Keynote Speakers:
Professor Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University
Professor Dennis Tenen, Columbia University
The domain of the page—or more contemporaneously, the screen—is a representational form of mental imagery. Indeed, textual surfaces are so ubiquitous in today’s culture that we sometimes forget that each arose from an internal inclination and proceeded into manifestation through a process culturally inscribed, but with one underlying, even fundamental, character at play: to preserve information outside the body so that it can be perceived either by ourselves or others at some later date. Yet so intricately instantiated is this association between our mental life and textual representation that we would be deceived to conflate the two or give one absolute precedence over the other. The question we seek to ask is this: what is the state of the image, or imaging, as mode, as practice, as ontology? Before the postmodern turn, the mind had primacy. But scholarship in the humanities has long-since changed, seeking to question the supposed seamlessness of degree between the mind and the external world of visual images. For when we look with adjusted eye, fissures emerge—and images, even those most dearly held, appear consigned to an empire of signs that we did not choose, though they are our own, and we seem to have no choice but to think and represent according to their dictation.
If these approaches have a unifying theme, it is the past, present, and future character of the image or imaging as technical and cultural practice across the centuries. We invite all papers that grapple in some manner with this theme and particularly encourage those that express an intercultural point of view. Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Digital Humanities and the changing role of literature
Big Data, computation and literary study
The New Formalism as methodology and/or rival to historicism
Literature, social space, and intersubjectivity
Romantic reconsiderations of the image
Ancient signification
Alchemy and Early Modern science
Myth, magic, and signs
Self-reflexive textual practices, ancient and modern
History of the book
Imaging the Anthropocene
The role of imaging in the representation of gender, race, and class
The advent and future of the moving image
Shakespeare and Digital Humanities
Imaging in Shakespeare
Visualizing Shakespeare