Travelling Concepts, Metaphors and Narrative

Concepts, metaphors, and narratives are not only the most important theoretical and analytical tools of academic discourse; they also provide critical interfaces between sciences, literature and humanities, enabling debate, research and dynamic exchange on the basis of a common language. However, more often than not, the meaning and operational value of concepts, metaphors and narratives, even of those which appear to be self-explanatory, differ between diverse disciplines, different academic and national cultures, and historical periods. Concepts such as ‘communication’, ‘code’, ‘complexity’, ‘life’ and ‘system’, metaphors like ‘crisis’, ‘network’, ‘body’ and ‘text’, and cultural narratives such as ‘evolution’, ‘ageing’ and ‘digression’, which are at the core of both sciences and humanities, are not univocal and firmly established terms. Rather they are dynamic and exchangeable as they travel back and forth between academic contexts and disciplines. Hence they constitute what Mieke Bal (2002) has felicitously called ‘travelling concepts’.

With the move towards greater interdisciplinarity, the dynamic exchange of concepts between different disciplines as well as the translation of concepts into metaphors and narratives has surged. Through constant appropriation, translation and reassessment across various fields, concepts, metaphors and narratives have acquired new meanings, triggering a reorganisation of prevalent orders of knowledge and opening up new horizons of research. The main theoretical accounts pertinent to the investigation of travelling concepts, metaphors and narratives include cognitive metaphor theory, cognitive narratology and poetics, the history of ideas, the history of science and cultural exchange studies. Issues to be addressed on the conference include:

• the aesthetic and metaphorical aspects of scientific discourse and scientific aspects of the discourses of the humanities;

• conditions that facilitate the ‘import’ and ‘export’ of concepts, metaphors and narratives in the sciences and humanities;

• the journeys of travelling concepts, metaphors and narratives and their effects on and methodological consequences for sciences, literature and humanities;

• historical case studies illustrating the transformation concepts, metaphors and narratives undergo as they migrate between different disciplines, academic and national cultures, and historical periods;
• a discussion of the methodological consequences that the travelling of concepts, metaphors and narratives have for the interdisciplinary studies of culture.