Image and the Imagination in the Visual and Verbal Arts

A program of the Society for Critical Exchange in conjunction with the M/MLA conference in Cleveland, OH, November 8-11, 2007

This working conference aims to examine the image—broadly conceived as pictorial, textual, and digital representations—and its relations to the collective imagination. We invite papers that explore how images are adopted, adapted, and translated in a variety of media (textual,visual, or digital), across borders, and among cultures. We invitepapers from all disciplines, including but not limited to art history,literature, the history of the book, anthropology, law, library and information sciences, and the cognitive sciences.

Potential rubrics include:

Literature: How can illustrations, cartoons, and photographs affect the way that literature is interpreted? How have comic books and graphic novels altered conceptions of literature or come to define themselves in the context of what is traditionally thought of as "the canon"? How do images figure in conceptions of generic boundaries? How does text/image interaction change when texts are serialized, collected into monograph form, or excerpted, especially when images are added or subtracted?

Digital Environments: How has the availability of digital material changed researchers' interactions with archival material? What does the individual consumer look for in digital archives, whether of scholastic, scientific, or lay interest? How has the basic knowledge of professionals working in archives and libraries changed to incorporate new standards and practices for database design, interface
design, and semantic markup? What analogies and differences between physical and digital architectures emerge when considering the representation of texts?

The Visual Mass Media: How do images and texts interact to present coherent narratives of events in print, broadcast, or digital news? What attitudes desires, and/or ideologies do advertising images such as billboards, websites, posters, commercials, etc., codify? Approaches might include the visual rhetorical, semiotic, or iconological.

Remediation: How has web design changed our understanding of the print page's determination of both the appearance and meaning of prose? What do current digital re-imaginings of literary texts indicate? What is involved in the translation of the word to the screen, whether cinematic or digital? How do movies that aren't adaptations of novels use text in their narrative techniques?

Trans-cultural and Trans-temporal Images: Whether in the context of the modern pilgrimage, of cultural or leisure tourism, of anthropological or colonial exploration or other, how do travel images detail and propagate the "sacred," the "civilizational," the "exotic," the "primitive," or the "Other"? How do images produced by the mobile eye or self organize, narrate, and/or reconfigure the world? How do
culturally- and historically-based approaches to adaptation theory change the way that we see adapted images?

Abstracts of no more than 500 words and a CV of no more than 2 pages to textimage.sce@gmail.com by March 15. Submissions from graduate students are particularly encouraged.