and analogue grows increasingly blurred, resulting in an "onlife" reality where the online and offline merge inseparably (Floridi 2015). 

The postmodern fragmentation of identity mirrors these contradictory forces. As algorithms push for coherent identity representations, reducing subjects into cohesive, commodifiable entities, the self remains inescapably fragmented and shaped by context (Fisher 2022). In this "age of fragmentation" (Lifton 1999), new reflections are being produced on the hybrid relationship between the human and non-human, nature and culture, emphasizing the agency of matter—even in its smallest, or toxic, or viral forms (Latour 2014). 

In literature, fragmentation—whether conceived as a trace of lost unity or as a configuration of autonomous parts forming a new whole—responds to the complexity of contemporary reality, caught between disintegration and a desire for renewed connections. Fragmentation is featured both in contemporary prose, through the rejection of conventional narrative forms, and poetry, whose fragmentary nature uniquely articulates the ruptures of the present. Literary expressions of the fragment allow for representations and interpretations of increasingly fragmented identities in a time of challenges to their integrity and ability to produce meaning (Deleuze and Guattari 2013).  In addition to reflecting a shattered world through fragments, the literary realm also proposes new ways of inhabiting and understanding it, balancing rupture with the potential for reconstruction. This implicit fragmentation may often become a deliberate structural choice. 

The dismissal of unity – be it temporal, spatial, or narrative – can suggest a worldview that is both chaotic and unstable, signaling a break from hegemonic discourses or even offering readers a method to embrace the uncertainty of reality (Caracciolo 2022). Such dynamics are particularly evident – either internally or externally – in the spatial, temporal or cultural dislocation of texts through intralingual, interlingual, intrasemiotic, or intersemiotic translation practices (Dam, Brøgger, and Zethsen 2019). 

As far as contemporary practices are concerned, fragments also interact with concepts of text and intertextuality, where each literary work exists in dialogue with others, enriched by traces and citations (Kristeva 2017, Genette 2014). In literature, texts, conceptualized as textus (Barthes 2002), represent a dense network of references—fragments that derive meaning relationally and pluralistically. Similarly, in linguistics, the fragment serves as a mosaic piece, elucidating complex links between texts and contexts. Many reflections on intertextuality, often regarded as a key criterion for defining textuality (de Beaugrande e Dressler 1981), have their roots in philology. This discipline, through its study of sources, has explored texts as repositories of collective memory. 

The interaction of texts extends to multimodal communication, combining words, images, sounds, and digital-native resources (Jewitt 2014, Esposito and KhosraviNik 2023). Phenomena such as ‘remediation’ and intermediality weave traditional and digital media together (Bolter and Grusin 1999). 

Morevoer, just like texts, words are produced by the continuous tensions that exist between lexical unity and the necessary fragmentation of their constituents, namely the discrete, productive combinatorial units that form minimal pairs of phonological segments and syntactic-semantic content (Jackendoff 2003, Haspelmath 2020). Word fragments combine to form new linguistic entities, such as neologisms (Pruvost and Sablayrolles 2019). Fragmentation is also intrinsic to linguistic repertoires, which are shaped by bilingualism, language varieties, and social identities (Eckert 1989, Burnett 2023, Appel and Muysken 2006). 

The Department of Literary, Linguistic, and Comparative Studies at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” is happy to present the XIII Graduate Conference and invites contributions that explore how the postmodern subject—torn between individual identity and the necessity of forging relationships with the multifaceted sociocultural realities of the contemporary era navigates (or drifts on) the fragments of various dimensions of the present. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged within, but not limited to, the following thematic areas: 

• fragment as form/practice/strategy: contemporary narrative, poetry, and essays, diaristic, memorial, and epistolary literature, aphoristic writing, translation practices; 

• contemporary reworkings of the fragment: AI driven tools and automation, combinatory literature, hypertextual and digital literature, multimodality, intermediality; 

• fragmentation and identity: postcolonial literature, migration literature gender literature, postmodern literature, metamodern literature language variation and varieties, linguistic contact, multilingualism; 

• environmentalism and fragmentation: ecocriticism, ecopoetry, speculative fiction, the human–non-human relationship, ecolinguistics; 

• fragment as a unit of meaning: philology, iconotextuality, intertextuality, lexical creativity, lexicology, phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic fragments. 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES 

Submission should include: 

• Author(s) name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information 

• Title of the presentation 

• Abstract using APA style for references (400 words, excluding references) 

• A short essential bibliography (max. 10 titles) 

• Short bio-note (100 words) 

Proposals should be submitted in PDF format to gradconf2025.unior@gmail.com by April 15, 2025. The file name should follow this format: Surname_Name_gc25.pdf. Presentations should last no longer than 20 minutes. 
Acceptance notifications will be sent by May 15, 2025. Selected papers will be considered for publication. Presentations may be delivered in Italian or English. 

IMPORTANT DATES 

• Abstract submission deadline: April 15, 2025 

• Notification of acceptance: May 15, 2025 

• Graduate conference: December 1–3, 2025