Category: Events

TEXT^eS, IMAGES, OBJE^cTS

En raison d’une manifestation étudiante, le local du colloque est occupé depuis le 7 mai 2024. Merci de consulter cette page juste avant l’événement, au cas où nous devrions déplacer notre rencontre vers un autre local.

PROGRAMME

Clément Dessy, Stefano Evangelista & Patrick McGuinness, org.

Université libre de Bruxelles

16-18.05.2024

Campus du Solbosch

Jeudi 16 mai-Thursday 16 May

10:00-10:30	Introduction
10:30-12:00	Session 1: Networks of mediation / Réseaux de médiation
Jon Stone (Franklin & Marshall College)	Russian Symbolists and the Imitative Imperative of Modernism
Helena Cox (University of York)	Bohemian Symbolism
Alexia Kalantzis (Université Paris Cité)	Plurilinguisme et cosmopolitisme : le périodique comme espace stratégique de circulation
12:00-13:30	Lunch
13:30-15:00	Session 2: Matérialités signifiantes / Meaningful Materialities
Lene Østermark-Johansen (University of Copenhagen)	East meets West: Antoine Bourdelle’s La Danse (1912)
Guy Conde-Reis (ULB) & Bruno Montamat (Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, France)	L’hôtel Van Eetvelde de Victor Horta : le Congo belge incarné
Angie Dunstan (Queen Mary University of London)	Her Double Life: Sarah Bernhardt and the Global Circulation of Symbolist Sculptural Aesthetics
15:00-15:30	Break/Pause
15:30-17:00	Session 3: East/West Encounters / Rencontres Est-Ouest
Maïa Varsimashvili-Raphaël	L’aspiration européenne du symbolisme géorgien
Teona Farmatu (Université Babeș-Bolyai de Cluj-Napoca)	Le symbolisme dans l’espace du sud-est européen : le cas de Roumanie. L’influence française et la double orientalisation du symbolisme
Adriana Sotropa (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)	Le symbolisme roumain : stratégies nationales pour un affichage international
19 :00	Dîner/Dinner

Friday 17 May-Vendredi 17 mai

9 :30-11 :00	Session 4: Intermédialité par-delà les frontières / Intermediality across Borders
Cyril Barde	Le verre symboliste : un prisme intermédial et international
Évanghélia Stead (UVSQ Paris-Saclay)	Aubrey Beardsley takes Europe by Storm and Provokes Art to Intermediality
Irene Beatriz Olalla-Ramírez (Université de Grenade)	Étude intermédiale de Pelléas et Mélisande de Maurice Maeterlinck dans la littérature mondiale : les illustrations symbolistes de Fernand Khnopff, Charles Doudelet et Carlos Schwabe
11:00-11:30	Pause/Break
11:30-13:00	Session 5: Intersecting Influences / Influences croisées
Laure Kazmierczak (Université de Mons)	Les (re)traductions en russe et en allemand de La Princesse Maleine, premier drame symboliste de Maurice Maeterlinck
Emmanuel Boldrini (Université Paris Est Créteil)	Redon, Klinger, Laforgue : itinéraires d’influences mutuelles et réciproques, entre textes et images, entre France et Allemagne
Ana Parejo Vadillo (Birkbeck, University of London)	The Author as a Symbol: Michael Field’s Dialoguic Imagination
13:00-14:00	Lunch
14:00-15:30	Session 6: Identités poétiques : cosmopolitisme et nationalisme / Poetic Identities: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
Inna Volkovynska et Oleksandr Volkovynskyi (Université Grenoble Alpes)	Réinterprétations du jardin dans la poésie symboliste ukrainienne
Matthew Potolsky (University of Utah)	Sarojini Naidu: Symbolism and Nationalism
Dimitris Papanikolaou (St. Cross College, Oxford)	Worlding C.P.Cavafy’s symbolism
15:30-18:00	Cultural visit/visite Culturelle – Bibliothèque-Musée Wittockiana (for speakers only)
19:00	Cocktail at Maison Hannon (for speakers only)

Samedi 18 mai-Saturday 18 May

9 :00-10 :30	Session 7: Translating the Visual / Traduire le visuel
Charlotte Ashby (Birkbeck, University of London)	Entangled Histories: Imagining India in Britain 1890-1920
Elodie Le Beller (Université Rennes 2)	La rénovation de la tempera : un caractère technique transnational du symbolisme pictural
Eduardo De Maio (University of York)	The magazine La Triennale : International symbolism and the debate on the social value of beauty in Italy
10:30-11:00	Break/Pause
11:00-12:30	Session 8: Écrire les mobilités / Writing Mobilities
Matthew Creasy (University of Glasgow)	Postal Routes: Mallarmé’s Occasional Poetry and the Dissemination of Symbolism
Alex Murray (Queen’s University Belfast)	‘The wanderer of the ways of all the worlds’: Christopher Brennan and the Quest for Australian Symbolism
Adeline Heck (Université libre de Bruxelles)	A Cosmopolitan Novel? Unpicking the Many Contradictions of Teodor de Wyzewa’s Valbert (1893)
12:30-14:00	Conclusions & lunch
14:00-17:00	Cultural visit/Après-midi : visite culturelle (for speakers only)

Avec le généreux soutien de la Fondation Wiener-Anspach.

Academia Belgica, Rome, 8 June 2023

Because of their widespread association with interior states of consciousness and the rejection of daily reality, Symbolism and Decadence often conjure ideas of failed journeys and the retreat from the world. J.-K. Huysmans’s À Rebours offers an emblematic instance of such practices, when Des Esseintes embarks on a journey to England only to end up in a Parisian English pub in order to preserve himself from a potentially disappointing encounter with reality. In a similar vein, Oscar Wilde wrily warned Japanophiles off the tourist trap of travelling to the Far East : ‘stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.’

However, the biographies of artists and writers contradict such clichéd representations of individuals stuck in their ivory towers. In the heyday of Symbolism and Decadence, modern and faster means of transport made journeys easier, across Europe and beyond. Artists, writers and performers linked to these movements travelled extensively in the course of their careers in order to give talks, build networks, visit international exhibitions and artistic events (such as the music festival in Bayreuth), or simply for leisure or to find new sources of inspiration in foreign places. Some turned their journeys into travel narratives or media events, as Oscar Wilde did with his tour of North America. Hotels, spas, seaside resorts, galleries, world fairs, artists’ colonies and colonial settings are among the many places that fed the spatial imagination of writers and artists.

This workshop will examine how travel and travel writing shaped the social identities and cultural practices of the Symbolist and Decadent movements, contributing at the same time to disseminate art works and literature across the globe. The aim is to facilitate an open discussion of work in progress, current scholarly trends and possible new research directions in relation to the global circulation of people, texts and art works around 1900. The event will comprise short presentations by invited participants, roundtable discussions of recent publications and a guided visit to the collections of Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.

‘Travelling with Symbolism’ will be held at the Academia Belgica in Rome on 8-9 June 2023. It is the second event of the research network ‘Symbolism and Decadence as World Literature’ supported by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation and led by Clément Dessy, Stefano Evangelista and Patrick McGuinness.

Programme

Thursday 8 June

9.15                 opening

9:30                 introduction

10:00- 11:00    Writing Journeys (session)

• Alexia Kalantzis (Paris Cergy Université /Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin), ‘The Train Journey: A Symbolist Poetics. Remy de Gourmont and Ardengo Soffici’

• Amândio Reis (University of Lisbon), ‘News from Japan and Beyond: Travel and Death in Wenceslau de Moraes’

11:00-11:30    coffee break

11:30-12:30    Italian Travellers (session)

• Anna Mazzanti (Politecnico Milano), ‘Travel and Place in Italian Symbolism’

• Davide Lacagnina (Università degli Studi di Siena), ‘The Art Critic as a Globe Trotter: Vittorio Pica and his international Symbolist Network’

12:30-14:00    lunch (Academia Belgica)

14:00-15:00    Dialogues and Correspondences (session)

• Lene Østermark-Johansen (University of Copenhagen), ‘Travelling between East and West, between the Living and the Dead: Anna Strunsky Walling’s Violette of Père Lachaise (1915)’

• Viola Parente-Čapková (University of Turku), ‘Belated Paris Letters from the Beginning of November: L. Onerva’s Journeys’

15:00-15:30    coffee break

15:30-16:30    Exoticism and Otherness (session)

• Mathilde Régent (Université Paris-Sorbonne), ‘Rodenbach reads Loti: Symbolism and Exoticism’

• James Dowthwaite (University of Jena), ‘“Unmeaning Profundity”: The Aesthetics of Race in Arthur Symons’s Travel Writing’

16:30-18:00    closing discussion

Venue: Academia Belgica, Via Omero 8, I-00197 Roma (www.academiabelgica.it)

With the generous support of the Academia Belgica and the Wiener-Anspach Foundation in the framework of the projet ‘Symbolism and Decadence as World Literature’ directed by Clément Dessy, Stefano Evangelista and Patrick McGuinness.

21-22 October, St Anne’s College, Oxford

This two-day workshop is the inaugural event of the international research project ‘Symbolism and Decadence as World Literature’ funded by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation and led by Clément Dessy, Stefano Evangelista and Patrick McGuinness.

The first readers of the ‘Manifesto of Symbolism’ (1886) by an obscure French poet called Jean Moréas could hardly have imagined that the term symbolism would soon become internationally known as a literary and artistic label. Occurring on the heels of the industrial revolution and at the peak of European colonialism, the symbolist movement was deeply informed by issues of global mobility. New ways of communicating and travelling across borders contributed to redefining the dissemination of artistic movements. Symbolism can be understood as a network that connected the rapidly growing imperial capitals of Europe (Paris, London, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna…) to each other and to cultures and places beyond the European continent, creating the conditions for the global circulation of ideas and artistic forms. This process involved a double movement towards cosmopolitanism and cultural competition: the international dissemination of symbolist literature and art strongly relied on acts of cross-border collaboration but it also forged or reinforced cultural hierarchies between different countries, cities and geographical spaces.

Symbolist works reflect this deep engagement with space. They are rooted in specific places when it comes to production and circulation, but their contents often gesture towards a world consciousness and towards reimaging existing spatial taxonomies (national borders; North-South, East-West binaries; metropolitan vs. colonial; urban vs. rural, etc.).

The project ‘Symbolism and Decadence as World Literature’ (a partnership between Oxford University and the Université Libre de Bruxelles) will start with a workshop that explores the international network of Symbolism through the angle of geography, broadly conceived. We want to discuss how geography affects symbolism and how Symbolism reconfigures geography. The aim is to facilitate an open discussion about work in progress, current research trends and possible future directions in relation to symbolist geographies. The event will comprise short informal papers (10 minutes), a roundtable discussion of recent publications and the state of the field and a guided visit to the symbolist collections of the Ashmolean Museum.

Programme

21 October, St Anne’s College (seminar room 8)

09:30-10:00: Welcome and Introduction of ‘Symbolism and Decadence as World Literature’

10:00-11:00: Session 1: Connecting Spaces

• Jennifer Yee (Christ Church, Oxford): Presentation of French Decadence in a Global Context (UP Liverpool, 2022)
• Elisa Segnini (University of Glasgow): ‘Symbolism and Multilingualism?’
• Alex Murray (Queen’s University Belfast): ‘Rendering Symbolism: Around Launcelot Cranmer-Byng’

11:00-11:30: Coffee break

11:30-12:30: Session 2: Imagined Places

• Matthew Creasy (University of Glasgow): ‘Translating Les Flaireurs – Scottish Cosmopolitanism and Belgian Symbolism at the Fin de Siècle’
• Edward Lee-Six (Free University of Brussels, ULB): ‘“Thekla” by Jane Wilde and the Symbolist North’
• Richard Hibbitt (University of Leeds): ‘The Symbolist Novel as Transnational Capital’

13:00-14:00: Lunch

14:30-16:00: Session 3: Displacing Objects

• Julien Schuh (University Paris Ouest Nanterre): ‘Symbolism, Epiphenomenon of Colonialism? (Indochina, Oceania, Indonesia)’
• Matthew Winterbottom (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford): ‘Symbolist Object in Focus: Clément Massier’
• Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (St Catherine’s College, Oxford): ‘Displacing the Human:  Rethinking Symbolist Theatre in the 21st-Century’
• María del Pilar Blanco (Trinity College, Oxford): ‘Experiments in Incommensurability: Latin America and Symbolism’

16:00-16:30: Coffee break

16:30-18:00: Session 4: The Future of Symbolist Studies

19:00-19:30: Drink reception

19:30: Dinner

22 October, Ashmolean Museum

10:00-12:00: [reserved for workshop speakers only] Symbolist tour in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum (org. An Van Camp and Matthew Winterbottom)

Download the programme in PDF format