Coming to Our Senses : Sensory Experience in Literature and Film
The University of Virginia Department of French Graduate Conference
March 29-30, 2013
At the beginning of Metaphysics, Aristotle writes: “Of all the senses, trust only the sense of sight.” Over time, this favoring of sight and the eye has persisted in Western cultures. However, Constance Classen’s Worlds of Sense (1993), David Howes’ The Varieties of Sensory Experience (1991), and Paul Rodaway’s Sensuous Geographies (1995) laid interdisciplinary groundwork for sensorial studies by opening intellectual thought to senses other than sight. Critics in literary studies, and more broadly in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, have now become attuned to the ‘sensual turn’ not just in critical theory but in the cultural trends of the West, including advertising and interactive media. By focusing on the wealth of sensory evidence embedded in works of fiction and the visual arts that appeal primarily to the senses of touch, taste, hearing, and smell, scholars can address the possibility of engaging these other senses in our interactions with literature and film. Specific works of literature consistently evoke multiple senses, including Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and Huysman’s À rebours. Further, Laura Marks, in The Skin of the Film and Touch, proposes a haptic criticism of cinema in which film becomes a tactile viewing experience. This conference will explore films and literature that provoke both our traditional five senses (hearing, smell, taste, touch, and sight) and others (balance, pain, orientation, and intuition). We invite papers that discuss senses, sensation, and sensory experience in French literary works and French cinema across all time periods.
Related topics include but are not limited to:
-synesthesia
-materiality
-corporeality and embodiment
-contours and textures
-the ‘nontraditional’ senses (pain, balance, intuition, etc.)
-haptic criticism and haptic aesthetics
-modes of perception
-sensory experience in the digital age
-touch and technology
-orality
-sound and/or silence; soundtrack
-olfactory, taste, and tactile memory
We invite proposals for individual papers that address the conference topic. Papers may be in English or in French, and are limited to 20 minutes. Abstracts should not exceed 250 words and must be sent to uvafrenchgradconference@gmail.com by JANUARY 10, 2013.Please include your name, university affiliation, and email address on your abstract submission. Decisions will be made by mid-January.