Gottfried Boehm, Basel:
Vor Augen stellen. Zum lebendigen Bild
Perhaps surprisingly, rhetorical models turn out to be highly suitable for understanding our comprehension of images (as artistic representations and material phenomena). This presentation will explore the creation of iconic evidence: how do images generate meaning, and how is this meaning different from linguistic meaning? A number of examples will guide the theoretical analysis. (Presentation in German)
Rüdiger Campe, Baltimore:
Shapes and Figures - Geometry and Rhetoric In the Age of Evidence
The figuration of evidentia is a rather poorly documented and rarely debated branch of the rhetorical production of images although it is closely connected with the emergence of the notion of Darstellung in 18th-century aesthetics. Two features of this proto-aesthetical device will be discussed: The first characteristic is the diagrammatical nature of this figure - examples used are rather geometrical diagrams or statistical tables than pictorial images. The second characteristic is the inherent relation to media translation - the diagrammatic 'image' is produced through and 'instead of' words and sentences evoking that image. Both aspects underline the relation of the evidential image to language and writing.
Ulrike Landfester, St. Gallen:
"Unverlöschliche Merkmale menschlichen Willens": Heinrich Wuttke und die Geburt der Schrift aus dem Geist der Tätowierung
In 1872 Heinrich Wuttke publishes the first volume of his "History of Writing"— with a surprising opening statement: Writing, asserts Wuttke, initially developed from tattooing as one of the first mnemonic techniques of humanity. This diagnosis is an effect of the fundamental 19th-century cultural-historical hypothesis that the history of the relationship among body, image, and text can be sketched as a logocentrically organizied continuity. Wuttke's argument is a reaction to the fact that new media such as photography and telegraphy are upsetting the hierarchical triangle of body, text, and image and thus initiate the decline of the primacy of writing. (Presentation in German.)
Sabine Mödersheim, Madison:
Brecht's "Kriegsfibel" — An Emblem Book?
This presentation links Early Modern Studies and contemporary media studies in assessing the frequently made claim that Brecht's "Kriegsfibel" should be considered a modern, marxist version of the emblem book. This "War Primer" is a collection of "photo-epigrams"— epigrams that accompany wartime news photography that Brecht collected in the early 1940s as an exile from Nazi Germany. Brecht employed this bi-medial form as functional transformation of artistic methods of production, distribution and consumption, using mass-media imagery and the conventional genre of the epigram. Reminiscent of the emblematic genre that combines a picture and an explanatory text to convey a moral maxim, Brecht's photo-epigrams comment on the immorality of war and the role of propaganda. But how precisely does Brecht engage the emblem tradition? This contribution offers a sustained questioning of the categorization of Brecht's work as "emblem book."
Stefanie Ohnesorg, Knoxville/Tennessee:
A Closer Look at the Contact Zone(s): Mapping "Realities" and Reading Maps
It could be argued that maps are primarily defined by their utility to represent spatial relationships and by their ability to authenticate a certain world view. However, it is also justified to view maps as objects of art that are highly subjective and thus reveal more about the artist/cartographer than about the space or landscape these maps claim to represent. No matter at which end of this spectrum we may find ourselves, maps need to be viewed as an attempt to translate narratives (observations, accounts of travel and exploration, attempts to articulate a personal 'standpoint,' theories, wishes, fantasies, etc.) into cartographic/schematic images, and 'reading' maps can thus turn into an art that goes far beyond the extraction of information. In my presentation, I will focus on the different translation processes between the two sign systems, and I will analyze the implications of these translation processes for defining the 'contact zone' between the two media.
Ben Parrot, Madison:
Aesthetic Schizophrenia: The Text-Image Relationship in Heinrich Hoffmann's 'Struwwelpeter'.
The "Struwwelpeter"— one of the most famous children's books ever published — has occasioned almost diametrically opposed reader responses. The complex and varied relation between text and images can furnish at least a partial explanation for this divided reception: close analysis reveals the intriguing, sometimes unexpected ways in which text and images both correspond and diverge.
Thyra Knapp, Madison:
"Trennung, Teilung, Spaltung": Ekphrasis as the Unifying Fissure in Anne Duden's "Das Judasschaf"
Anne Duden's 1985 novel Das Judasschaf relies crucially on visual art to chart the main character's experiences and development. The biography and subjectivity of the post-WWII female protagonist is refracted through the images of Italian Renaissance paintings in ways that challenge the traditional boundaries of text and image and transform both.
Monika Schmitz-Emans, Bochum:
Der Erzähler und seine Zauberlaterne
The arts invent each other in reciprocal processes of metaphoric "mirroring": this is most true for the relationship between literary narratives and the visual arts. Especially since the 18th century, "non-artistic" media have provided powerful metaphors for the process of literary (self)reflection. Especially among Romantic authors, the motif of the laterna magica has had a powerful influence, and it has played a key role in the history of the liberation of poetic imagination from the requirement of mimetic representation. The presentation will explore the function of this motif in Friedrich Schiller ("Der Geisterseher"), in Bonaventura's "Nachtwachen" in selected texts by Jean Pauls and E.T.A Hoffmann, and in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust's work opens with a description of this technique of projecting images, used as a means of narrative self-reflection and (since the device was by that time technically obsolete) as a representation of a narration that invokes the past. (Presentation in German.)
Marc Silberman, Madison:
Soundless Speech / Wordless Writing: The German Silent Cinema
This presentation focuses on text-image relations in the German Expressionist cinema where the historical antinomies between the two signifying systems achieved a new dimension of artistic self-reflexivity. In some of these films the silent speech of the figures was conveyed by means of graphically stylized intertitles while others sought an original, non-written "language" precisely in the silence of the silent cinema. This "silent" language — realized through the dramaturgy of light and movement — demands a different reading than written language. If the language crisis of modernism is a crisis in constituting signifiers, then the Expressionist cinema responds with the disappearance of writing, and thus marks a transition, perhaps even an endpoint in a much longer process of change.
Roy Arenella, "iNotA" 2005
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