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The Modernist Wound

A conversation about injury and bodily harm as an aesthetic principle

Values


Fields of Knowledge
  • Aesthetics / Media
  • Artistic legacies
  • Philosophy / Theory

Organizing Institutions

Slought, University of Pennsylvania Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Contributing Institutions

University of Pennsylvania Departments of Cinema and Media Studies, French and Francophone Studies, Italian Studies, and Comparative Literature and Literary Theory

Opens to public

03/26/2018

Time

6-8pm

Address

Slought
4017 Walnut St
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Slought is pleased to announce The Modernist Wound, a conversation about injury as an aesthetic principle in modernist literature and film, on Monday, March 26, 2018 from 6-8pm. The discussion will feature Ian Fleishman of the University of Pennsylvania, Nora Alter of Temple University and Jean-Michel Rabaté, a Senior Curator at Slought, moderated by Naomi Waltham-Smith of the University of Pennsylvania.

"That an artwork ought to injure is among the most fundamental and the most resilient of modernist tenets," writes Fleishman. In modernist film or writing, violence is characterized by an ostensible intrusion of raw bodily harm into the work. As a result, words and images that either depict injury or inflict it are produced at a high rate. On one hand, this violence, in its very corporeal nature, aims to transcend the text or image that describes it. On the other, writing or imaging is itself an act of incision, of wounding and opening up.

The conversation at Slought will focus on bodily harm and the kind of narratology it inspires. It will build upon Fleishman's forthcoming book, An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino, which traces the trope of wounding in in ten exemplary authors and filmmakers: Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Hélène Cixous, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Werner Schroeter, Michael Haneke, and Quentin Tarantino.

The event will also explore questions such as: How is injury mobilized as an aesthetic strategy in film and literature? What is the meaning of bodily harm today, when experiences are highly mediated? How do we reconcile what we normally think of as the most "real" object – the human body and its wounds – with its "nonreal" representation in texts?

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Ian Fleishman is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses largely on sex and violence in order to trace the evolution of narrative form and its underlying epistemological shift from modernism to the postmodern. He has published or has articles forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies, German Quarterly, French Studies, The Germanic Review, Mosaic, and The Journal of Austrian Studies.

Naomi Waltham-Smith is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research engages music theory, sound studies, and recent European philosophy, especially deconstruction, Italian biopolitics, and post-Althusserian Marxisms.

​Nora Alter is Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She has published widely on German and European Studies, Film and Media Studies, Cultural and Visual Studies and Contemporary Art. Her most recent book, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction, was published in 2018.

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Curator of Discursive Programs at Slought and a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He has authored or edited 38 books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce.