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Representing Reality in Text and Image: Clichés, Stereotypes, and Caricatures

Representing Reality in Text and Image: Clichés, Stereotypes, and Caricatures

Publié le par Perrine Coudurier (Source : Christopher Bains)

Representing Reality in Text and Image:

Clichés, Stereotypes, and Caricatures

 

Text and image have traditionally been the dominant concepts for understanding and questioning our relationship with reality.  They also constitute the fundamental building blocks of literature, cinema, photography, and digital media. From theories on mimesis (Aristotle, Quintilian, Lukács, Ricoeur) to more recent reflections on simultaneous media-based realities (Benjamin, Barthes, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Flusser), we have come to see reality as primarily constructed and mediated through the interplay of text and image. Artistic representations of reality and the illusion of transparency that they perpetuate lead us to question whether we inhabit a parallel world of our own creation.

This conference will focus on artistic representations of reality and their consequences, in particular the construction of clichés, stereotypes, and caricatures. These figures often take on a life of their own and escape all efforts to contain them. They create a self-sustaining world of textual and iconographic reductionism, which professes to capture the essence of truth by poking fun, questioning, celebrating, or even demeaning its subject. The distinct relationship that clichés, stereotypes, and caricatures have with reality—either as heightened reality or insidious misrepresentation—is determined in the contextual instant, and invites us to probe the conditions and boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and representation.   

The conference will be held at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas on April 11-12, 2014.  Please submit abstracts of approximately 250 words along with a brief bio by February 14, 2014 to representingreality.conference@gmail.com.  Website for conference:  http://english.ttu.edu/complit/symposium.php.

Possible topics include:

Forms of Mis-representation:

  • Icons and iconography
  • Virtual worlds
  • Painting
  • Graffiti
  • Photography
  • Film
  • Genre fiction
  • Stereotypes and humor
  •  “Deforming” genres (e.g. blazon, caricatures, parody, satire)
  • Pop culture media (e.g. video games, internet, comics, television, commercials, print advertisements, sports)

Cultural and Social Representations:

  • Nation and nationalism
  • Minority cultures
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Clichés and stereotypes: Travel literature and the encounter with the other
  • Stereotypical role models in text and film

Functions of Clichés, Stereotypes, and Caricatures:

  • Commenting and undermining familiar social, political, and cultural images
  • Providing social critique
  • Undermining or reinforcing power relations
  • Celebrating or disparaging consumerism
  • Propaganda
  • Examining binaries: fact and fiction, original and reproduction, reality and the imaginary
  • Criticizing  literary and/or cinematographic conventions
  • Breaking down the fourth wall (i.e. actors, authors addressing the audience)
  • Questioning authenticity and reality