[ELTWeekly Volume 7, Issue 7 | February 23, 2015 | ISSN 0975-3036]

The advent of the 20th century marked a significant paradigm shift in almost all walks of life. The century witnessed extraordinary seminal happenings wherein life itself got redefined. Literature, which has always been the index of various hues of life, too witnessed watershed moments. Peter Childs in Modernism (2007) says “modes of literary discourse blur . . . or overwrite . . . the ones before”. Hence, there is an undeniable inter-relationship between life, literature, thought and language. The ever-changing paradigms of the global world have given literature not only an opportunity to revisit its own theories and practices but chartered a course for new ones to emerge. The issues
of society, culture, politics, gender, etc. need to be oriented and explored with reference to the changing necessities of the society. Moreover, the rise of a global world has made the medium of imitation a complex phenomenon as the linguistic diversities have paved the way for a multilingualism that co-exists with the ever-increasing territory of a single Global Language, English, which in turn comes with its own set of adaptations and “englishes”.

Hence, there is an urgent need to contemplate on the role of literature and language in the light of the cross-cultural paradigm shifts experienced all over the world. In view of the prevailing scenario, the two-day conference NTELL-2015 aims to serve as a forum for eminent scholars and leading academicians from India and abroad to brainstorm these challenges, share their knowledge & experience and generate empirical observations.

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