7.0490 Barthes Conference (1/119)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 16 Feb 1994 23:50:49 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 7, No. 0490. Wednesday, 16 Feb 1994.
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 94 19:17:26 EST
From: jmrabate@sas.upenn.edu (Jean-Michel Rabate)
Subject: Barthes Conference
From Jean-Michel Rabate , English, University of Pennsylvania. Please
announce an International Conference on Roland Barthes "After Roland
Barthes", Philadelphia, PA. 15-17 April 1994
Since Barthes's death in 1980, his influence has not ceased to grow in
Europe as in the United States. Barthes, who used to fascinate wide
audiences with his mixture of theoretical radicality, urbane skepticism
and delightful wit, has been called a master of the essay in the Gide
tradition and also belongs to a period which has seen radical innovations
in the field of literary and cultural studies, most of which have been
either launched or influenced by him. The aim of this international
conference is to provide a fresh and unprejudiced evaluation of Barthes's
heritage today. If he is still taken as the author of text-books
introducing students to Structuralism and Semiology in domains as varied
as film-studies, the analysis of advertisement, modern rhetorics of the
image, the semiology of fashion, the structural analysis of narrative, his
later work shows a marked tendency to return to questions of history,
biography and subjectivity. Barthes's genius has lain in his ability to
adapt scientific models to the classical study of the humanities. His
curiosity led him to constantly broaden the scope of his investigations,
moving from the reading of texts to the debunking of contemporary
mythologies, from the interpretation of popular culture to more personal
acounts of his encounters with music, painting and photography. The
starting point of this conference is the later Barthes, as much of a
novelist as a versatile critic, always ready to qualify or even dismiss
his prophecy of a coming "death of the author", in order to stress the
individual enjoyment one derives from literature and art. Barthes's
awareness of the values at stake in apparent random encounters with
different worlds of signs led him to write his last moralities, such as
his famed meditation on the nature of love or his reflexive aphorisms on
his own teachings. This culminates with Camera Lucida, Barthes's moving
autobiographical disclosure of his love for his mother under the guise of
a study of photography. Whereas in the former essays on the image, Barthes
had emphasized the artificial nature of the medium and the ideological
role of their manipulations, Camera Lucida defines photography as opening
to pure reference. Each photography testifies to past presence, and
appears as a Japanese haiku, forcing us to stare directly at death. The
studium, or scientific approach, which misses the point of the photograph,
is opposed to the punctum, the small detail or "point" likely to capture
the eye of the beholder. Accordingly, a display of original photographs
will recreate the space of Camera Lucida at the Phildadelphia ICA.in April
1994 in conjunction with "After Roland Barthes".
AFTER ROLAND BARTHES
International Conference at the University of Pennsylvania
April 15 - 17 1994 -- PHILADELPHIA
FRIDAY APRIL 15: 11:00-1:3O REGISTRATION
Lauder-Fischer Hall
FRIDAY 1:30-3:30 Lauder-Fischer Hall
Chair: Jean-Michel Rabate
(U Penn)
Francois Brunet (Paris VII) "Barthes and American Photography"
Colin MacCabe (Pittsburgh University) "Barthes after Bazin".
Michael Wetzel (Kassel University) "Green Stuff: Phantasy and Photography in
Barthes and Carroll".
FRIDAY 4:00-6:00 Lauder-Fischer Hall
Chair: Frank Bowman (U Penn)
Hubertus von Amelunxen (Mannheim University) "Ponctualite
: point d'aprJolanta Wawrzycka (Radford University) "Photographeme:
Semioti(sizing) in Camera Lucida".
Wendy Steiner (U Penn) "'The Vast Disorder of Objects': Towards an Aesthetics
of Content".
I.C.A. : RECEPTION AND BUFFET. 6:30-7:45
SPECIAL PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION : "CAMERA LUCIDA" AT THEINSTITUTE OF
CONTEMPORARY ARTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA (I.C.A.)
EVENING TALK at the I.C.A.: 8:OO-9:00 Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University)
"What Has Occured Only Once" : Barthes"s Winter Garden, Boltanski's Mickey
Mouse
Club".
RESPONDENT : Nancy Shawcross (U of Penn)
SATURDAY APRIL 16 9:00-11:00 Lauder-Fischer Hall
Chair: Gerald Prince (U Penn)
Marjorie Welish (Brown University) "The art of being sparse, porous,
scattered"
Jacques Leenhard (EPHESS) "Il n'y a plus d'aprSATURDAY 11:15-1:15. Chair
Margreta de Grazia (U. Penn)
Carol Shloss (West Chester University) "Narrative liaisons: dangers of the
Photography Essay"
Steven Ungar (University of Iowa) "Bodies in Time : Rereading the 1950s"
Philippe Roger (CNRS Paris) "Barthes and Marx".
SATURDAY. 2:30-4:30. Lauder-Fischer Hall
Chair. D.A. Miller (Harvard)
Derek Attridge (Rutgers University) "Barthes's Obtuse, Sharp meaning"
Diana Knight (University of Nottingham) "Barthes and the Woman without a
shadow"
Antoine Compagnon (Columbia University) "Where Is the Real One?"
SATURDAY 5:00- 7:30. Lauder-Fischer Hall
Chair: Richard Sieburth (NYU).
Daniel Ferrer "Genetic Criticism in the Wake of Roland Barthes"(ITEM )
Patrizia Lombardo (Pittsburgh University) "Literature and nostalgia in Roland
Barthes"
Pierre Force (Columbia University) "Barthes and Bathmologia".
Elene Cliche (UQAM Montreal) "The later Barthes"
EVENING TALK : 8:30 - 9:30 Lauder-Fischer Hall
Victor Burgin (Santa Cruz): "Barthes's Discretion"
SUNDAY APRIL 17. 9:00-11:00. Lauder-Fischer Hall
Chair: Michele Richman (U Penn)
Dalia Kandiyoti (N.Y.U) "Exotic Barthes"
Craig Saper (U. Penn) "Learning from being Lost: A Barthesian
Multiculturalism"
Beryl Schlossman (Mellon University) "The Luxury of Language: Reading (Proust)
with Barthes".
SUNDAY 11:15 - 1:30 Lauder-Fischer Hall
Chair: David Wills (Louisiania SU)
Arkady Plotnitsky (U Penn) "Un-scriptible".
Francoise Gaillard (Paris VII) "Mythologies today"
Hayden White (U of California, Santa Cruz): "The Historical Fantastic".
Information: Francoise Gramet
French Institute for Culture and Technology
401 Lauder-Fischer Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6330
University of Pennsylvania
tel. 215. 573. 35. 50. fax. 215. 573. 21. 39.
fax. 215. 573. 21. 39.