Porthania, P722, 29th April 2025 – 14.00-19.00
Organizers: Enrico Garavelli, Juhani Härmä, Elina Suomela-Härmä
Contact person: Enrico Garavelli, <enrico.garavelli@helsinki.fi>
Moderator: Eva Havu.
Speakers: Enrico Garavelli, Juhani Härmä, Emilia Ivancu, Sabine Kraenker, Simo Määttä, Merja Nivala, Kholud Shoushou.
The increasing attention paid during the last years in many European countries (and also in United States) to the epistolary genre has produced several high-level projects as Mapping the Republic of Letters (Stanford), Archilet, EpistolART, E-Pistolarium, Early Modern Letters Online etc.
Letters are an ideal object of study for a multi-lingual and multi-methodological community as CoCoLaC is. Letters can be studied from many points of view: verbal politeness, code-switching and code-mixing, rhetorical strategies, historical information, questions of poetics and so on.
We believe in the opportunity of keeping alive in Finland a discussion about this topic, also in order to be able to valorise in future the large local deposit of epistolary material (Kansalliskirjasto, Kansallisarkisto, SKS:n arkisto, Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland etc.).
In 2016 CoCoLaC organised a first seminar on the epistolary genre. The proceedings of the seminar were also published at the beginning of 2018 (https://tiedekirja.fi/fi/writing-letters-typologies-utilisation-corpora).
This time we would like to limit the topic to the correspondence of writers and poets with other writers or poets, translators, editors, scholars and men of culture in general.
The languages of the seminar are English, Finnish, French and Italian. PowerPoints presentations are to be prepared in English. Presentations should not exceed 20-25 minutes.