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Call for Papers: Nineteenth-Century Studies Association annual conference, March 3-6, 2011 at Arizona State University (possibility of relocation to New Mexico)
Session: Art and Gambling (session to be sponsored by the Association of Historians of 19th-Century Art)
Chair: Allison Morehead, Queen’s University
“...there /is/ something in the feeling that, though one is alone, and in a foreign land, and far from one’s own home and friends. And ignorant of whence one’s next meal is to come, one is nevertheless staking one’s very last coin!” – Dostoevsky, /The Gambler/
Writing on Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin presented the gambler as a heroic modern type, a mirror image of the industrial laborer in his mechanized actions, drudgery and eternally delayed wish fulfillment. In the nineteenth century, games of chance ceased to be the preserve of aristocratic society; as gambling became increasingly institutionalized it was also fetishized and pathologized. This panel invites papers that explore what purchase gambling – that singular experience of betting on chance – had on nineteenth-century visual culture. Contributions might engage visual representations of gambling, casino architecture and decor, literary representations of artist-gamblers, speculation in the art market, or art-making and artistic careers as forms of gambling.
Deadline for 300-word abstract: August 15, 2010
Email proposals to morehead@queensu.ca
Please note: This panel is contingent upon a change in the conference location.
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