Extended Deadline CFP: "Walter Pater: Continuity and Discontinuity" (7/15/2013; 7/4-5/2014)

Deadline for the proposals extended to 15 July 2013

International Walter Pater Conference
Sorbonne University, Paris (France),

4-5 July 2014

As carefully elaborated in The Renaissance, history and art history are made up of continuities and discontinuities between epochs, artistic forms, artists and thinkers. The Renaissance was indeed an unceasing return to the “standard of taste” set in Antiquity, an acknowledgment of its permanence in men’s minds and actions. However, it was also a discovery of “New experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art” (“Two Early French Stories”) that called into question the conditions of life and art. These “exquisite pauses in time” were Pater’s most effective means of linking the continuous and discontinuous. In his other writings, whether published or fragmentary, Pater continued to envisage and apply such patterns to study Europe’s intellectual and cultural traditions. In keeping with this complex patterning, the 2014 Paris International Conference will explore Continuity and Discontinuity in Pater’s writings from an interdisciplinary perspective, reflecting his diverse engagements with literature, the arts, history and philosophy. We invite proposals that examine Continuity/Discontinuity with reference to all aspects of Pater’s work, including but not limited to:

• Themes and images (representations of violence, cycles and myths of death and rebirth…)
• Generic, formal and stylistic features
• Different types of publication (book form, periodicals...)
• Pater’s reading of other writers from the classics to his contemporaries (intertextuality, the text as a palimpsest, quotations and misquotations, interpretation and misinterpretation…)
• Response to existing fields of research (anthropology, archaeology, art history, literary criticism…)
• Pater’s understanding of the visual arts
• The critical reception of Pater’s writings; his biography. Are there different Paters?

We are grateful for the support of the Walter Pater International Society.

Keynote speakers

Laurel BRAKE

Lene ØSTERMARK-JOHANSEN

Presentations and papers will be delivered in English. Proposals (300 words) for 20-minute papers and a short bio-bibliography should be sent as a word attachment by 15 July 2013 to the four organizers:

• Bénédicte COSTE, University of Bourgogne (TIL): benedicte.coste@u-bourgogne.fr
• Anne-Florence GILLARD-ESTRADA, Rouen University (ERIAC): af.gillardestrada@orange.fr
• Martine LAMBERT-CHARBONNIER, Paris-Sorbonne University (VALE): martine.charbonnier@paris-sorbonne.fr
• Charlotte RIBEYROL, Paris-Sorbonne University (VALE): Charlotte.Ribeyrol@paris-sorbonne.fr

For more information see the conference website: 
http://www.vale.paris-sorbonne.fr/FR/Page_colloque_detail.php?P1=15