CFP 27.05.2016

Sessions at IAWIS/IAERTI (Lausanne, 10-14 Jul 2017)

Lausanne, IAWIS/IAERTI

H-ArtHist Redaktion

Calls for papers for the following sessions:

[1] Ironic Reproductions: Benjamin's blind spot and Baudelairean modernity
[2] Landscape in Print

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[1]

Ironic Reproductions: Benjamin's blind spot and Baudelairean modernity

Chair: Lauren S. Weingarden, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
Email: lweingardenfsu.edu (guidelines for submitting proposals below)

This panel interrogates Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire in an effort to undo the dogma of Benjaminian history of Baudelairean modernity. Specifically, we focus on Benjamin’s blindness to a modernity that fosters irony and parody as productive agents of originality and change. In this light, reproduction/reproducibility are at the center of artistic and literary creation. Here irony and parody co-function as a verbal and visual devices for at once embracing and inverting artistic/literary conventions and cultural traditions. However, scholars who view Baudelaire’s writings through the Benjaminian lens have routinely considered the negative function of irony as mirroring the negative valence of “shock” in Benjamin’s writing on modernity. This negative valence has obscured irony’s generative agency for self and cultural growth, shrouding ironic rupture and discontinuity in Baudelaire’s poetry and prose about modern Paris, within the amorphic enigma of shock. Benjamin’s blind spot has also obscured the impact of Baudelaire’s prose poems and art criticism on the artists who translated his ironic strategies into parodic devices for reproducing/transforming the old as/into the new. We invite papers that challenge the limitations of Benjaminian-Baudelairean modernity. How can the negative impulse of shock be transformed into something productive? How might Benjamin’s notion of “shock” be re-viewed as a modernist mode of defamiliarization rendered by ironic parody? How can critiques of Benjamin’s blind spot alter our understanding of his impact on our interpretations of modernity? How has Benjamin’s own historical notion of modern media, as per “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” limited our own queries about ironic reproduction, in the form of parody or pastiche, in Baudelaire’s and his followers’ work? Papers should not be limited by these questions, but should provide strategies and case studies for freeing Baudelaire’s/Baudelairean words and images from Benjamin’s doctrinaire blind spot.

[2]

Landscape in Print

Convenor: Patricia Mainardi, pmainardigc.cuny.edu

The focus of this session will be on printed landscape imagery in the “long nineteenth century” (ca. 1780 to 1914), encompassing all geographic regions, with special attention to its purpose, audiences, technology, derivation, and distribution. While images of landscape were widespread in the print trade from the Renaissance onward, “art” prints (such as Rembrandt’s landscape etchings) had small editions; engravings could be printed in much larger editions but tended to focus on culturally significant sites, such as major monuments or historically significant locations such as Greece, Rome or the Holy Land. With the invention and development of new printing technologies in the nineteenth century--lithography, wood engraving and photography--prints became cheaper and widely diffused, appealing to a wider audience and serving a broad variety of functions.
Collections of landscape imagery were published throughout Europe, and focused as well on Asia, the Americas, North Africa. They invented new imagery, but also perpetuated landscape tropes that had been familiar for centuries, regularly exchanged between paintings and the printed page. Corot’s Rome landscapes, for example, reproduced sites already familiar from guidebooks, and, in turn, inspired generations of artists and amateurs to depict the same locales. Drawing manuals published models for landscape depictions-- plants and trees, geologic formations, typical inhabitants; these were often borrowed from paintings but were then recycled into new paintings, drawings, photographs, prints.
Possible topics for presentation could include: printed landscape imagery in colonialism, nationalism, global consciousness; images in guidebooks and drawing manuals; the role of new print technologies in the circulation of landscape imagery; landscape reproductions in the periodical press, their derivation, purpose, and context; the mutual interdependence and exchanges of printed landscape imagery with other forms of visual art; the proliferation, derivation, and function of publications combining text and landscape imagery.

Proposals can be submitted, in English or in French, using this on-line
form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vote850Mssh1r1oLZe3fiKnrpPdSt_WSTBNQNQ_eC14/viewform?c=0&w=1

See Guidelines for submitting proposals: http://wp.unil.ch/reproduction2017/program/panels/

Quellennachweis:
CFP: Sessions at IAWIS/IAERTI (Lausanne, 10-14 Jul 2017). In: ArtHist.net, 27.05.2016. Letzter Zugriff 28.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/13118>.

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