Guest: Giulia Bigongiari, 'The second view: sympathy beyond visuality in literature'

This week, our visiting PhD student Giulia Bigongiari will give a presentation on The second view: sympathy beyond visuality in literature.

Abstract:

I will focus on the emergence of ‘sympathy’ as a modality of aesthetic reception in Britain at the beginning of the 19th century. In an age of political and social unrest, 'literature' had to find its place amongst a lively media environment: the theatre, magazines, public assemblies, preachers, all strove to address the political issues of the day and to form political communities. Discussing texts by Shelley, De Quincey, and Bulwer-Lytton, I will argue that some authors start to claim a certain kind of sympathy as the peculiar domain of 'poetry', high literature. The emphasis on the visuality of sympathy we find in the classic, definitory texts by Smith and Hume is displaced, and 'sympathy' is redefined as something particularly difficult to achieve, that constantly risks turning into contagion, and is restricted to a highly selected audience. Direct, visual 'imitation', sometimes attached to devices such as the painting or the mirror, surfaces as an uncanny, wrongheaded enterprise, that distracts from deeper truths that are those that really need to be imitated, or better, since they lie behind the media, suggested, evoked. Intermedial references proliferate in essays and novels. The notion of the 'discursive unconscious' developed in discursive psychology by Michael Billig will allow me to pin down important elements of this process. Turning to the 20th century, I will then show how some Modernist writers have come to feel that the intermedial codification of ‘sympathy’ makes it a structurally impossible goal for the reader and the author to achieve fully.

Bio

Giulia Bigongiari (g.bigongiari@gmail.com) is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of L'Aquila, Italy. She is currently working on negative empathy and on song performance scenes in film. Her work has appeared on Orbis Litterarum and Whatever. A Journal of Queer Studies.

You are welcome to attend the seminar via zoom. Email us at ims@lnu.se to get the zoom link, or join our email list (zoom links to all open seminars and events are sent out one week in advance via this list).

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen