Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects
An international and interdisciplinary conference at the FRIAS, 15-17 July 2015
organised by Prof. Dr. Evanghelia STEAD (FRIAS Senior Research fellow, EURIAS programme, 2014-15)
Books are not only sets of written pages; they provide an optic and haptic experience as well, leading to manifold investigation. As such, books and to some extent prints are complex and multidimensional cultural objects, “bearing in their pages the boundaries of their possible reception” (Roger Chartier, Pratiques de la lecture, 1985).
This international conference brings together Freiburg University and German scholars and specialists from other countries and addresses intersemiotic relations born of the ways in which content (texts and pictures) and material setting (shape, reproduction, ornament, typography and page layout, binding etc.) combine from medieval to modern times. By considering prints and albums as silent but powerful messengers, circulating in a wide European context, the conference explores the meeting of cultures, their interrelation and confrontation.
The fascinatingly complex dialogue between interpretation of context and expression of cultural trends as evidenced by the study of relations between “reading with images or ornament” in books and “works on paper” (engravings, lithographs, drawings, reproductions) will be one of the issues to be analysed. Other issues include the way major works, myths and imaginary patterns are transmitted, read, re-read and remediated through such processes and in such contexts; the limits of the much employed term “illustration” and its extensive use; the re-valuation of copies, replicas and multiplication processes in an intense network of circulation.
The conference thereby aims to enhance a constructive dialogue between disciplines such as literature and comparative literature, history, history of art, cultural studies and Medienwissenschaft, and to promote dialogue between reading theories and practices, book and literature histories, myth and pattern studies, text / figure transmission and circulation studies in Europe.
The event is conceived as a broader context to Prof. Stead’s current FRIAS Project Faust I in prints and book objects: Germany, England and France, 1816-1925 in the wake of three previous publications : the special issues «Reading with images» [«Lire avec des images au xixe siècle en Europe»], La Lecture littéraire (Reims), n° 5-6, 2002, ed. by E. Stead, and «Imago & Translatio», Word & Image, vol. 30, n° 3, July-September 2014, guest editors E. Stead & Hélène Védrine, as well as Evanghelia Stead’s monograph The Flesh of the Book: Materiality, Imagination and Poetics of the Fin-de-siècle Book (Paris, PUPS, «Histoire de l’imprimé», 2012, in French).
Languages of the conference: English, German, French.
Conference Programme
Wednesday 15 July
13:30-14:00 Venue arrival at the FRIAS
14:00-14:15 Greetings and Brief Introduction
Cultural Practices and Devotional Books (Chair: Michael Stolz)
14:15-15:00 Henrike Manuwald (Freiburg), « A fourteenth-century devotional booklet (Montpellier, BUP, H 396): a unique document of cultural practices»
15:00-15:45 Henrike Lähnemann (Oxford/FRIAS), « From devotional aids to antiquarian objects. The prayer books of Medingen »
15:45-16:15 Coffee break
Philologies on the move : Reading and Interpretation (Chair: Norbert Bachleitner)
16:15-17:00 Guyda Armstrong (Manchester), «The Afterlives of St Catherine of Siena»
17:00-17:45 Ralph Häfner (Freiburg), «Philologie und Zivilisationsgeschichte. Praktiken der Textinterpretation bei Caspar Barth»
18:30 Dinner
Thursday 16 July 2015
Library and Codex Practices (Chair: Henrike Lähnemann)
8:30-9:15 Michael Stolz (Bern), «Otium and negotium. Reading processes and their cultural backgrounds in early Italian and German humanism»
9:15-10:00 Christoph Mackert (Leipzig Uni-Bibl.), «Dichten, Schreiben und Abschreiben im Leipziger Thomasstift: die literarische Sammelhandschrift Ms 1279 und die Buchkultur an St. Thomas im 3. Viertel des 15. Jahrhunderts»
10:00-10:45 Anja Grebe (Freiburg), «Singing the Codex. Practices of Reciting Texts in Different Cultures»
10:45-11:15 Coffee break
Circulation of Images and multiplying (Chair: Alfred Messerli)
11:15-12:00 Alberto Milano (Milan), «Change of use, change of public, change of meaning. Printed images traveling through Europe»
12:00-12:45 Christina Kuhli (Freiburg), «Fluidität der Bilder oder die Komprimierung der Medienvielfalt im Buch: Galeriewerke und die Histoire métallique»
12:45-14:00 Lunch
Reading and Cultural Practices in the 19th century (Chair: David Skilton)
14:00-14:45 Stefanie Lethbridge (Freiburg), «Personalising Cultural Experience: Nineteenth-century Poetry Anthologies between Cultural Object and Private Memory»
14:45-15:30 Barbara Korte (Freiburg), «Gift Books and the Promotion of the Heroic Girl in Late-Victorian Britain»
15:30-16:00 Coffee break
On illustration (Chair: Barbara Korte)
16:00-16:45 Alfred Messerli (Zürich), «Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm und ihre ikonographische Rezeption zwischen 1823 und 1873»
16:45-17:45 Giorgio Bacci (Pisa), «Pinocchio (1883-2004): an illustrated adventure over more than a century»
Conference Dinner
Friday 17 July
Reading with Images (Chair: Corinna Norrick-Rühl)
8:30-9:15 Hélène Védrine (Paris), «Relectures iconographiques : Les Fleurs du mal illustrées par Armand Rassenfosse et Carlos Schwabe»
9:15-10:00 Norbert Bachleitner (Vienna), «The Relation between Text and Illustration in German and English Editions of Arthur Schnitzler’s Works»
10:00-10:30: Coffee break
Modern and Contemporary practices (Chair: Evanghelia Stead)
10:30-11:15 Corinna Norrick-Rühl (Mainz) : «Book Sales Clubs, Book Ownership, and Cultural Trends during the Long Twentieth Century»
11:15-12:00 David Skilton (Cardiff), «Victorian illustration and the remediation of a novel by Anthony Trollope into a comic book»
12:00-12:45 : Stephan Packard (Freiburg) : «New Identities and Differences: On some Emerging Material Conditions for Critique in the Early Age of Digital Reading»