College Art Association Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA 2009

Call for Papers:
Session Title: The Classical Unconscious

Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, University of Delaware, Department of Art
History, Newark, DE 19716.

deadline, May 9, 2008
send abstracts to: ninaudel.edu

An odd vision of the ancient world emerged in the last decades of the
nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries, between roughly 1850 and 1914.
This vision transformed an exhausted classical aesthetic rehearsed in
academies into a vital but subjective, a-historical, and sometimes
disquietingly disjointed or darkly libidinal idiom that will be less
antiquarian, erudite narrative and more metaphorical, generic "reservoir
of human models and symbols" --in Carl Schorske's words--with immediate
relevance to the present. Can we find answers for this idiosyncratic,
fractioned evocation of classical antiquity in the period's changing
cultural climate? Papers are invited that explore the transmutation of
the idea of Classicism in Europe under the impact of modernist forces,
including, among others, imperialist expansion, globalism and nationalism,
the rise of scientific archaeology, evolutionist theories, an explosive
popular culture, and philosophical-psychological forays into the realm of
the unconscious (Nietzsche, von Hartmann, Freud, the latter also a
collector of antiquities).