Congist'26: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crisis

Session

Session 1.7 (Day 2)

D2-S1-K1

14 May 2026, 09:30

Kurul Odası (Istanbul University Faculty of Letters)

Conveners

Session 1.7 (Day 2): Dilbilim & Göstergebilim / Linguistics & Semiotics

• Mona Simu (Research Institute for Quality of Life)

The Linguistic Bridge Over the Abyss: Approaching the Bottomless and Its Symbolic Enclosure (D2-S1-K1)

Bettina Rabelhofer (University of Graz)

14/05/2026, 09:30

Oral Presentation

Speaking about the abyss is always speaking from the edge. Once the ground beneath one’s feet is lost, there is no more support, and in the act of falling, every cry for help turns into a scream. Diffuse fears often feel strikingly concrete, and the physical sensation of falling is accompanied by a loss of orientation in time and space.
In the face of the bottomless, the symbolic function of...

Crisis Without Rupture: Franz Janowitz’ Wartime Landscapes and the Emergence of an Ecological Lyric (D2-S1-K1)

Konstantin Schmidtbauer (Sapienza Università di Roma)

14/05/2026, 09:50

Oral Presentation

This paper reads Franz Janowitz’ WWI poems as a laboratory for a language of crisis within an interdisciplinary frame of ecocriticism, ecolinguistics, and semiotics of crisis. It asks how a lyric still shaped by a long German tradition of form (from Buch von der deutschen Poeterey onwards) can register the technologised, atmospheric violence of modern war without either heroic continuity or...