Some of our network members will participate in the international and interdisciplinary conference “Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects”, which is organised by Prof. Dr. Evanghelia Stead and will be held at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, 15-17 July 2015.
From the conference description:
The event will consider books and prints as telling and multidimensional cultural objects, “bearing in their pages the boundaries of their possible reception” (Roger Chartier, Pratiques de la lecture, 1985:79), and particularly address intersemiotic relations born of the ways in which content (texts and pictures) and material setting (shape, reproduction, ornament, typography and page lay-out, binding etc.) combine.
The conference’s goal is to enhance a constructive dialogue between disciplines such as literature and comparative literature, history, history of art, Mediawissenschaft and cultural studies, and to promote dialogue between reading theories and practices, book and literature histories, myth and pattern studies, text / figure transmission and circulation studies in Europe. […]Particular issues to be explored in the forum:
– the meeting of cultures, their interrelation and confrontation, when prints and albums are seen as silent but powerful messengers, circulating in a wide European context
– the complex dialogue between interpretation of context and expression of cultural trends as evidenced by the study of relations between “reading with images or ornament” in books and “works on paper” (engravings, lithographs, drawings, reproductions)
– the way major works, myths and imaginary patterns are transmitted, read, re-read and remediated through such processes and in such contexts
– a challenge to the limits of the much employed term “illustration” and its extensive use
– a re-valuation of copies, replicas and multiplication processes in an intense network of circulation
Conference languages are English, German and French. The full programme is available here: [pdf]
Attendance is by registration only. Please contact Anna Blattner: anna.blattner[at]frias.uni-freiburg.de
Book History and Print Culture Network 