Aesthetics Afterlives: Memory, Transfiguration and the Arts
Call for Papers
September 9, 2016 to September 10, 2016
New Jersey, United States
Art,
Art History & Visual Studies, Atlantic History / Studies, Colonial
and Post-Colonial History / Studies, Humanities, Literature
Keynote Speaker: Jonathan Holloway, Dean of Yale College and Professor of History and African American Studies
Location: Princeton University, New Jersey
The
last four decades have witnessed a phenomenal upsurge of interest in
memory and memory studies. Spurred on by the unprecedented destruction
of World War II, memory studies as many know it today has evolved in a
largely Euro-centric context. But the last two decades have seen
groundbreaking work in overcoming regional as well as disciplinary
boundaries. Many scholars now reject the so-called "competition" model
of trauma, which implicitly pits one community's suffering against
another, finding instead that the study of commemoration can affirm and
encompass the full diversity of human experience and loss. Scholars have
also taken new interdisciplinary strides, blending critical study of
the arts with the study of memory as well as personal narrative, as our
keynote speaker, Jonathan Holloway, does in Jim Crow Wisdom.
Recent developments in the study of memory, from Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory to Benjamin Stora’s La gangrène et l’oubli,
highlight the struggle between the desire to remember and the need to
forget, which has taken center stage in discussions about memory and its
uses. Pierre Nora's concepts of lieux and milieux de mémoire
have inspired both praise and controversy regarding the relationship
between memory and history; memory and space; and memory and artifacts
in societies’ efforts to institute archives or commemorate important
events. Between the preservation of sites of commemoration, such as
Ground Zero and Parque de la Memoria, and the state-imposed silence on
commemorative spaces under repressive governments, memory has become a
much more self-conscious societal focus.
All
these developments have strong aesthetic dimensions. The third annual
conference of the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton will
undertake a two-day reflection on these issues of memory in artistic
works and practice, broadly conceived. We see opportunities for new
exploration of the way memory is preserved, transmitted, changed,
resignified, and reinvented in works of art, and especially in
"translation" from one work or medium to another.
We
invite conference participants and community members to join us in
considering such questions as: How is the memory of a war or violent
event reconceptualized in aesthetic representations? How does
kitchification transform the memory of an original event? How does
mnemonic intertextuality change memories? How do artists transmit one
another's work, and extend one another's reach (or their own) in
posterity? In what ways does a painting or photograph establish the
afterlife of its subject, or does a composer extend the life of a text
or image "translated" into music? Can the various art forms do justice
to one another? Can they do without each other? How do different
translators re-write or change texts and memories? How does the artistic
medium transform, change or adapt the memory of an event, experience,
person or another work of art? What is the role of the scholar in the
commemoration of the dead, and the living? How do issues of memory
figure in the Public Humanities movement? These questions concern us not
only as scholars, but also as citizens and human beings, and they can
inform our approach to the scholar's ideal role in society.
Potential papers might explore these subjects:
- Literature's refiguration of the memory of specific events
- Translation and resignification of memories
- Ekphrastic "translation," comparative media, and intermedial transmission (e.g., poetry set to music)
- Musical compositions and their particular mode of transmission
- Resignifying mnemonic sites
- Memory and palimpsest
- Food as memory
- Memory and trace(s)
Abstracts no longer than 500 words are due to Brahim El Guabli and Rachel Bergmann at comconf@princeton.edu by June 10, 2016. Please include your full name, the title of your paper and your institutional affiliation in your abstract.
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