Elective Affinities - Philadelphia, USA 09/05

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International Association of Word and Image Studies, Philadelphia, USA
23.09.2005-27.09.2005, Philadelphia, USA
Deadline: 01.10.2004

International Association of Word and Image Studies: Elective
Affinities

Philadelphia, 23-27 September, 2005

The title of the conference has been borrowed from Goethe’s 1809 novel
Elective Affinities. There, the term “elective affinities” is the
subject of an energetic debate. A chemical term that was in currency
from the late eighteenth century, in the novel it extends to human
relationships, both intimate and political. Since this is a novel that
foregrounds “mixed media” such as tableaux vivants (i.e. dramatic
performances of artworks) and the picturesque garden, the concept of
“elective affinities” also has profound implications for the
relationship between words and images. Like the alkalis and acids of
which Goethe’s characters speak, words and images, though apparently
opposed, may have a remarkable affinity for one another. At the same
time, as one of the protagonists objects, such affinities are
problematic, and “are only really interesting when they bring about
separations.” The conference seeks – in the spirit of Goethe’s allusive
discussion – to explore word/image interactions in literature and visual
arts from a broad historical perspective, and also as they extend to
fields as diverse as Political Science, Religious Studies, and History
of Science.

The call for papers is available at:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/affinities/
IAWIS invites submission of proposals for papers (250-300 words) to
affinitiesccat.sas.upenn.edu

The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2004.

Please contact the organiser with any queries:

Catriona Macleod
Associate Professor
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
745 Williams Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
cmacleodsas.upenn.edu

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Arts of the Book

1. Artists’ Words

2. Artists and the Art World in Fiction

3. Word and Image in Printed Books

4. The Book and the Scroll: Forms of Printing and Publication

5. Book Design in the Digital Age

6. Breaking the Frame: From Comic-Strip to Graphic Novel

7. VVV-on-line: Verbal-Visual-Vocal Poetries in Hyperspace

Early Correspondences

8. Objects of Love – Material Tokens and Traces of Elective Affinities

9. Befriending Antiquity: The Renaissance Emblem

10. The Sight of Song: Meanings and Function of Medieval Musical
Notation

11. Presenting the Visual: Repraesentatio/Ekphrasis/Descriptio/Hypnoia
in Ancient and Medieval Literature and Theory

12. The Image of the Text in Medieval Art

13. Images of Harmony in Early Modern Europe

Political Inscriptions

14. Visualizing the Past: History, Literature, Spectacle

15. Word and Image in the Modern Public Monument

16. The New Prohibitions Against the Image: A Semiotic and Mediological
Question

17. Image, Text, History

18. Cultural Translation Between Europe and Latin America – Borders and
Exchange

19. National History: Text, Image, Rhetoric

20. Verbal and Visual Representations of Contemporary Islamic Culture

Scientific Imaging

21. Medical Case Studies

22. Words on Screen: Hierarchies of Text and Picture in Cyberculture

23. The Physical Universe

24. Explaining the Universe

Sacred Words, Sacred Images

25. The Jewish Book

26. Word and Image in Jewish Tradition

27. Reading Religious Texts

28. Graphic Sign, Symbol and Image: Seeing and Reading in Islamic Visual
Culture

29. Indian Religious Art and Literature

30. Medieval Manuscripts and Early Modern Books

31. Reformation Iconology and Spectacle

32. Reading Religious Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Spaces, Places

33. Museum – Object – Text

34. Duchamp: Master of Word-&-Image Disruption

35. Reading and Writing the Site

36. Imagining Libraries

37. Reading and Seeing the Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century American
City

38. Ornamental Texts and/ or Modernism?

Photographic Texts

39. Unequal Partners: When Photographs Vie With Words in Journalism

40. Cinema and Photography: Time, Space, Theory

41. Photography and Prose Fiction

42. Theory of Photography, Psychoanalysis, and the Theory of Literature

Homepage <http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/affinities/>