Challenging the Boundaries seeks to transcend the limits of literary genres and national cultures, exploring both old and new frontiers in language and literature from an interdisciplinary, multifaceted, and challenging perspective. Selected from the pathbreaking Istanbul conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association, these papers treat topics ranging from contemporary neurobiology’s insights into the sources of poetic creativity to the cultural theories of Michel Foucault and Hélène Cixous and their literary consequences; from the films of the American director David Lynch to those of the Senegalese artist Djibril Diop Mambéty; from the work of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk to James Joyce’s Ulysses and the stories of Virginia Woolf. This volume will be of particular interest to readers who might wish to become acquainted with the work of able young scholars from an exceptionally wide array of academic cultures and theoretical commitments. The authors whose essays appear in Challenging the Boundaries reflect in their approaches and subjects both the breadth and depth of the international academic community.

PALA Papers is a series of volumes comprising essays selected and edited from presentations at the annual conferences of the Poetics and Linguistics Association, an international body of scholars whose work focuses on the interdisciplinary nexus of linguistics, discourse theory, and literary analysis, criticism, and theory. Each volume will present studies that provide models to scholars throughout the world for conducting their own research in this multidisciplinary paradigm on such topics as, among many others, close linguistic analysis of canonical literary works, corpus-based studies of literary narrative, and the linguistic basis of contemporary social and cultural theory.