“How are you framing that?” It’s a frequent question we hear in the theoretically pluralistic world of the contemporary humanities. The question is seldom complimentary. As an interrogatory salvo, it frequently means: “What are the epistemological assumptions that undergird your conclusions?” The question is often meant to expose undertheorized terrain so that it can be made more intellectually robust with deeper thinking—or set aside as insufficient. Visual culture scholar John Tagg concisely defines framing, used in this sense, as “discursive constraint.” All framing, however, could arguably be seen as a problem of such constraint, regardless of how big or how refined the frame gets.

This panel invites new positions from which to conceptualize postwar moving-image art, extending into the contemporary moment. Anglo-American and European scholarship on moving-image art through the 1960s and 70s has largely privileged formalist thinking. There is, as Jonathan Walley has written, a “general agreement…that avant-garde filmmakers of this period followed the trend within modernist art toward medium-specific purification: the reduction of the art object to the essential physical or material components of its medium.”[1] In recent years, however, we have witnessed a number of crucial revisionist interventions.

As recent literary and cultural critics have shown, food, and its presence in literature and film, is not solely linked to corporeal survival. The relationship between food and the body is also one of chemical and physical processes, and of tolerance and rejection (both individual and societal). Food—eating, preparation, choice—therefore also embodies social and cultural nuances and, in their evolution, processes of change. What is more, in the acts of consumption and digestion, food can re-emerge in various, and often socially taboo, ways and, in so doing, highlight sociocultural boundaries and normativities. In other words, food not only reflects on individual biological needs, but it also exposes larger social ontologies.

The topic of this seminar is the presence of the “chicas raras” in Modern Spanish literature, also known as “queer women” in English. Queer is the perfect conceptual framework to think about how Spanish authors explore feminist themes, such as discrimination or inequality using their narratives as a tool to examine tensions in female subjectivity. The concept queer includes the idea of gender dissidence that encompasses how female intellectuals experience sex, sexuality and, gender. Even if oftentimes these writers have difficulties conceptualizing these notions, they are perceptible in women narratives, especially through specific genres: autobiography, memoir, romance fiction and letters.

In On the Genealogy of Morals Friedrich Nietzsche writes critically of just how bound his own native German was to more widespread religious-moral beliefs, such as those which take a fixed moral subject as the beginning and end of all we can know, thereby leaving out one’s own doing as secondary to who one is. Nietzsche writes: “But there is no ‘being’ behind doing[…] – doing is everything” (GM I, 13) and thus suggests that the underlying grammar of the languages he himself knew well – all of which acknowledge if only implicitly an objective difference between subject and verb, doer and deed – were in fact wrong and had to be thought through from the ground up. One might yet take Nietzsche to task on this provocation.

We are seeking abstracts for our panel at NeMLA 2019 entitled, "Transnational Aesthetics in Comics and Graphic Narratives."

Dear Colleagues,

Please consider submitting a proposal to the following session for the NeMLA 2019 Convention in Washington, DC (March 21-24).

 Urban Space and Cityscapes: Italian perspectives in fiction, photography, and film.