Thursday, February 16, 2006
Penn Humanities Forum, 3619 Locust Walk
1:30p: Registration
2:00p: Welcome: Moose Room
Liliane Weissberg: Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature
2:15-3:15p
Session 1: Rethinking the Giants: Seminar Room
Respondent: Aaron J. Ilika, Doctoral Student, Spanish Literature, University of Pennsylvania
Barbara Stoltz, Art Historical Institute, Florence, Italy (Abstract p. 10)
"The Dante-album": Frederico Zuccaros Pictorial and Textual Interpretation of the Divina Commedia
Francesco Lucioli, Università "La Sapienza," Rome (Abstract p. 10)
"Theatricalization" of a Genre. The Don Chisciotte Adapted by Maurizio Scaparro
Session 2: The Buying Game: Moose Room
Respondent: Frederick F. Wherry, Dean's Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Kirt Mausert, University of Pennsylvania (Abstract p. 10)
The Semiotics of Contemporary Thai Advertisement
Truc Nguyen, Ryerson and York Universities, Toronto (Abstract p. 11)
Dressed to Sell: Postmodern Aesthetics, Consumer Culture, and Fashion in Teen Magazines
3:15-3:30p: Break
3:30-5:00p
Session 3: Reading Buildings/Building Readings
Respondent: Erika Tapp, DoctoralCandidate, History of Art, Universityof Pennsylvania
Sarah Ruhland, Universityof Delaware (Abstract p. 11)
Constructing the Cannon Ball House: Subjectivity and Documentation
Elaina D. Lin, University of California, Los Angeles (Abstract p.11)
A Storied Burialby Burin: Charles Eisen's Womanand Marc-Antoine Laugier's Essai sur l'Architecture (1753 and 1755)
Abigail Susik, Columbia University (Abstract .p 12)
Text, Interrupted: Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant
Session 4: Words and Images in Motion: Liturgy, Devotion, Dance
Respondent: Grant Potts, D o c t o r a lCandidate, Religion, University of Pennsylvania
Lesley .T Stone, University of South Florida (Abstract .p 12)
From Chapel to Chamber: Liturgy and Devotion in Lucantonio Giuntas Missale romanum, 1508
Monique Ingalls, University of Pennsylvania (Abstract .p 12)
"The Word Made Digital:" Digital Writing and Images in American Evangelical Protestant Worship
Seran Schug, University of Pennsylvania (Abstract p. 13)
Speaking and Sensing the Self: AQuest for "Authenticity" through Contemplative Dance
Meyerson Hall Gallery, 3420 S. 34th Street
5:30p: And Image: A Visual Art Exhibition
Alison Byrnes, University of Michigan (Abstract p. 13)
Translating into the Visual
Dafang Chai, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
and Matthew Valentine, California Polytechnic State University (Abstract p. 13)
Rain on the Roof: Fear and Fertility
Kelly Xintaris, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Abstract p. 13)
Allostasis
Penn MFA Students
Philip Adams
Milana Bravlavsky
Jonathon Cancro
Su-Yen Chae
Nathaniel Clark
Andrew Graham
Sinae Lee
Francesca Pfister
Tina Valentine
Nathan Wasserbauer
Zachary Yorke
Reception to follow
Friday, February 17, 2006
10:00-11:15a
Session 5: Visualizing Literature
Respondent: Alexandra Pappas, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn Humanities Forum and Classics
Ashli Jane Elizabeth Baker, University of Washington (Abstract .p 14)
Reader as Voyeur in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe
Vance Byrd, University of Pennsylvania (Abstract p. 14)
(Ent)Täuschung: Deception, Disappointment, and Germany's First Panorama
James J. Hodge, Univesity o fCalifornia, Santa Barbara (Abstract p.14)
Intermedial Aesthetics: Joyces Stereoscope and the Trembling of Representation
Session 6: Supplementary Icons/Complementary Words
Respondent: Lynn Ransom, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn Humanities Forum and History of Art
George Neal, University of North Texas (Abstract p. 15)
Image and Incarnation: Christ as Logos in Two Insular Manuscripts
Karen Gloyd, University of Delaware (Abstract p. 15)
Why label? Reconsidering theInscriptions on an Eighth-Century Crucifixion icon
Lilia Verchinina, University of Alberta, Edmonton (Abstract p. 15)
Iconoclasm, Iconolatry a n d Modernity in Relation to Proto-image
11:15a-11:30a: Break
11:30a-12:45p
Session 7: Constructing Communities
Respondent: Marlis Schweitzer, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn Humanities Forum and History
Francis M. Hult, University of Pennsylvania (Abstract p. 16)
Words as Images on a Swedish Linguistic Landscape
Ellesia A. Blaque, Wayne State University (Abstract .p 16)
From Mammies and Jezebels to Bitches and Hoes: Performing Word and Image Using Cultural Icons of Black Female Stereotypes
Karen Schrier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Abstract p. 16)
Roadside Transgressions: Visions of the Border in "South of the Border"
Session 8: Alternate Literacies
Respondent: Gregory Downs: Doctoral Student, History, University of Pennsylvania
Miriam Clinton, University of Pennsylvania (Abstract p. 16)
Seeing the Unseen: The Question ofAudience in Assyrian Art
Beth A. 'Zinsli, University of Wisconsin-Madison (Abstract p. 17)
Word as Image: Reception and Reading of Text Images in Ralph Gibson's Ex Libris
Ana Garcia Varas, University of Magdeburg (Abstract p. 17)
Scientific Words - Scientific Images. Considerations Concerning the Indispensable Role of Images in Science
2:00-3:15p
Session 9: Voices in the Book: Visualizing Music, Speech, and Meter; Seminar Room
Respondent: Jennifer Saltzstein, Doctoral Candidate, Music, University of Pennsylvania
Hector Reyes, Northwestern University (Abstract p. 17)
Speech Acts and Narration in the Illustrations of The Roman Vergil (Verg. Lat. 3867)
Anna Grau, University of Pennsylvania (Abstract p. 18)
Reading Robin and Marion: Generic Play and Textual Community in Medieval France
Roger Grant, University of Pennsylvania (Abstract p. 18)
At the Frontier of Emptiness: Newtonian 'Time in J.P. Kirnberger's Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik
Session 10: Media and Mediation; Moose Room
Respondent: Kerry Wallach, Doctoral Student, German Literature, University of Pennsylvania
Laura White, Binghamton University (Abstract p. 18)
Reporting World Conflict: The Case forComics in Joe Sacco's Palestine
Michael Tymkiw, University of Chicago (Abstract p.19)
Saubere Wehrmacht
Bridget Rose Nolan, University of Pennsylvania (Abstract p. 19)
From Murals to Morals: A Picture of Northern Ireland
3:15-3:30p: Break
3:30-5:00p
Session 11: Pictures of You: Photo, Text, Modernity
Respondent: Marcy Dinius, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn Humanities Forum and English
Vered Maimon, Columbia University (Abstract p. 19)
Displaced "Origins," Imaginative "Beginnings:" Henri Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature
Jessie Morgan Owens, New York University (Abstract p.20)
"We must daguerreotype for our readers": Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Author as Photographer
Asma Naeem, University of Maryland, College Park (Abstract p.20)
Mechanical Painting: Eakins's PianoPictures, the Typewriter, and Transcription
Colin Dickey, University of California, Irvine (Abstract p.20)
Mementoesofthe Past: The Photographic Novel as Allegorical Rupture
Session 12: Art and Ideas of the U.S.
Respondent: Stephen Petersen, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn Humanities Forum and HistoryofArt
Jason D. LaFountain, Harvard University (Abstract .20)
Cotton Mather's Reading and Writing on Art
Megan Walsh, Temple University (Abstract p.21)
Ordinary People: Francis Blackwell Mayer and 19th-Century Images of the American Revolutionary Soldier
Seth McCormick, Columbia University (Abstract p.21)
Signs and Wonders: Jasper Johns and the Pictographic Imaginary
Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Harvard University Art Museums (Abstract p.21)
The Writing on the Wal: Agnes Martin's Collected Writings
5:30: Keynote Address; Class of '55 Room, Van Pelt Library
Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University
Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday
Michael Fried is the .J R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities, Director oft h e Humanities Center, and Professor of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. He gave the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts ("The Moment of Caravaggio) at the NationalGallery of Art in the spring of 2002, and received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2004.
After earning his B.A. in English at Princeton University, Professor Fried pursued his Ph.D. in Fine Arts at Harvard University, where he taught from 1968-75. Since then he has been at Johns Hopkins University. A world-renowned historian of art, Professor Fried is the author of several monographs: Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987), Courbet's Realism (1990), Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996), Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002), in addition to three books of poetry: Powers (1973), To the Center of the Earth (1994), and The Next Bend in the Road (2004). He is currently writing two books, one on recent photography and the other on Caravaggio.
Abstracts
Thursday, February 16
Session 1: Rethinking the Giants
Barbara Stoltz, Art Historical Institute, Florence, Italy
The "Dante-album": Federico Zuccaros pictorial and textual interpretation of the Divina Commedia
The famous "Dante-album" from Federico Zuccaro (around 1588) is an extraordinary example of a choreographed performance between text and image. Exactly during the period of "ut pictura poesis" and the "Dante-discussion" in academic circles, Zuccaro's work stages a playful and ironic break with media conventions. The drawings have their own independent narrative system. In addition, Dante's verses are not simply copied from the original source and therefore must be considered a creative edition of Dante'sComedia. Now, in the second and third parts of the album, text invades the space of the image: as a result, the audience must switch their role from viewer to reader. While most analyses concerning the"Dante-album" separate the word from the image, ti is exactly the interplay between the drawings and the Comedia-text that reveals an important key to understanding Zuccaro's work, that is, how he combines both media in order to construct an innovative narrative strategy that allows us to read and to see Dante in a completely new way.
Francesco Lucioli, Università "La Sapienza, Rome
"Theatricalization" of a genre. The Don Chisciotte Adapted by Maurizio Scaparro Maurizio Scaparro, one of the leading contemporary Italian directors, challenges himself with the staging of Don Quijote by Miguel De Cervantes. 'This text, which marks the end of the success of the romance, is considered in a mere theatrical light. As a matter of fact, the adventures of the hidalgo from Mancia take a metatheatrical form, involving the characters, the actions, the spaces, and the times of the novel. An analysis of the play makes it possible to understand in what way the literary model may influence the play and how far the play can convey the meaning of the written word. By comparing the Scaparro Don Chisciotte to the by-now classical Orlando Furioso adapted by Luca Ronconi we can notice to what extent the differences between the Italian poem and the Spanish romance deeply affect their adaptation. We can also go deep into the various possibilities of rendering the literary word through the use of stage images.
Session 2: The Buying Game
Kirt Mausert, University of Pennsylvania
The Semiotics of Contemporary Thai Advertisement
Accurately apprehending the role of advertising in massified societies is possible only through the application of a theoretical framework that is broad enough to account for the variety of phenomena which inherein the processes and texts which are constitutive of advertisements. Specifically, by applying a theory informed by a Peircean semiotic mode of reasoning about sign (and, therefore, social) relations, it is possible to avoid reducing complexities of advertising as a social practice solely to either psychological, economic, or historical facts; claims supporting the proposition that a discourse centered approach offers the most general (and coherent) account of the elementary cultural dimensions of advertising are therefore offered. Methodologically, then, the particulars of Thai print advertisements, published in industry magazines, are described in terms of the manner in which the circumscription of highly motivated orders of semiotic (use) value is achieved through, and embodied in, text and image.
Truc Nguyen, Ryerson and York Universities, Toronto, Canada
Dressed to Sell: Postmodern Aesthetics, Consumer Culture, and Fashion in Teen Magazines
This paper investigates how contemporary fashion products and commodity culture are presented in three American magazines aimed at female adolescents: Teen Vogue, Seventeen, and ELLEgirl. I will argue that contemporary images and layouts in teen magazines utilize postmodern aesthetics in order to promote commodity fetishism and hyperconsumption. This is ironic because postmodernity is traditionally associated with a greater emphasis on fashion individualism and postmodern fashion signifiers with subversive youth subcultures. This paper will discuss the findings of prior research on the relationship of teenage girls to fashion magazines, particularly with regards to consumption. 'Then, a qualitative content analysis of selected editorial fashion content will be used to determine the presence of postmodern fashion and aesthetic techniques within these texts. Finally, whileconsidering the way that meanings are invested in fashion products, these design and content elements will be examined within the context of commodity fetishism and an ideology of consumption.
Session 3: Reading Buildings/Building Readings
Sarah Ruhland, University of Delaware
Constructing the Cannon BallHouse: Subjectivity and Documentation
The amount of historic buildings still standing certainly does not comprise a complete picture of our ever-changing architectural landscape. Fortunately, some of our destroyed buildings have found a means of survival through documentation, however, the subjectivity and various interpretations of documentation often overshadow the reality of historic structures. Using the Cannon Ball House, which stood in Philadelphia until its demolition in 1996, as a case study, I examine the implications of decisions regarding what aspects of a historic structure are recorded, as well as discuss the subjective interpretation of these documents. This home represented one of the oldest examples of colonial architecture in its region and contained certain unique architectural elements, yet depending on the intention of the interpreter, the home has been viewed either as an unsightly burden or an exceptionally important piece of colonial history. I construct this home from its documentation, showing the cloaking of reality achieved through the manipulation of words.
Elaina D. Lin, University of California, Los Angeles
A Storied Burial by Burin: Charles Eisen's Woman and Marc-Antoine Laugier's Essai sur l'Architecture (1753 and 1755)
Marc-Antoine Laugier writes in Essai sur l'Architecture (1753): "Since my main purpose is to form the taste of architects, I leave out those details which can be found elsewhere; nor do I need to burden this little work with drawings which may be irritating and tiring to the reader." Laugierreplaces the latter clause in 1755, conceding "a number of plates sufficient to put before the reader all those objects of which a simple description would give him only an imperfect idea." Unlike the eight mechanical plates, however, Charles Eisen's frontispiece serves no apparent didactic purpose, seems grafted onto a stylistically hostile text ... yet becomes the most enduring and hitherto unquestioned image of Laugier's primitive hut. By foregrounding Architecture as Woman, Eisen finishesLaugier's simple histoire of the primitive hut. The ontological void underpinning allegory and the female figure represents what is repressed in architecture's storied turn to Paradise.
Abigail Susik, Columbia University
Text, Interrupted: Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant
In Louis Aragon's surrealist novel, Paris Peasant (1924-26), the author's description of two 19th-century sites in Paris is continually interrupted by a series of foreign entities. At once linguistic and imagistic- nestled within the narrative and set apart from it through spacing, alterations in font, and decorative borders- these textual interruptions have the combined effect of shattering the integrity of the narrative flow and the visual space of the page. Diverse as they are numerous, texts such as shop signs, café menus, elaborate word plays, and snippets of nonsensical poetry appear in context with Aragon's perambulations of two 19th-century sites in Paris, a ruinous shopping arcade, the Passage de l'Opera, and a derelict urban park, Buttes- Chaumont. A clearer understanding of this phenomenon will be sought through a comprehensive analysis of these texts and comparisons with a variety of Modernist methods such as collage and the found object.
Session 4: Words and Images in Motion: Liturgy, Devotion, Dance
Lesley T. Stone, University of South Florida
From Chapel to Chamber: Liturgy and Devotion in LucantonioGiunta's Missale romanum, 1508
Missals traditionally contained minimal illustrations prior to printing, resulting in their strict classification as a liturgical object. This paper questions the previous established boundaries which categorize medieval objects as related to a particular type of religious activity. In other words, missals have been categorized based on content rather than function. 'This study challenges the existing strict nomenclature applied to medieval art objects as either "liturgical" or"devotional" Lucantonio Giunta's 1508 Missale romanum edition mirrors the image formula used in his widely successful Officium beatae Mariae Virginis of 1501. The inclusion of twenty full-page woodblock images to form a coherent iconographic program indicates a shift in the relationship between text and image in early printed missals. Whereas the text of a missal serves a liturgical function, the accompanying images do not fit so easily in the same classification, resulting in a new application of the "para-" or "quasi-liturgical" art object.
Monique Ingalls, University of Pennsylvania
"The Word Made Digital": Digital Writing and Images in American Evangelical Protestant Worship
Historically, American evangelical Protestantism has placed great importance on the written word within congregational worship while showing ambivalence or hostility toward the image. However, the increased use of digital technology (especially PowerPoint) as the media for presenting song lyrics during the worship service has altered evangelicalism's relationship to word and image. In examining the ramifications of this technological change, I will first explore differences between digital and print media, focusing especially on the ability of digital writing to blur the boundaries between word and image. Second, I will suggest through an analysis of worship song lyrics how these changes may have impacted evangelical belief. An examination of word and image in the context of American evangelical worship enables a better understanding of the adaptation of American evangelicalism to modern cultural forms and provides an example of how the "medium" affects the "message."
Seran Schug, University of Pennsylvania
Speaking and Sensing the Self: A Quest for "Authenticity" through Contemplative Dance
Neurologists' current focus upon the kinesthetic image as the way "one has oneself, one is oneself ...[and how] the body. confirms itself" presupposes the essentialist notion that sensory images are natural phenomena with determinate psychological effects. Conversely, following Boas, I assert that sensory images are modes of perception conditioned by tradition and history. The senses, as bodily ways of knowing, are an intrinsic aspect of cultural life and as we learn how to perceive the world, we simultaneously learn which sensorial attributes are valued as aesthetic ideals of authenticity and personhood. Culture and body, word and image, do not live within separate realms of existence but are intimately intertwined in the process of self-construction. In my research on an aesthetic practice called Authentic Movement, I show how "authenticity" is achieved through the semiotic mediation of the phenomenological experience of the senses as well as through the narration and interpretation of that experience.
And Image: A Visual Art Exhibition
Alison Byrnes, University of Michigan
Translating into the Visual
I am interested in portraying the problems of historiography itself- that history is an artificial construction, reflecting actual events but never fully conveying its multiple realities. Similarly, images of history represent only the subjective point of view of the image-maker. My current strategy is to investigate the gap between the historical word and the visual image by "translating" directly from Roman historical texts into a pictorial form. I have discovered that I am left to fill in many of the details, thus leaving space for my personal interpretation and anachronism informed by pop culture. The very act of painting becomes an exercise in historiography: writers of history must perform the act of "filling in" as well.
Dafang Chai, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Matthew Valentine, California Polytechnic State University
Rain on the Roof: Fear and Fertility
In today's over-imaged architectural world, there is too much said about form, and too little about dwelling within. Architecture involves all of the human senses including the visual, acoustic, touch, smell, proprioception, and inner feelings such as we experience when reading literature, and poetry. The power of words to inspire the imagination should be re-examined. My installation presents a poetic design of a rain gutter and "downspout". Combined with a series of representations of rain in the fields of word, literature, art, and architecture. These mixed media provide a chance to fully indulge in the rain by engaging all human senses. Italian architect Filarete wrote that architecture originated when Adam had to find his living after being driven out of Paradise, both for food and shelter, in the sense that we need shelter to protect from rain, and, we need rain to fertilize the earth. The purpose of the installation is to remind us that rain fertilizes our lives. Rather than just hide rainwater in downspout, we should treat it positively and beautifully in architecture.
Kelly Xintaris, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Allostasis
As an artist and writer, I create photo-and text-based works that include sculptures, booklets, and printed multiples. In doing so, I am interested in the juxtaposition of language and images, and the construction of meta text. This has led me to go beyond the circumnavigation of the obvious, to an exploration of what is and what should be, and at times, to a realization of what never was. The wall piece Allostasis contains excerpts from a sociological study of Catholic nuns, as well as fragments of a prose poem by Samuel Beckett. These streams of words are cast against each other, literally and metaphorically, through the use of layering. It is, in effect, text as texture, as one voice resonates with and shadows the other, in both form and content. Allostasis invites a multitude of readings and interpretations, each one as varied as the viewers who experience the piece.
Friday, February 17
Session 5: Visualizing Literature
Ashli Jane Elizabeth Baker, University of Washington
Reader as Voyeur in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe
In Daphnis and Chloe, a late second-century AD erotic Greek novel, Longus opens his story with an unusual prologue. In this prologue, the narrator recounts that while hunting in the woods of Lesbos, he happened upon a painting. What follows is the narrator's attempt to recount the story of love contained in the painting. In this paper, I propose that one reason Longus structured his work within an ekphrastic frame is to force the reader into the role, not only of narratee but also of sexual spectator. Through the constant associations between erotically charged viewing and death, Longs transforms his novel from a text into a dangerous erotic spectacle and alerts his reader to the risks inherent in reading/viewing the very novel in which the warning is written.
Vance Byrd, University of Pennsylvania
(Ent)Täuschung: Deception, Disappointment, and Germany's First Panorama
Borne out of techniques of surveillance and illusionism, driven by market forces, and arguably connected to the emergence of mass culture, panorama shows began circulating throughout Europe. In 1800, the first German panorama, Breysig's Panorama der Stadt Rom, was installed on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. My close reading of Heinrich von Kleist's correspondence with Wilhelmine von Zenge as well as contemporary reporting on Breysig's panorama in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden will show how the periodical grants a glimpse into the techniques of illusion, the manipulation of the observer at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The condition of illusion is the perfect manipulation of the entire body of the observer; this failed panorama reveals how the medium is destined to deceive all of the senses, not just vision.
James J. Hodge, University of California, Santa Barbara
Intermedial Aesthetics: Joyce's Stereoscope and the Trembling of Representation
The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a sea change in mediated forms of visual representation. This change engendered a concomitant shifting in the relation of the word tot h e visual as such. In response to Mallarme's essay "Crisis in Poetry" via W. B. Yeats, James Joyce considers the media-specific relation of word and image in the "Proteus" episode of Ulysses. Within a speculative aesthetic of an "ineluctable modality of the visible," Joyce's deployment of a stereoscope provides a heuristic for articulating a link between media as a trembling representation. A mechanistic understanding of stereoscopic vision enables us to consider how Joyce's literary mobilization of the stereoscope negotiates broader aesthetic, corporeal, and religious anxieties over the relation between word and image in terms of the position of the reader as intermedial-observer.
Session 6: Supplementary Icons/Complementary Words
George Neal, University of North Texas
Image and Incarnation: Christ as Logos in Two Insular Manuscripts
The introduction of Christianity into sixth-century England resulted in a proliferation of Gospel books used as instructional and liturgical tools. Through several illustrative methodologies, illuminators explored ways of creating Christological allusions for both private and liturgical use. The use of decorative carpet pages in two insular Gospels, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Durrow, functioned as devices through which the reading of the pages' contents could activate the Gospel in a way to make present Christ as logos. It can also be argued that carpet pages were themselves a kind of word that represented the Word of creation unknowable until Christ and the Gospels. New textual technologies allowed for a way of reading text that resulted in it being objectified and imbued with religious power. As a result, the text took on many aspects of the religious icon in that it could beseen as possessing a divine presence.
Karen Gloyd, University of Delaware
Why label? Reconsidering the Inscriptions on an Eighth-century Crucifixion Icon
Anxiety over word and image pervades the defenses of the eighth- and ninth-century iconoclast and iconodule. Their theological debates engage the categories of imitation, copy, and the original, posing the challenge to accurately represent the unique events of the Incarnation and Eucharist. The paper examines the function of the label inscriptions within the eighth-century crucifixion icon from the Theodotus Chapel of Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome. It explores an alternative perspective of their function in terms of the iconoclastic debate centered on the crisis of the copy: the labels guarantee a frame of representation. The property of text as a system composed naturally of substitutions resists the crisis associated with likeness and presence. The labels operating as symbols, therefore, preclude the capacity to be reproduced in the same manner as perpetual icon painting. The dynamics of the text-image relationship delineated in an inscribed icon reflect the crux of this debate.
Lilia Verchinina, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Iconoclasm, Iconolatry and Modernity in Relation to Proto-image
Eastern Christian icons reveal a culture where the Subiect has never affirmed itself. My presentation focuses on an unsuccessful attempt of the Subject to get into the Christian East. 'This occurred in visual world through the Byzantine iconoclasm of 8 t h - 9 t h centuries. Resisting the iconoclasm, Byzantine icon-worshipers resisted reducing images to mere signifiers. Image cannot be immanent to both Subject and Proto-image ("referent" in terms of the Western discourse), for the Proto-image is transcendental to subjectivity. Devotion to Proto-images-this is what distinguishes the consciousness of the Christian East. Conversely, presence of the Subject or "the eye that sees" (in Durer's words about the direct perspective) makes the modern consciousness iconoclastic. Image is identical with its Proto-image i n hypostasis (personality)and different in ousia (essence) -this is what distinguishes the Eastern Christian icon from a modern iconoclastic image.
Session 7: Constructing Communities
Francis M. Hult, University of Pennsylvania
Words as Images on a Swedish Linguistic Landscape
In recent years language policy research has increasingly focused on the social context for policies, investigating how they shape and are shaped by sociolinguistic circumstances. This presentation features ongoing research that draws o na specific methodological approach, linguistic landscape analysis, to investigate relationships among languages and language policies in the multilingual city of Malmö, Sweden. Linguistic landscape analysis is used to map linguistic objects (storefront signs, posters, etc.) in public spaces in light of what their use suggests about the sociopolitical factors that condition language choices. Elements of the linguistic landscape of certain neighborhoods, as reflected by datagathered from photography, are juxtaposed with specific policies such as language education curricula and a recently proposed national language policy. Preliminary implications for what the linguistic landscape suggests about the construction of Malmö as a multilingual city are discussed.
Ellesia A. Blaque, English, Wayne State University
From Mammies and Jezebels to BitchesandHoes: Performing Word andImage using Cultural Icons of Black Female Stereotypes
The black female stereotypes of yesterday plague the perceptions of contemporary black women. This is due, in large part, to the consistent perpetuation and proliferation of three slave woman stereotypes: the mammie, the Jezebel, and the Sapphire. Each of these stereotypes are based in the sexual experiences of slave women, and each are repeatedly interpreted and embedded in the literary products of black men throughout the literary history of African Americans. This presentation's goals are to foreground the utilitarian usage of such stereotypes by black men through the lens of literary production and authorship, juxtaposing nineteenth-century slave narratives and twenty-first-century rap lyrics written by black men.
Karen Schrier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Roadside Transgressions: Visions of the Border in "South of the Border"
"South of the Border" (SOTB), a roadside rest stop in South Carolina, is a multimedia theme park of the U.S.-Mexico border. In this presentation, I explore how it functions as a border in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the term. The replication, oversaturation, and fetishization of its "Mexican" themes, images, and products seem to exceed the boundaries of the norm. I argue that this excessiveness, and its status as a liminal border space, functions to naturalize the consumer relationship with SOTB, justify its economic and cultural practices, and disavow questions of the (misuse of national, ethnic, and racial identities. Moreover, by focusing on the SOTB mascot, the "Pedro," a caricature of a Mexican man, and related Mexican-themed American cartoon images, I analyze the ways advertising imagery and commodification of SOTBserve to express and propagate mythologies about Mexican culture and increase international tensions as popular culture traverses national boundaries. Finally, I evaluate SOTB as a possible Bahktin carnival--and consider whether such a place could be only produced in liminal border spaces.
Session 8: Alternate Literacies
Miriam Clinton, Universityof Pennsylvania
Seeing the Unseen: The Question ofAudience in Assyrian Art
Word and image are designed to communicate to an audience, but understanding that intended audience from the work itself may be difficult. The problem is compounded when considering ancient text and art, such as the corpus of the Assyrian Empire, since the modern viewer lacks context. It has long been known that certain Neo-Assyrian works were apparently not intended for any audience, but the unseen as a category of Assyrian art has never been defined or explored. Instead, the unseen, when addressed, has been grouped with visible texts or images of similar style. 'This paper identifies the types of works that were hidden and creates five classes of the unseen, including magic figurines, portions of visible works that were difficult to see, those in locations that were difficult to reach, foundation records, and texts on the backs of other works. It then speculates on the possible audience for the unseen.
Beth A. Zinsli, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Word as Image: Reception and Reading of Text Images in Ralph Gibson's Ex Libris
The argument that photography is dependent on accompanying texts for the creation of meaning changes dramatically when text moves from the privileged role of informed and informing companion into the role of the image itself. U.S. photographer Ralph Gibson's 2001 publication Ex libris uses text as image rather than as accompanying explanation or caption. The viewer's "reading" of Gibson's photographs necessarily focuses on the gestures and patterns created by the words and letters-not on the meanings typically signified by the texts. Using reception theory and semiotics, I will examine how the ideal viewer-reader of Gibson'swork receives the texts as photographic images and constructs or deciphers meanings from texts that no longer function in a conventionally legible way. Gibson's distinctive incorporation of text into photographic images and his eschewing of text as caption or explanation requires the viewer-reader to find an alternative way to make meaning in the works. An examination of a constructed ideal viewer-reader's reception of Ex libris and the resulting shift in how meanings are created by the text as an image will contribute to a different direction of inquiry in word and image studies, as well as increase existing knowledge on Gibson and his work.
Ana Garcia Varas, University of Magdeburg
Scientific Words - Scientific Images. Considerations Concerning the Indispensable Role of Images in Science
The interpretation of images as constructions, so influential in the last decades in cultural studies, has a special relevance in the study of science: the traditional description of science as a verbal knowledge which consists only in what is codified by linguistic entities presented images as mere illustrations for centuries. This paper examines the opposition between an exclusively linguistic conception of science, which is distinctive both for a kind of philosophy of science and for a long tradition in the history of art, and a conception that recognizes the particular representational value of images, challenging the idea that this value can only be understood as a construction.
Session 9: Voices in the Book: Visualizing Music, Speech, and Meter
Hector Reyes, Northwestern University
Speech Acts in the Illustrations of The Roman Vergil Manuscript (Verg. Lat. 3867)
Late antique manuscript illustrations are often assumed to translate text directly into visual form. I will argue that illustrations from the Roman Vergil manuscript demonstrate an awareness of, and cause the viewer to reflect on, the ways in which both image and text, as mediating forms, are in tension with the immediacy that epic and its performance strive for. The illustrations represent "speech-acts," reminding the viewer t h a toral performance was the original context of, and is what allows, the text that follows. I argue that the illustrations make use of late antique iconographic conventions of rhetorical address in order to insistently represent dramatic action and performed speech. Also, the moments which the artist has chosen to represent from the epic are moments already concerned with questions of language and performed speech. The images parallel Vergil's own meditations on the limits of language and the possibility of making the distant past more proximate.
Anna Grau, University of Pennsylvania
Reading Robin and Marion: Generic Play and Textual Community in Medieval France
The medieval pastourelle had strong generic conventions, including formulaic language and iconography. These motifs, including the characters Robin and Marion, were drawn upon by the anonymous composers and poets of the thirteenth-century Old French motet. The regularity of these features created a community of listeners and readers with shared knowledge and expectations, which could then be applied to the understanding of individual works. While motet texts are notoriously difficult to understand, the use of conventions and details of musical settings both clarify content and complicate meaning. The writing and notation of these works, and the illumination of the manuscripts in which they appear, broaden the context in which we imagine these works to include visual as well as aural engagement. A close reading of a single motet, Laurier m'esbatoie / Demenant grant joie/MANERE, will demonstrate the possibilities of using generic expectations to interpret meaning through music, word, and image.
Roger Grant, University of Pennsylvania
At the Frontier of Emptiness: Newtonian time in J. P. Kirnberger's Die Kunstdes reinen Satzes in der Musik
In the present paper, I focus on a historical juncture in ways of writing and thinking about meter. Specifically, I examine Johann Philipp Kirnberger's explanation of meter in his 1779 treatise, Die Kunst des reinenSatzes in der Musik. Kirnberger's work is important in that it designates a paradigmatic shift in conceptions of musical temporality. Along with his close associates, Kirnberger was the first to use Newton's concept of time in a description of musical meter. The diagrams and images used in seventeenth and eighteenth-century writings on meter help to distinguish Kirnberger's work as revolutionary. While images and diagrams used by other music theorists correspond to an Aristotelian concept of time, Kirnberger's images correspond directly to those used by Newton.
Session 10: Media and Mediation
Laura White, Binghamton University
Reporting Conflict: The Case for Comics in Sacco's Palestine
With its facts and photographs, typical media coverage often masquerades as objective truth, but it provides consumers only limited knowledge of distant places and their conflicts. As a powerful alternative to traditional, journalistic coverage, Joe Sacco travels through war zones with a photographer, but offers his view of the world through black and white comics. Using Susan Sontag's theories about photographs in conjunction with Homi Bhabha's ideas about the alliance between stereotypes and representations of time, I will explore how Sacco's comics might help to move readers beyond stereotypes to understanding. I will focus my analysis on scenes from Sacco's book, Palestine, concentrating on how his use of words and image allows Sacco to place viewers into productive new relationships with reporter, with subjects of coverage, and with time.
Michael Tymkiw, University of Chicago
Saubere Wehrmacht
This paper will draw on key texts by Roland Barthes to explore the relationship between the photographic image and word within two controversial exhibitions curated by the Hamburger Institute for Social Research concerning the Wehrmacht's responsibility for Nazi war crimes. Iwil begin by considering how the first exhibition's wall text, display structure, and logic for grouping photographs de- traumatizethe individual photograph by injecting a suprasegmental meaning into the ensemble of images. In addition, I will discuss how the second exhibition's greater emphasis on written documentation and its creation of "text and image documents" underscore the role of text when using photography as historical evidence. Finally, I will suggest that the second shows largely text-based argument reinforces the myth oft h e unsullied Wehrmacht due to the types of photographic images ultimately submitted as evidence.
Bridget Rose Nolan, University of Pennsylvania
From Murals to Morals: A Picture of Northern Ireland
The Northern Ireland situation is one of the most contentious in modern history. The key aspect of the "Troubles" is the intertwining of religion and politics: Catholics generally advocate Ireland's reunification, while Protestants hold that the North should remain part of the UK. One need only walk the streets of Belfast to understand the magnitude of this link. Pavement painted red, white, and blue signify a Protestant/Unionist area; a few blocks down the road, green, white, and orange pavement delineates a Catholic/Nationalist neighborhood. Central to the conflict's visibility are the political murals that occupy much of the region's wall space. These works serve as canvases to display aggression and catharsis as wellas memorials for the fallen. 'This image display will examine the ways in which political murals allow their creators and viewers to construct their views of history, encourage mobilization, and recreate their cultural heritage.
Session 11: Pictures of You: Photo, Text, Modernity
Vered Maimon, Columbia University
Displaced 'Origins,' Imaginative 'Beginnings:' Henri Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature
Within teleological histories of photography Henri Fox Talbot's 1844 The Pencil of Nature is often analyzed as the first mass-produced photographically illustrated book, a forerunner to what photography became in the modern era. Rather than addressing Pencil as an 'origin' for photography's future applications, my paper emphasizes the historical discursive specificity of the book and argues that ti presents a complex and undecided view with regard to the future of the photograph and its role as a document. What informs Talbot's views on the evidentiary status of the photograph is not any notion of an ontological essence or inherent semiotic structure such as the index, but the discourse of history as a literary genre and distinctive mode of knowledge in the early nineteenth century. For Talbot, the evidentiary status of the photograph was inseparable from the disseminating and destabilizing effects of time as a constitutive element of being and thought.
Jessie Morgan Owens, New York University
"We must daguerreotype for our readers": Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Author as Photographer
In a letter to the editor of Uncle Tom's Cabin dated March 9th, 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe schemes that "there's no arguing with pictures and everybody is impressed by them, whether they mean to be or no." In chapter four of the novel, she presents Uncle Tom, "who, as he is to be the hero of our story, we must daguerreotype for our readers." The author, assuming the guise of the photographer, penetrates fiction to impress, by photographing Tom, her picture of American history. In this paper I analyze this passage a n d similar confluences of the photographic and verbal in Stowe's work to expose a photographic topos or rhetorical strategy that authors from this period utilized to define, invest, and exploit contemporary notions of what photography might be, and what it might be good for.
Asma Naeem, University of Maryland
Mechanical Painting: Eakins's Piano Pictures, the Typewriter, and Transcription
In this paper, I juxtapose several paintings of piano-playing women by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) with the contemporary technology of the typewriter to suggest that Eakins's depictions of pianists and their sheet music, like the typist and her manuscript, manifest the artist's own quasi-mechanical relationship with the image on canvas. Invented in 1867, the first typewriter consisted of piano keys and piano wire. Moreover, like playing the piano, the physiological experience of typing involved a visual/manual/cognitive system that was fundamentally rote. Similarly, Eakins's use of photography to create paintings, beginning around 1872, may be viewed as another form of automatic iteration. With such techniques as projecting photographs onto canvas, Eakins inflected the creative process of painting with the act of transcription. Eakins's art, like an author's words streaming from a typewriter, was mediated by technological advances, and blurred the boundary between the mechanical and the creative.
Colin Dickey, University of California, Irvine
Mementoes of the Past: The Photographic Novel as Allegorical Rupture
Photographs are common in nonfiction, but few novelists have deliberately and seriously used photography in fictional narratives. While illustrations are, in a sense, timeless, photographs are rooted in the past, the specific moment when they were taken--they carry the aura of an unrecoverable time gone by. Photography creates a temporal rupture when embedded in fiction, immediately at odds with the sense of presence that fiction creates, and photographic novels create a bifurcated structure, an unresolved tension between the past of the photography and the present of the prose. This essay attempts to delineate this bifurcated space through Henry James' New York Editions, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and the novels of W. G. Sebald. Specifically, this essay will argue that the photographs in these novels do not simply illustrate their narratives, as Victorian drawings did, but rather create a rupture in time that is more akin to allegory.
Session 12: Art and Ideas of the U.S.
Jason D. LaFountain, Harvard University
Cotton Mather's Reading and Writing on Art
Although more or less unnoticed by scholars, the Congregationalist minister Cotton Mather's occasional references to art constitute (in sum) the earliest theorization of art in the English colonies. In sermons and moral treatises, in histories, biographies, and elegies, Mather ruminates on drawing, painting, and sculpture. Mather had never seen the majority of the artworks he mentions, whether in original form or printed reproduction. His attention to art developed largely through reading books. In this paper, I will begin to explicate Mather's investment in art as it is anchored in the complex word-image dialectics of his writing. As a member and product of a Puritan culture which privileged reading and writing, Mather depends heavily upon references to art in order to advance an argument concerning the supremacy of the textual, which he favors as the optimum medium of expression and the most durable depository for personal and historical information.
Megan Walsh, Temple University
Ordinary People: Francis Blackwell Mayer and 19th Century Images of the American Revolutionary Soldier
This paper looks at how Francis Blackwell Mayer's paintings remake the image of the Revolutionary soldier in a familiar, personal, and popular way. His journal, With Pen and Pencil on the Frontier in 1851: The Diary and Sketches of Frank Blackwell Mayer, as well as his contributions to Harper's and Scribner's, suggest that the figure of the American hero in Mayer'swork embodies familiarity and ordinariness as markers of greatness.
Seth McCormick, Columbia University
Signs and Wonders: Jasper Johns and the Pictographic Imaginary
In rejecting Abstract Expressionism's pictographic image, Johns shows how even the most advanced artistic and scientific investigations of the relation between vision and language are founded upon the presupposition of an original Edenic unity of nature and culture. This unity is figured in the indexical or natural sign, such as the found object or image, the painterly gesture, and the photograph. Johns's manipulation of these signs reveals the index as a secularized technology of divination bound up with the power of interpreting nature and with the interpretation of the nature of power. On the one hand, it fixes within itself the boundary between nature and culture, grounding all scientific and philosophical articulations of the relation between society and the "state of nature." On the other, its valorization as a natural sign sustains the modernist quest for a pre-representational and uncensored immediacy of sense while obscuring the ways in which this semiotic transparency serves the politicization of the private sphere and of biological life.
Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Harvard University Art Museums
The Writing on the Wall: Agnes Martin's Collected Writings
"Nature's Mystical Poetry, Written in Paint." The headline of Michael Kimmelman's 1992 review of Agnes Martin's paintings in The New York Times captures the interdependency between words and images that pervades Martin's work. To a remarkable extent, Martin has been able to direct the criticism of her art through her words: her interviews, published writings, and public lectures. What happens when, by privilege or by default, an artist's words become the dominant discourse through which we see their images? 'This paper will examine the effects that Martin's published writings have on the critical reception of her art and will suggest that the key to achieving a fuller understanding of Martin's art does not lie in using her writings to describe her artistic production. Instead, it lies in viewing her writings as part and parcel of her artistic work-the theoretical underpinnings of an oeuvre that issignificantly broader than is currently acknowledged.
