2025 COEDA Conference

Call for Papers: COEDA 2025 – Polyphony

October 17-18, 2025 (Friday and Saturday)

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

College of Liberal Arts

National Taiwan University

Throughout different cultural histories and geographies, literary works embody not a univocal authoritative voice but multiple voices, fragmented narratives, and a coexistence of perspectives whose discords and disagreements rarely coalesce into a monolithic discourse. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), Mikhail Bakhtin famously borrows a musicological term to read Dostoevsky’s prose as “polyphonous,” arguing that the latter’s works create a space where multiple, independent voices interact without being subordinated to a single authoritative truth—not even the author’s! In contemporary literary studies, the idea of polyphony extends beyond structural complexity—it offers ways to imagine nonlinear temporalities, dissolve boundaries between human and non-human perspectives, and challenge conventional distinctions between reality and fiction.

Polyphony is particularly significant in postcolonial literature, where different languages, dialects, and cultural registers coexist within a single text. Postcolonial narrators and characters may speak in the colonizer’s language, their native tongues, or a mix of both, creating a linguistic tension that reflects both the violence of imperial domination and the survival strategies of colonial subjects. Whether through multilingualism, creolization, or code-switching, these texts resist the illusion of a singular linguistic or cultural authority. Similar dynamics can be observed in diasporic and border-crossing narratives, where displacement, whether due to labor migration, environmental devastation, or warfare, generates hybrid linguistic and cultural expressions.

Feminist, queer, and crip critiques of cis-heteronormative and ableist rhetorics also strum rebellious cacophonies, understood as a refusal to conform to dominant prescriptions of gender, sexuality, and ability. Meanwhile, relationships among different marginalized identities unfold polyphonically, as solidarities and dissents emerge through mutual engagement and critique. Today, though, social media corporations and big-data conglomerates threaten these productive tensions. The result is a global, hyperconnected public sphere that promises democratic pluralism but delivers polarization and aggressive identitarianism instead—one algorithm at a time,

Across different fields of studies, polyphony destabilizes fixed narratives, foregrounding instead simultaneity, multiplicity, contradiction, and relationality. It is through these layered and intersecting voices—at times cacophonous, at times smoothly intertwined—that new forms of storytelling, knowledge, and resistance take shape. We hereby invite papers that explore the above themes or other polyphonic arrangements articulated in literature, culture, and media; anticipating reflections across various spatio-temporal contexts and theoretical frameworks.

Possible fields of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

l   Postcolonial critique, diasporic studies, and border-crossings

l   Multilingualism, translation, language acquisition, sociolinguistics

l   Gender and sexuality

l   Music in literary and cultural texts, sound studies

l   New media studies

l   Disability, crip time, neurodiversity

l   Digital cultures, cybernetics, virtual reality

l   Literature, science, and technology

l   Time studies, literary histories, periodization

l   Environmental humanities

Please submit a paper title, 250-word abstract (including a list of 5-7 keywords) and a short bio (up to 150 words) in a Word document to coeda2025@gmail.com by May 26, 2025. Paper presentations should be 15-20 minutes long.

For further inquiries, please contact:

Student Representatives:

·  Ruth Alegre                                            r11122018@ntu.edu.tw

·  Ted Po-Chen Chung                                   r12122010@ntu.edu.tw   

·  Chen Hsiang-Lin                            r12122027@ntu.edu.tw

·  Joyce Huang                                           r13122007@ntu.edu.tw   

·  Sylvia Liu                                       r13122002@ntu.edu.tw   

·  Luke Springett                                        r12122020@ntu.edu.tw

Faculty Representatives:

·  Prof. Manuel Herrero-Puertas                    herreropuert@ntu.edu.tw

·  Prof. Wei H. Kao                                       whkao@ntu.edu.tw

·  Prof. Yana Ya-Chu Chang                  yanaycchang@ntu.edu.tw

·  Prof. Pingta Ku                                           pingtaku@ntu.edu.tw

·      Prof. Nancy Tsai                                          ntsai@ntu.edu.tw