WORKSHOP with Stef Craps (Ghent University)

Friday 22^nd November, 1-4 pm.

Location: Roeterseiland E gebouw E0.22

The increasing visibility of climate change and scientists’ alarming warnings about it are taking a toll on people’s mental well-being. This lecture surveys the culturally resonant repertoire of new coinages that have emerged in recent years to name and communicate environmentally induced distress. It pays particular attention to the concept of pre-traumatic stress disorder, which has become the focus of a small but important body of humanistic scholarship calling for an expanded trauma theory that would be future- as well as past-oriented. Noting trauma theory’s persistent human-centredness, the lecture goes on to consider attempts that are being made to reconceptualize trauma in non-anthropocentric terms and to acknowledge the interconnectedness and entanglement of human and non-human traumas. It ends by predicting that cultural trauma research, which has so far shown relatively little interest in environmental issues in general and climate change in particular, will engage more fully with our dire environmental predicament in the years ahead.

Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, memory and trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), and a co-editor of Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (Berghahn, 2017). He has also co-edited two special issues of Studies in the Novel, on climate change fiction and postcolonial trauma novels, and one of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, on transcultural Holocaust memory. He has recently co-authored an introductory guide to the concept of trauma, which is forthcoming in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series, and is currently guest-editing a special issue of American Imago on ecological grief.

In preparation for the workshop students read three academic chapters/articles (see reading list below); they formulate a question for Stef Craps (around 200 words), which they print and bring to the workshop.

Participation in the workshops earns RMA students 1 EC. Register by sending a mail to nica-fgw@uva.nl. Please mention your affiliation.

Reading list:

• Craps, Stef. “Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory.” Parallax 23:4 (2017): 479-492.
• Cunsolo, Ashlee & Karen Landman, eds. Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. Introduction.
• Saint-Amour, Paul. “Waiting for the Bomb to Drop.” The New York Times, 3 August 2015.

Seminar taught by Prof.Dr. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes and Dr. Ilse van Rijn

Amsterdam, 6 December (Pre-meeting), 12-14 December (Conference), 16 December (post-meeting), 2019

Artists tend to work across disciplines and “art cannot be disciplined” (Hito Steyerl). Taking the case of W.G. Sebald’s interdisciplinary word and image practice on memory and presences of (migratory) lives as touchstone for our discussions, this conference seeks to foster academic, professional, artistic and public scholarship by exploring cutting-edge interdisciplinary research, findings, techniques, practices and theoretical advances in the areas of memory, word and image. Which role do art and literature play in this regard?

In order to deepen our understanding of writing with images (a key question in e.g. artistic research) and how it intersects with questions of memory, participants of the seminar will actively participate in the international conference 12-14 December 2019. The conference is the core activity in this NICA course; up-to-date details can be found at: https://ahmsebaldmemorywordimage.humanities.uva.nl

This seminar is meant for all researchers interested in word and image matters, whether from a literary, cultural analysis, art history or other vantage point.

In a pre-meeting with Mia Lerm Hayes on Friday 6 December, students are asked to relate the conference’s themes to their own research and motivate their plans for which of the parallel sessions and/or workshops they will attend. They will read at least one of Sebald’s major novels and prepare the conference keynote by James Elkins (details below) by consulting http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/experimental-writing/256-writing-with-images, where much primary and secondary literature are given. Art students of ‘Approaching Language,’ Sandberg Instituut, join university students, the course thus conceptually questioning the traditional separation between image and language, practice and theory, as does Sebald’s work.

On 16 December, the Monday after the conference, students will reflect on their findings in a morning workshop taught by Ilse van Rijn. This session is followed by a discussion with James Elkins in the afternoon. For these Monday encounters, students are asked to prepare (on basis of the pre-meeting) a page that relates their own projects to the matters of discussion (or Elkins’ work more broadly), leading to a question for Elkins to address at the meeting.

Finally, students will write a short reflection on their learning during the conference and meeting with Elkins, to be commented on with feedback by the teachers.

James Elkins : Models For Word and Image: From Rodenbach to Fernandez Mallo

Keynote Abstract:

The prevalence of Sebald in studies of fictional narratives that incorporate images has led to a lack of theorization of other practices. Sebald’s practice is generally to anchor the image in its surrounding text in such a way that the reader is led up to, into, and past the image with minimal interruption in the flow of reading. In that way his narratives can explore continuous paths of memory on which images are passing waystations. It is also possible to permit images to slow the narrative, or to draw readers repeatedly back to the images, or to use images to cast doubt on the narrator or the narration. I will compare Sebald’s practices to what can be found in Georges Rodenbach, Breton, Tan Lin, Anne Carson, Christian Bök, Fernandez Mallo, Philipp Weiss, and others, in order to suggest that Sebald is only one example of a long discontinuous history of writing on images.

James Elkins is C. Chadbourne Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism (1989). BA, cum laude, 1977, Cornell University; MFA and MA, 1983, and PhD with honors, 1989, University of Chicago. Books:Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings; Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History; Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis; The Domain of Images; How to Use Your Eyes; What Painting Is; The Poetics of Perspective; The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing; Why are our Pictures Puzzles?; On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them; What Happened to Art Criticism?; Six Stories from the End of Representation; Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction; What Photography Is; Art Critiques: A Guide.

Register by sending an email to Eloe Kingma at nica-fgw@uva.nl. The seminar can host up to 10 participants and admission is on a first come, first in basis. For full participation and the written reflection you may earn 3 EC.