“Tracing Types: Comparative Analyses of Literary and Visual Sketches (1830-1860)”
Ghent University Belgium, 3-4 June 2016.
In the wake of the pioneering work of Nathalie Preiss and Martina Lauster, a new wave of scholarship has emerged in recent years, which examines nineteenth-century sketches (sometimes referred to as ‘panoramic literature’) from a transnational perspective.
Two recent examples of this interest are the special issue of Interférences littéraires, “Croqués par eux-mêmes. La société à l’épreuve du panoramique” (2012), directed by Nathalie Preiss and Valérie Stiénon, and the recent NYU conference “Dissecting Society: Periodical Literature and Social Observation (1830-1850)” (March 2015), organized by Christiane Schwab and Ana Peñas Ruiz.
The present call for papers seeks to continue this comparative reflection by placing the spotlight on the comparative analysis of texts and images of specific types and by tracing how these representations vary across sketches from different places, media and editorial contexts.
The organizers welcome presentations that address the following types of questions:
- How do the representations and definitions of a type (or group of related types) vary from one national context to another?
- How do different collections, periodicals or editorial contexts inflect a type in different ways?
- How do visual representations of a type differ from one another or from literary representations of the same figure?
- How does the type transform as it is taken up in other genres, registers or types of discourse?
- Does the type exist in a system? Does it belong to a collection or series of types and if so, how does it relate to or interact with other types in the system? How do different collections position the type within their systems?
In short, the organizers invite each participant to choose a type (or group of related types) and to trace how it shifts or remains the same across different contexts and in relation to different co-texts. Presentations that explore less known types are particularly welcome.
The longterm goal of this project is to publish an edited volume exploring these issues. It is the organizers' hope that the combined insights of the seminar will allow them to draw a series of general reflections about how portrayals of types shift across contexts, borders and media.
The organizers would like to invite expressions of interest in the form of a short abstract (of around 300 words in English or French) describing your idea. Please submit your idea to Leonoor Kuijk at l.kuijk@ugent.be by October 1, 2015.
Organizers: Leonoor Kuijk, Elizabeth Amann and Marianne Van Remoortel (Ghent University), Valérie Stiénon (Université Paris 13)