CFP Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity December 18-19 Tel Aviv University

From: Alberto Gabriele <[email protected]>

Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity

A Two-Day International Workshop

Tel Aviv University, December, 18-19, 2013


A vast tradition of literary and theoretical reflections has mapped
modernity in the fragmented, synaesthetic experience that characterizes
urban life. From the paratactic verses of Wordswoth’s Prelude describing
the city of London, to the discussion of the ‘shock’ effect and the
hyper-stimultion of the urban sensorium in the works of Walter Benjamin,
George Simmel, and, most recently, Ben Singer, the bombardment of ever
changing stimuli targeting the perception of the urban flâneur has been set
against a tradition of aesthetic and epistemological concern valuing the
intuited principle of unity that granted access to truth.
The publishing industry has contributed to this new experience of modernity
by transforming the production and dissemination of narrative units through
periodical forms that mechanically reproduced the same episodic
impressions, often by capitalizing on the shock factor upon which many
genres of popular entertainment depended. The sensational potential of the
plots of both popular fiction, drama, and early cinema have challenged and
transformed the discourses of class, gender and national identity that
structured the dominant culture.
A significant role in the transformation of aesthetic perception, artistic
representation  and the production of the print industry has been played by
the research on vision and the analysis of movement in the course of the
‘long nineteenth century,’ as Max Milner, Jonathan Crary and Marta Braun,
among others, have argued.  Nineteenth century research on vision has
significantly altered not only theoretical discussions but very the
modalities of vision that countless ‘philosophical toys’ and popular forms
of entertainment disseminated at the level of the everyday.
This conference seeks to map a genealogy of modernity through the
‘sensational’ by taking a comparatist, transnational, interdisciplinary and
intermediatic approach to the study of perception and the ways of
constructing knowledge in the period going from the emergence of the
discourse of aesthetics to the experimentations associated to the early
twentieth century avant-garde.

Among the topics considered (but not limited to these):

-the emergence of aesthetics in the eighteenth century
-the research on optics and motion and its impact on literary and artistic
mimesis
-sensationalism in the eighteenth century
-the many forms of literary sensationalism in theatrical production and
periodical fiction (melodrama, sensation novels, crime fiction, roman
judiciaire, etc.)
-adaptations, translations and fortune of specific genres, works and
authors of sensational literature in foreign markets
-violence and the project of modernity
-serialization and the status of the reader
-the montage effect in print culture
-political meanings of sensationalism
-the responses to new media and the reverberations of optical toys in
theoretical,  artistic and literary texts
-points of rupture/continuity in the historical narratives of modernism
-transmediation of the sensational in advertising, precinema and silent film
-the periodical press and the emergence of new journalism
-archeological approaches to the avant-garde
-urban modernism and subjectivity in the long nineteenth century
-the challenges to traditional notions of the sister arts
-comparative models of sensationalism and the genealogies of modernity
-commodity culture and the hybrid text of modernity


Please send a 3-400 word abstract and a short bio by July 31 to Alberto
Gabriele ([email protected])