In 2016,
Oxford Dictionaries declared ‘post-truth’ as the international word of the
year. It was selected from a shortlist that also contained words like
‘alt-right’ and ‘Brexiteer’, whose relevance for the political turmoil of the
year was evident. Yet the appeal of the term post-truth was undeniably
stronger: this was a word that promised to make a career as the expression of
one essential trait of an age. The ‘post-truth’ syntagm first appeared used
with the current meaning in a 1992 article in which an American journalist made
a pioneering observation referring to a certain “spiritual mechanism” through
which we have come to “denude truth of any significance”, thus transforming
ourselves into “prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool
about in their dreams” (Tesich, 1992).
Recent
historical events have showed us that the erasure of all substance from truth
is best achieved when the distinction between fact and fiction no longer
exists. A series of social phenomena have largely contributed to this, among
them, most prominently, fake news and their implied corollary, the production
of alternative facts or realities. For many, what is referred to as an
alternative fact is nothing more than a stylistically disguised lie. It
resembles many other euphemisms that have penetrated contemporary cultural
discourse: parallel truth, nuanced truth, counterfactual statements, strategic
misrepresentations, selective disclosure, etc.
The
pervasive presence of such discursive legerdemains that are meant to hide and
denature the real facts is a symptom of the ethical erosion of a society
increasingly built on lying and pretence. One might even speak of an
“alt.ethics” (Keyes, 2004) – an alternative moral system which allows one to
lie without being affected by guilt or by remorse and in which dissembling is
no longer considered necessarily wrong or dishonest. This is the result of the
relativization of truth in our society. This relativization has been sanctioned
by the tenets of poststructuralist deconstructionism. It has been further
enforced by the now omnipresent and omnipotent new channels of virtual
communication where, in the absence of any institution that could establish
filters, belief in truth has become almost impossible. Under such circumstances,
people tend to disregard what others say and hold tight to their own, sometimes
parochial, convictions.
“We live in
one world only, not in two”, John Searle (1995) confidently stated, while
arguing that it would be a fallacy to equate truth and reality, since the
structure of reality and the structure of real representations can never be
isomorphic. What we need to take into consideration is the idea that reality
does not predetermine at all the modes in which it can be described. Various
vocabularies can be constructed to describe the various aspects of reality
according to various objectives. Social reality is an intersubjective
phenomenon that should be grounded in a series of verified facts, widely
accepted as true. In the post-truth society in which the search for truth
matters far less than the presentation and reception of what goes as truth, the
classical schemes involved in the construction of reality are fundamentally
altered. It is no longer demonstrable facts that legitimate the knowledge constituting
the foundation of the symbolic universe people share, but data. Numerical
approaches use data in algorithms which constitute the basis for the
justification of opinions and judgments. Semiotic processes are heavily
influenced by subjective perception and by the pervading manipulation of
emotionality. The old consensus on what objective reality is can no longer be
attained. There is no more clear black and white separation between truth and
falseness, but only shades of grey and matters of taste.
Language is
now, more than ever, the supreme instrument in the creation of that reality in
which we imagine we live, a reality which can also be seen as “hyperreal”
(Baudrillard, 1981). Hyperreality is a reality that has lost difference and
reference by equating the real with the models of simulation whereby that real
is produced. Simulation implies a disturbing absence at the core of signs that
are deprived of any representational value. Images that used to be reflections
of a profound reality gradually turn into icons that are their own pure
simulacra, with no relation to any reality whatsoever. And when the real has
become impossible to find, the possibility of illusion is also compromised. All
we are left with is a parody world within which discourses endlessly compete
for primacy and in which power entirely and dangerously depends on rhetorical
means.
Is meaning
and value still recoverable in a post-truth age? How can we counteract
discursive manipulation? How can we correctly identify the vested interests
behind what is made to look as innocent heart-breaking emotion? In what ways
can specialists in any epistemological field restore the authority of truth and
facts? What discursive strategies can be adopted that should teach humans how
to defend themselves from the dangers of all sorts of propaganda and
disinformation? In what ways can arts and literature still help us recover and
enhance our humanism? What perspectives can offer us valuable clues while we
deal with the degrees of verisimilitude of post-truth realities?
We invite
specialists in such fields as linguistics, discursive analysis, literature,
communication studies, cultural studies, sociology, arts, philosophy,
journalism, digital humanities etc. to contribute papers addressing problems
related to the issues presented above. The following topics are suggested, but
by no means should they be considered exhaustive:
- The role of language in the construction of post-truth meaning
- Data, information and knowledge
- Truth and truthfulness in contemporary discourses
- The manipulation of emotion in the media
- Truth versus opinion/interpretation in the post-truth society
- The role of humanities in the recovery of meaning and value
- Ethics and post-truth
- ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) and post-truth
- The role of numerical devices in creating or denouncing falseness
- Social media and the propagation of post-truth attitudes
Deadlines:
Submission
of articles: 25th June 2019
Confirmation
of publication acceptance: 20th July 2019
Paper
publication: 30th September 2019
The
articles will be peer-reviewed and published in Interstudia, an academic
journal based at the Faculty of Letters, Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacau,
Romania, indexed in international databases like EBSCO, CEEOL, Index
Copernicus, Fabula, KVK. More information.
The
publication fee is 15 EURO, payable after the article has been accepted for
publication (all the necessary details will be provided in due time).
Author
instructions:
Papers can
be written in English, French, Italian, Spanish. Text will be written in
Windows, Microsoft Word, B5 format, Times New Roman, 11, one line spacing,
left-right alignment. Margins: left: 3 cm; right, up, down: 2 cm.
The
articles must be written on an even number of pages and should not exceed 12
pages (including the bibliography).
The first
page must contain:
- title of the article, centered (Times New Roman, 12, bold) in upper case;
- 3 rows below, author / author's surname and name (Times New Roman, 12, bold);
- 1 row below, University / affiliation, under the author's name (Times New Roman, 12);
- e-mail address of the author, under affiliation;
- 2 rows below, article abstract (10-15 lines) and 5 keywords (Times New Roman, 11). The word Abstract must be written in italics (no tab), the compound word Key-words in bold (no tab) and the actual key-words in italics.
- 1 row below, the text of the article (Times New Roman, 11).
In the text
of the article, titles of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. will be written in
italics. The titles of chapters, articles and short writings, such as poems or
short stories, will be written in quotes.
The
footnotes will contain only the supplementary information; the bibliographic
references will be listed in the BIBLIOGRAPHY at the end of the article.
The
chapters will be numbered with Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3 etc.) and the subchapters
will be hierarchically numbered inside the chapter (1.1, 1.2, etc.).
The pages
shall not be numbered.
Quotations
in the text:
Each
quotation should be placed between quotes (typographic “...”) followed by the
author’s reference, the date of publication, and the page from which it is
extracted (Author’s name, year of publication: page).
e. g.
“According to Desiderius Erasmus, chief architect of Renaissance humanist
educational theory, the main hope of a state lies in the proper education of
its youth” (Bate, 2008: 126).
If the name
of the author is previously quoted in the text on the same page, only the date
of publication and the pages will be placed in brackets: e. g. (2008: 126).
If the
title is mentioned in the text immediately preceding the quotation, only the
pages should be indicated.
Quotations
or examples exceeding three lines will be inserted one row after the article
text, without quotation marks, at two tabs away from the left margin (Times New
Roman, 11). The final punctuation is preceded by the parenthesis. The
subtraction of a passage from a quote will be indicated by three points in
square brackets.
The
bibliographic list of the cited works will be at the end of the text (not in
the footnotes), one row below from the last line of the text, after the word
BIBLIOGRAPHY (Times New Roman, 11, bold).
The
bibliography should include all the documents explicitly quoted in the text.
The
bibliography should be organized strictly in the alphabetical order of the
authors, then chronologically, then by title. Each reference must end with a
full stop. For references, the following rules will be met:
- Paper, chapter from a paper in printed format:
NAME,
Surname, year of publication, Title of the work, Tome, Edition, Place of
publishing, Publishing House, (Title of collection):
KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI,
Catherine, 1977, La connotation, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon.
- Articles in magazines or newspapers:
NAME,
Surname, year of publication, “Title of article”, in Title of
magazine/newspaper, volume, issue, Edition, Place of publishing, Publishing
House, page.
KLEIBER,
George, 1994, “Contexte, interprétation et mémoire: approche standard vs
approche cognitive”, in Langue française, no 103, Paris, Larousse, pp. 9-22.
- Work in electronic format
NAME,
Surname, year of publication, Title of the paper. Tome [online], Edition, Place
of publishing: Commercial publisher, Number of pages (Title of collection).
Format. Available on: (access date).
- Internet sites (Websites or Blogs)
Homepage
title [online]. Available on: (access date).
- Several authors:
Up to 3
names of authors: quote 3 names, separated by commas:
AMOSSY,
Ruth, HERSCHBERG PIERROT, Anne.
More than 3
names: quote first name or first three names followed by: “et al.”:
DANON-BOILEAU,
Laurent et al.
Please send
the article together with the author information to the following email
address: ciobanu.elena@ub.ro by 25th June 2019.
Author
information:
– Name and
surname:
– Academic
title:
–
Affiliation:
– Personal
research areas:
– Email address:
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