Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) Seminar
Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) has weekly seminars throughout the term. The seminars often have invited guest scholars and are open to all interested.
Guest Lecture
Michel Delville on "Translating and Transmediating the Lower Senses: Taste, Touch, Smell, and the Literary Sensorium".
Western culture has not treated the senses equally. For a long time, the "lower" senses of smell, taste and—to a lesser extent—touch were relegated to the lowest positions in the hierarchy, excluded from the realm of aesthetic judgment, and disqualified on account of their proximity to the object studied or described.
The recent interest in representations of bodily experience and sensory materialism in a particular period of literary history (e.g., William Cohen's Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses and Timothy Morton's Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism) and of diachronic accounts devoted to a particular sense (e.g., Hans J. Rindisbacher's The Smell of Books, Charles Bernstein's Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word and Denise Gigante's Taste A Literary History) suggests that scholars are increasingly drawn to the representation of the body and the functions of the senses and emotions in the production and reception of literary meaning as well as in the development of new theories and models for literary analysis.
Using examples drawn from writers and diverse as Gertrude Stein, F. T. Mrinetti, J. K. Huysmans and Helen Keller, this talk addresses the question of how taste, smell and touch are represented in literature while taking up the political and ideological aspects of transmedial sensory negociations.
Michel DELVILLE
Michel Delville teaches English, American, and comparative literature,at the University of Liège, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He is the author or co-author of The American Prose Poem (1998), J.G. Ballard (1998), Hamlet & Co (2001), Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (2005), Eating the Avant-Garde (2009), Crossroads Poetics (2013), Radiohead : OK Computer (2015), Undoing Art (w. Mary Ann Caws; 2017), and The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust (2017). He has also published three poetry collections and edited several volumes of essays on contemporary art.