IAWIS/AIERTI

International Association of Word and Images Studies

Sedimentation: Towards an Archaeology of Word and Image

The 13th International IAWIS Conference

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais –

UFMG, Brasil, 28 August-1 September, 2023

Call for Papers Seminar 15

Word and Image: A Palimpsestic Romance

Coordinators

Prof. Béatrice Laurent

(U. Bordeaux-Montaigne, France – beatrice.laurent@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr)

Prof. Manuela D’Amore

(U. of Catania, Italy – m.damore@unict.it) 

At its inception in the 1980s, Inter Arts Studies focused mostly on the relations between literature and visual art. Poetry and painting were considered as ‘sister arts’, with the poetic mode ‘giving voice to a mute art object’ (Mitchell 1986: 153) while the visual mode shaped the text into a pattern that stilled ‘the movement of linguistic temporality into a spatial, formal array’ (Krieger 1992). Insisting on similitudes, the egalitaring metaphor of sisterhood was first supplanted by that of the self and the other – where difference was emphasized – and then it changed for a gendered one speaking of the complementarity of different, yet equal partners (Mitchell 156).

Going beyond text and image to include other media, Intermedial studies emerged in the late 1990s with the specific purpose to study ‘the point of intersection between different media’, their ‘hybridization’ (Oxford Reference Dictionary). Considering that ‘all communicative situations and all media types are multimodal’ (Bruhn & Schirrmacher 2021: 21), the latter are referred to as the mixed-blood offspring of the original pair.

The more contemporary questions raised by transmediation regarding the fidelity issue and the gains or losses induced by the process of adaptation look at the new object with the eye of a physionomist seeking out the resemblance with ancestors and the imports from other parents. This is a source of delight according to Sanders as ‘adaptation and appropriation are fundamental to the practice and, indeed, to the enjoyment of literature and the arts more generally’ (Sanders 2016: 21). The pleasure we argue is an archeological/genealogical one that finds romantic comfort in the palimpsestic traces left by generations of ancestors of various media types, and celebrates diversity.

Considering a wide historical span starting from early/primitive forms of textual/ visual forms to the digital age, we welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers (maximum). Please send a 500-word abstract and 200-word curriculum vitae via Google Form https://forms.gle/JwZ9DePy9edcHQ9x6. The submission deadline is 30th September 2022.

Further information about the 13th IAWIS Conference can be found at this link https://www.iawis.org/_files/ugd/db3902_69a7de725e284d8fbd3db4428e44eec8.pdf