Project acronym CAFYR
Project Constructing Age for Young Readers
Researcher (PI) Vanessa JOOSEN
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT ANTWERPEN
Country Belgium
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2018-STG
Summary Constructing Age for Young Readers (CAFYR)
CAFYR starts from the observations that Europe has recently witnessed a few pertinent crises in intergenerational tension, that age norms and ageism frequently go unchecked and that they are part of children’s socialization. It aims at developing pioneering research for understanding how age is constructed in cultural products. CAFYR focuses on fiction for young readers as a discourse that often naturalizes age norms as part of an engaging story and that is endorsed in educational contexts for contributing to children’s literacy, social and cultural development. The effect of three factors on the construction of age in children’s books is studied: the age of the author, the age of the intended reader, and the age of the real reader.
CAFYR aims to lay bare whether and how the age and aging process of children’s authors affect their construction of the life stages in their works. It will show how various crosswriters shape the stages in life differently for young and adult readers. It considers the age of young readers as varied in its own right, and investigates how age is constructed differently for children of different ages, from preschoolers to adolescents. Finally, it brings together readers of various stages in the life course in a reception study that will help understand how real readers construct age, during the reading process and in dialogue with each other. CAFYR also aims to break new theoretical and methodological ground. It offers an interdisciplinary approach that enriches children’s literature research with concepts and theories from age studies. It combines close reading strategies with distant reading and tools developed for digital text analysis. It provides a platform to people of different stages in life, contributing to their awareness about age, and facilitating and investigating dialogues about age, with the aim of ultimately fostering them more.
Summary
Constructing Age for Young Readers (CAFYR)
CAFYR starts from the observations that Europe has recently witnessed a few pertinent crises in intergenerational tension, that age norms and ageism frequently go unchecked and that they are part of children’s socialization. It aims at developing pioneering research for understanding how age is constructed in cultural products. CAFYR focuses on fiction for young readers as a discourse that often naturalizes age norms as part of an engaging story and that is endorsed in educational contexts for contributing to children’s literacy, social and cultural development. The effect of three factors on the construction of age in children’s books is studied: the age of the author, the age of the intended reader, and the age of the real reader.
CAFYR aims to lay bare whether and how the age and aging process of children’s authors affect their construction of the life stages in their works. It will show how various crosswriters shape the stages in life differently for young and adult readers. It considers the age of young readers as varied in its own right, and investigates how age is constructed differently for children of different ages, from preschoolers to adolescents. Finally, it brings together readers of various stages in the life course in a reception study that will help understand how real readers construct age, during the reading process and in dialogue with each other. CAFYR also aims to break new theoretical and methodological ground. It offers an interdisciplinary approach that enriches children’s literature research with concepts and theories from age studies. It combines close reading strategies with distant reading and tools developed for digital text analysis. It provides a platform to people of different stages in life, contributing to their awareness about age, and facilitating and investigating dialogues about age, with the aim of ultimately fostering them more.
Max ERC Funding
1 400 885 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-02-01, End date: 2024-01-31
Project acronym COMICS
Project Children in Comics: An Intercultural History from 1865 to Today
Researcher (PI) Maaheen AHMED
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Country Belgium
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary Owing to their visual essence and status as a popular, modern medium, comics – newspaper strips, comics magazines and graphic novels – provide valuable insight into the transformation of collective consciousness. This project advances the hypothesis that children in comics are distinctive embodiments of the complex experience of modernity, channeling and tempering modern anxieties and incarnating the freedom denied to adults. In testing this hypothesis, the project constructs the first intercultural history of children in European comics, tracing the changing conceptualizations of child protagonists in popular comics for both children and adults from the mid-19th century to the present. In doing so, it takes key points in European history as well as the history of comics into account.
Assembling a team of six multilingual researchers, the project uses an interdisciplinary methodology combining comics studies and childhood studies while also incorporating specific insights from cultural studies (history of family life, history of public life, history of the body, affect theory and scholarship on the carnivalesque). This enables the project to analyze the transposition of modern anxieties, conceptualizations of childishness, child-adult power relations, notions of liberty, visualizations of the body, family life, school and public life as well as the presence of affects such as nostalgia and happiness in comics starring children.
The project thus opens up a new field of research lying at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies and illustrates its potential. In studying popular but often overlooked comics, the project provides crucial historical and analytical material that will shape future comics criticism and the fields associated with childhood studies. Furthermore, the project’s outreach activities will increase collective knowledge about comic strips, which form an important, increasingly visible part of cultural heritage.
Summary
Owing to their visual essence and status as a popular, modern medium, comics – newspaper strips, comics magazines and graphic novels – provide valuable insight into the transformation of collective consciousness. This project advances the hypothesis that children in comics are distinctive embodiments of the complex experience of modernity, channeling and tempering modern anxieties and incarnating the freedom denied to adults. In testing this hypothesis, the project constructs the first intercultural history of children in European comics, tracing the changing conceptualizations of child protagonists in popular comics for both children and adults from the mid-19th century to the present. In doing so, it takes key points in European history as well as the history of comics into account.
Assembling a team of six multilingual researchers, the project uses an interdisciplinary methodology combining comics studies and childhood studies while also incorporating specific insights from cultural studies (history of family life, history of public life, history of the body, affect theory and scholarship on the carnivalesque). This enables the project to analyze the transposition of modern anxieties, conceptualizations of childishness, child-adult power relations, notions of liberty, visualizations of the body, family life, school and public life as well as the presence of affects such as nostalgia and happiness in comics starring children.
The project thus opens up a new field of research lying at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies and illustrates its potential. In studying popular but often overlooked comics, the project provides crucial historical and analytical material that will shape future comics criticism and the fields associated with childhood studies. Furthermore, the project’s outreach activities will increase collective knowledge about comic strips, which form an important, increasingly visible part of cultural heritage.
Max ERC Funding
1 452 500 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30
Project acronym CUTS
Project Creative Undoing and Textual Scholarship:
A Rapprochement between Genetic Criticism and Scholarly Editing
Researcher (PI) Dirk Van Hulle
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT ANTWERPEN
Country Belgium
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary "In the past few decades, the disciplines of textual scholarship and genetic criticism have insisted on their respective differences. Nonetheless, a rapprochement would be mutually beneficial. The proposed research endeavours to innovate scholarly editing with the combined forces of these two disciplines. Since genetic criticism has objected to the subservient role of manuscript research in textual criticism, the proposed research suggests a reversal of roles: instead of employing manuscript research with a view to making an edition, an electronic edition can be designed in such a way that it becomes a tool for manuscript research and genetic criticism. The research hypothesis is that such a rapprochement can be achieved by means of an approach to textual variants that values creative undoing (ways of de-composing a text as an integral part of composition and literary invention) more than has hitherto been the case in textual scholarship. This change of outlook will be tested by means of the marginalia, notes and manuscripts of an author whose work is paradigmatic for genetic criticism: Samuel Beckett. His manuscripts will serve as a case study to determine the functions of creative undoing in the process of literary invention and its theoretical and practical implications for electronic scholarly editing and the genetic analysis of modern manuscripts. Extrapolating from this case study, the results are employed to tackle a topical issue in European textual scholarship. The envisaged rapprochement between the disciplines of genetic criticism and textual scholarship is the core of this proposal’s endeavour to advance the state of the art in these disciplines by giving shape to a new orientation within scholarly editing."
Summary
"In the past few decades, the disciplines of textual scholarship and genetic criticism have insisted on their respective differences. Nonetheless, a rapprochement would be mutually beneficial. The proposed research endeavours to innovate scholarly editing with the combined forces of these two disciplines. Since genetic criticism has objected to the subservient role of manuscript research in textual criticism, the proposed research suggests a reversal of roles: instead of employing manuscript research with a view to making an edition, an electronic edition can be designed in such a way that it becomes a tool for manuscript research and genetic criticism. The research hypothesis is that such a rapprochement can be achieved by means of an approach to textual variants that values creative undoing (ways of de-composing a text as an integral part of composition and literary invention) more than has hitherto been the case in textual scholarship. This change of outlook will be tested by means of the marginalia, notes and manuscripts of an author whose work is paradigmatic for genetic criticism: Samuel Beckett. His manuscripts will serve as a case study to determine the functions of creative undoing in the process of literary invention and its theoretical and practical implications for electronic scholarly editing and the genetic analysis of modern manuscripts. Extrapolating from this case study, the results are employed to tackle a topical issue in European textual scholarship. The envisaged rapprochement between the disciplines of genetic criticism and textual scholarship is the core of this proposal’s endeavour to advance the state of the art in these disciplines by giving shape to a new orientation within scholarly editing."
Max ERC Funding
1 147 740 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31
Project acronym DigitalMemories
Project We are all Ayotzinapa: The role of Digital Media in the Shaping of Transnational Memories on Disappearance
Researcher (PI) Silvana Mandolessi
Host Institution (HI) KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Country Belgium
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2015-STG
Summary The project seeks to study the role of digital media in the shaping of transnational memories on disappearance. It investigates a novel case that is in process of shaping: the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico in September 2014. The role of the new media in getting citizens’ attention and in marking a “turning point” was crucial to the upsurge of a counter-movement against the Mexican government and qualifies the event as significant for the transnational arena.
The groundbreaking aspect of the project consists in proposing a double approach:
a) a theoretical approach in which “disappearance” is considered as a particular crime that becomes a model for analyzing digital memory. Disappearance is a technology that produces a subject with a new ontological status: the disappeared are non-beings, because they are neither alive nor dead. This ontological status transgresses the clear boundaries separating life and death, past, present and future, materiality and immateriality, personal and collective spheres. “Digital memory”, i.e. a memory mediated by digital technology, is also determined by the transgression of the boundaries of given categories
b) a multidisciplinary approach situating Mexico´s case in a long transnational history of disappearance in the Hispanic World, including Argentina and Spain. This longer history seeks to compare disappearance as a mnemonic object developed in the global sphere –in social network sites as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube– in Mexico and the social performances and artistic representations –literature, photo exhibitions, and films– developed in Spain and Argentina.
The Mexican case represents a paradigm for the redefinition of the relationship between media and memory. The main output of the project will consist in constructing a theoretical model for analyzing digital mnemonic objects in the rise of networked social movements with a transnational scope.
Summary
The project seeks to study the role of digital media in the shaping of transnational memories on disappearance. It investigates a novel case that is in process of shaping: the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico in September 2014. The role of the new media in getting citizens’ attention and in marking a “turning point” was crucial to the upsurge of a counter-movement against the Mexican government and qualifies the event as significant for the transnational arena.
The groundbreaking aspect of the project consists in proposing a double approach:
a) a theoretical approach in which “disappearance” is considered as a particular crime that becomes a model for analyzing digital memory. Disappearance is a technology that produces a subject with a new ontological status: the disappeared are non-beings, because they are neither alive nor dead. This ontological status transgresses the clear boundaries separating life and death, past, present and future, materiality and immateriality, personal and collective spheres. “Digital memory”, i.e. a memory mediated by digital technology, is also determined by the transgression of the boundaries of given categories
b) a multidisciplinary approach situating Mexico´s case in a long transnational history of disappearance in the Hispanic World, including Argentina and Spain. This longer history seeks to compare disappearance as a mnemonic object developed in the global sphere –in social network sites as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube– in Mexico and the social performances and artistic representations –literature, photo exhibitions, and films– developed in Spain and Argentina.
The Mexican case represents a paradigm for the redefinition of the relationship between media and memory. The main output of the project will consist in constructing a theoretical model for analyzing digital mnemonic objects in the rise of networked social movements with a transnational scope.
Max ERC Funding
1 444 125 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2021-12-31
Project acronym DIME
Project Disruptive innovation in healthcare requires disruptive innovation in medical ethics
Researcher (PI) Heidi Mertes
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Country Belgium
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2020-STG
Summary Several recent medical innovations do not conform with the way medicine traditionally operates, but rather blur the boundaries of medicine and/or side-line the doctor-patient relationship as an essential aspect of healthcare. Examples of this are healthcare apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, disease surveillance, electronic patient records, telehealth and certain types of clinical decision support systems. I postulate that several of these new innovations will fundamentally change the very concept of medicine and thus turn out to be disruptive innovations.
Given that medical ethics are tailored to ‘traditional’ medicine, we should be critical about its current ability to cope with these changes and question whether the discipline of medical ethics is sufficiently equipped to guide new, disruptive innovations in healthcare towards their great potential in terms of improving patients’ access to good quality healthcare, while also safeguarding patients/users for the risks that come with them, not only in terms of health, but also in terms of infractions against firmly rooted values such as patient autonomy, the duty of care, confidentiality or privacy. If the medical ethics toolbox is ill-equipped to deal with these challenges, we urgently need to rethink or replace procedures, principles or theories in order to remedy this problem.
DIME will address these challenges by focusing on three main objectives:
(1) To establish where the most prominent ethical disruptions are located and therefore in which areas re-orientations of ethical principles are most urgently needed.
(2) To develop normative arguments regarding which fundamental procedures, principles or theories in medical ethics ought to be reinforced, adapted or replaced in the face of disruptive innovations to better cope with the challenges ahead.
(3) To critically analyse the shifting moral responsibilities in healthcare as a consequence of disruptive innovations.
Summary
Several recent medical innovations do not conform with the way medicine traditionally operates, but rather blur the boundaries of medicine and/or side-line the doctor-patient relationship as an essential aspect of healthcare. Examples of this are healthcare apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, disease surveillance, electronic patient records, telehealth and certain types of clinical decision support systems. I postulate that several of these new innovations will fundamentally change the very concept of medicine and thus turn out to be disruptive innovations.
Given that medical ethics are tailored to ‘traditional’ medicine, we should be critical about its current ability to cope with these changes and question whether the discipline of medical ethics is sufficiently equipped to guide new, disruptive innovations in healthcare towards their great potential in terms of improving patients’ access to good quality healthcare, while also safeguarding patients/users for the risks that come with them, not only in terms of health, but also in terms of infractions against firmly rooted values such as patient autonomy, the duty of care, confidentiality or privacy. If the medical ethics toolbox is ill-equipped to deal with these challenges, we urgently need to rethink or replace procedures, principles or theories in order to remedy this problem.
DIME will address these challenges by focusing on three main objectives:
(1) To establish where the most prominent ethical disruptions are located and therefore in which areas re-orientations of ethical principles are most urgently needed.
(2) To develop normative arguments regarding which fundamental procedures, principles or theories in medical ethics ought to be reinforced, adapted or replaced in the face of disruptive innovations to better cope with the challenges ahead.
(3) To critically analyse the shifting moral responsibilities in healthcare as a consequence of disruptive innovations.
Max ERC Funding
1 273 750 €
Duration
Start date: 2021-02-01, End date: 2026-01-31
Project acronym EVWRIT
Project Everyday Writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt (I - VIII AD). A Socio-Semiotic Study of Communicative Variation
Researcher (PI) Klaas BENTEIN
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Country Belgium
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary This five-year project aims to generate a paradigm shift in the understanding of Graeco-Roman and Late Antique communication. Non-literary, ‘documentary’ texts from Ancient Egypt such as letters, petitions and contracts have provided and continue to provide a key witness for our knowledge of the administration, education, economy, etc. of Ancient Egypt. This project argues that since documentary texts represent originals, their external characteristics should also be brought into the interpretation: elements such as handwriting, linguistic register or writing material transmit indirect social messages concerning hierarchy, status, and power relations, and can therefore be considered ‘semiotic resources’. The project’s driving hypothesis is that communicative variation – variation that is functionally insignificant but socially significant (e.g. there are ~ there’s ~ it’s a lot of people) – enables the expression of social meaning. The main aim of this project is to analyse the nature of this communicative variation. To this end, a multidisciplinary team of six researchers (one PI, one post-doc, and four PhD’s) will apply recent insights form socio-semiotic and socio-linguistic theory to a corpus of Graeco-Roman and Late Antique documentary texts (I – VIII AD) by means of a three-level approach: (i) an open-access database of annotated documentary texts will be created; (ii) the ‘semiotic potential’ of the different semiotic resources that play a role in documentary writing will be analysed; (iii) the interrelationships between the different semiotic resources will be studied. The project will have a significant scientific impact: (i) it will be the first to offer a holistic perspective towards the ‘meaning’ of documentary texts; (ii) the digital tool will open up new ways to investigate Ancient texts; (iii) it will make an important contribution to current socio-semiotic and socio-linguistic research; (iv) it will provide new insights about humans as social beings.
Summary
This five-year project aims to generate a paradigm shift in the understanding of Graeco-Roman and Late Antique communication. Non-literary, ‘documentary’ texts from Ancient Egypt such as letters, petitions and contracts have provided and continue to provide a key witness for our knowledge of the administration, education, economy, etc. of Ancient Egypt. This project argues that since documentary texts represent originals, their external characteristics should also be brought into the interpretation: elements such as handwriting, linguistic register or writing material transmit indirect social messages concerning hierarchy, status, and power relations, and can therefore be considered ‘semiotic resources’. The project’s driving hypothesis is that communicative variation – variation that is functionally insignificant but socially significant (e.g. there are ~ there’s ~ it’s a lot of people) – enables the expression of social meaning. The main aim of this project is to analyse the nature of this communicative variation. To this end, a multidisciplinary team of six researchers (one PI, one post-doc, and four PhD’s) will apply recent insights form socio-semiotic and socio-linguistic theory to a corpus of Graeco-Roman and Late Antique documentary texts (I – VIII AD) by means of a three-level approach: (i) an open-access database of annotated documentary texts will be created; (ii) the ‘semiotic potential’ of the different semiotic resources that play a role in documentary writing will be analysed; (iii) the interrelationships between the different semiotic resources will be studied. The project will have a significant scientific impact: (i) it will be the first to offer a holistic perspective towards the ‘meaning’ of documentary texts; (ii) the digital tool will open up new ways to investigate Ancient texts; (iii) it will make an important contribution to current socio-semiotic and socio-linguistic research; (iv) it will provide new insights about humans as social beings.
Max ERC Funding
1 476 250 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-06-01, End date: 2023-05-31
Project acronym GRAPH
Project The Great War and Modern Philosophy
Researcher (PI) Nicolas James Laurent Fernando De Warren
Host Institution (HI) KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Country Belgium
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2013-CoG
Summary "The First World War was an unprecedented event of destruction, transformation, and renewal that left no aspect of European culture unchanged. Philosophy proved no exception: the war motivated an historically singular mobilization of philosophers to write about the war during the years of conflict; significant works of philosophy were written during the war years and immediately thereafter; the postwar decades of the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a systematic reconfiguration of the landscape of philosophical thought that still largely defines contemporary philosophy. Surprisingly, while the impact of the war on literature, poetry, and the arts, political thought has been a subject of intense inquiry and interpretation, the significance of the war for modern philosophy remains relatively unexamined, often misunderstood or simply taken for granted.
This project aims at understanding the impact of the Great War on modern philosophy. It aims to chart an original course and establish a new standard for the philosophical study of the relation between the First World War and 20th-century philosophy through a comparative and critical approach to a diverse array of thinkers. Specifically, this project will investigate the hypothesis of whether diverse philosophical responses, direct and indirect, immediately or postponed, can be understood as formulations of different questions posed, or better: catalyzed by the war itself. This project will additionally argue that the very idea that war could reveal, challenge or legitimate cultural or philosophical meaning is itself a legacy of a distinctive kind of war-philosophy produced during the war.
This project will be divided into four sub-projects: (1) ""Philosophy of War and the Wars of Philosophy,""; (2) ""The Philosophy of Language and the Languages of Philosophy""; (3) ""The Care of the Soul""; (4) ""Europe after Europe."""
Summary
"The First World War was an unprecedented event of destruction, transformation, and renewal that left no aspect of European culture unchanged. Philosophy proved no exception: the war motivated an historically singular mobilization of philosophers to write about the war during the years of conflict; significant works of philosophy were written during the war years and immediately thereafter; the postwar decades of the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a systematic reconfiguration of the landscape of philosophical thought that still largely defines contemporary philosophy. Surprisingly, while the impact of the war on literature, poetry, and the arts, political thought has been a subject of intense inquiry and interpretation, the significance of the war for modern philosophy remains relatively unexamined, often misunderstood or simply taken for granted.
This project aims at understanding the impact of the Great War on modern philosophy. It aims to chart an original course and establish a new standard for the philosophical study of the relation between the First World War and 20th-century philosophy through a comparative and critical approach to a diverse array of thinkers. Specifically, this project will investigate the hypothesis of whether diverse philosophical responses, direct and indirect, immediately or postponed, can be understood as formulations of different questions posed, or better: catalyzed by the war itself. This project will additionally argue that the very idea that war could reveal, challenge or legitimate cultural or philosophical meaning is itself a legacy of a distinctive kind of war-philosophy produced during the war.
This project will be divided into four sub-projects: (1) ""Philosophy of War and the Wars of Philosophy,""; (2) ""The Philosophy of Language and the Languages of Philosophy""; (3) ""The Care of the Soul""; (4) ""Europe after Europe."""
Max ERC Funding
1 652 102 €
Duration
Start date: 2014-10-01, End date: 2019-09-30
Project acronym HANDLING
Project Writers handling pictures: a material intermediality (1880-today)
Researcher (PI) anne REVERSEAU
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN
Country Belgium
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2018-STG
Summary Not only does the writer’s hand hold the pen, it manipulates pictures as well. Writers touch, hoard, cut, copy, pin and paste various kinds of pictures and these actions integrate literature in visual culture in many ways that have never been tackled as a whole before.
Some writers spent their life surrounded by pictures taken from magazines, creating an inspirational environment; yet others nurtured their imagination with touristic leaflets and visual advertisements; others created fictional characters based on collected portraits. What do writers do with pictures? How does literature stage the pictures handled? From very concrete and banal uses of pictures will emerge a new vision of literature as intermediality in action.
This investigation applies the tool set of visual anthropology and visual studies to writers for a deeper understanding of visual ecosystems. Covering a large period, from the beginning of mass reproduction in the 1880s and the digital practices of today, HANDLING focuses on the French and French-speaking field and stands as a laboratory to refashion a broader model for relationships between image and text. Its main challenge is to get to the root of contemporary iconographic practices.
HANDLING is unconventional because literary studies usually focus on the text: contrary to the norm, it sets the image at the very centre of the literary act. This approach might yield promising results for the visibility of literature in the future, especially in exhibitions. Making these practices visible will make literature itself more visible.
As an internationally recognized specialist of text-image relationships with an in-depth knowledge of French/Belgian literature and photography, I will build a team and lead this 5-year ambitious project. Grounded in interdisciplinarity, it will show the significant and unexpected role of literature in material visual culture.
Summary
Not only does the writer’s hand hold the pen, it manipulates pictures as well. Writers touch, hoard, cut, copy, pin and paste various kinds of pictures and these actions integrate literature in visual culture in many ways that have never been tackled as a whole before.
Some writers spent their life surrounded by pictures taken from magazines, creating an inspirational environment; yet others nurtured their imagination with touristic leaflets and visual advertisements; others created fictional characters based on collected portraits. What do writers do with pictures? How does literature stage the pictures handled? From very concrete and banal uses of pictures will emerge a new vision of literature as intermediality in action.
This investigation applies the tool set of visual anthropology and visual studies to writers for a deeper understanding of visual ecosystems. Covering a large period, from the beginning of mass reproduction in the 1880s and the digital practices of today, HANDLING focuses on the French and French-speaking field and stands as a laboratory to refashion a broader model for relationships between image and text. Its main challenge is to get to the root of contemporary iconographic practices.
HANDLING is unconventional because literary studies usually focus on the text: contrary to the norm, it sets the image at the very centre of the literary act. This approach might yield promising results for the visibility of literature in the future, especially in exhibitions. Making these practices visible will make literature itself more visible.
As an internationally recognized specialist of text-image relationships with an in-depth knowledge of French/Belgian literature and photography, I will build a team and lead this 5-year ambitious project. Grounded in interdisciplinarity, it will show the significant and unexpected role of literature in material visual culture.
Max ERC Funding
1 500 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-07-01, End date: 2024-06-30
Project acronym HOM
Project Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism
Researcher (PI) Nidesh LAWTOO
Host Institution (HI) KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Country Belgium
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2016-STG
Summary Mimesis is one of the most influential concepts in Western thought. Originally invoked to define humans as the “most imitative” creatures in classical antiquity, mimesis (imitation) has recently been at the centre of theoretical debates in the humanities, social sciences, and the neurosciences concerning the role of “mimicry,” “identification,” “contagion,” and “mirror neurons” in the formation of subjectivity. And yet, despite the growing confirmations that imitation is constitutive of human behaviour, mimesis still tends to be confined to the sphere of realistic representation. The HOM project combines approaches that are usually split in different areas of disciplinary specialization to provide a correction to this tendency.
Conceived as a trilogy situated at the crossroads between literary criticism, cinema studies, and critical theory, HOM’s outcomes will result in two monographs and accompanying articles that explore the aesthetic, affective, and conceptual implications of the mimetic faculty. The first, radically reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics in modern literature, Oscar Wilde, by looking back to the classical foundations of theatrical mimesis that inform his corpus; the second considers the material effects of virtual simulation by looking ahead to new digital media via contemporary science-fiction films; and the third establishes an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophical accounts of mimesis and recent discoveries in the neurosciences. Together, these new perspectives on homo mimeticus reconsider the aesthetic foundations of a major literary author, open up a new line of inquiry in film studies, and steer philosophical debates on mimesis in new interdisciplinary directions.
Summary
Mimesis is one of the most influential concepts in Western thought. Originally invoked to define humans as the “most imitative” creatures in classical antiquity, mimesis (imitation) has recently been at the centre of theoretical debates in the humanities, social sciences, and the neurosciences concerning the role of “mimicry,” “identification,” “contagion,” and “mirror neurons” in the formation of subjectivity. And yet, despite the growing confirmations that imitation is constitutive of human behaviour, mimesis still tends to be confined to the sphere of realistic representation. The HOM project combines approaches that are usually split in different areas of disciplinary specialization to provide a correction to this tendency.
Conceived as a trilogy situated at the crossroads between literary criticism, cinema studies, and critical theory, HOM’s outcomes will result in two monographs and accompanying articles that explore the aesthetic, affective, and conceptual implications of the mimetic faculty. The first, radically reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics in modern literature, Oscar Wilde, by looking back to the classical foundations of theatrical mimesis that inform his corpus; the second considers the material effects of virtual simulation by looking ahead to new digital media via contemporary science-fiction films; and the third establishes an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophical accounts of mimesis and recent discoveries in the neurosciences. Together, these new perspectives on homo mimeticus reconsider the aesthetic foundations of a major literary author, open up a new line of inquiry in film studies, and steer philosophical debates on mimesis in new interdisciplinary directions.
Max ERC Funding
1 044 000 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-11-01, End date: 2022-04-30
Project acronym MusicExperiment21
Project Experimentation versus Interpretation: exploring New Paths in Music Performance in the Twenty-First Century
Researcher (PI) Paulo De Assis
Host Institution (HI) ORPHEUS INSTITUUT VZW
Country Belgium
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2012-StG_20111124
Summary As part of the historical shift out of a textual culture into a ‘mediatized’ image and sound culture, musical performance practices have undergone, in recent decades, a shift from text-based to performative-based renderings of musical works—focussing attention upon the experience of performance more as a material, present event, then as an ‘execution’ or ‘interpretation’ of an abstract work. The aim of this research proposal is to investigate: (a) the extent to which the traditional conception of musical interpretation is bound to a given historical period; (b) how new investigative paths can be created through experimental performance practices; and (c) the extent to which the scientific model of the practice of experimentation is transferable to music performance.
Crucial to these objectives is the material engagement in artistic practice, including the generation of concrete artistic outputs by the PI and other team members. The practice of music – understood as a fundamental methodological tool for the generation and exposition of new knowledge, will contribute decisively to innovations in both theory and practice, opening up opportunities for both scholarship and future performance practices. While exploring alternative approaches to music performance, this project will deliver concrete examples of such possibilities, situating itself at the frontline of the burgeoning field of Artistic Research.
Combining theoretical investigation with the concrete practice of music, this project presents a case for change in the field of musical performance. Alongside critical reflection on the state-of-the-art, it proposes a graspable and ‘audible’ alternative to traditional understandings of ‘interpretation’ in musical performance.
Hosted at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music, it will benefit from, and contribute to, the wider discourse on Artistic Experimentation, the Centre's current research focus.
Summary
As part of the historical shift out of a textual culture into a ‘mediatized’ image and sound culture, musical performance practices have undergone, in recent decades, a shift from text-based to performative-based renderings of musical works—focussing attention upon the experience of performance more as a material, present event, then as an ‘execution’ or ‘interpretation’ of an abstract work. The aim of this research proposal is to investigate: (a) the extent to which the traditional conception of musical interpretation is bound to a given historical period; (b) how new investigative paths can be created through experimental performance practices; and (c) the extent to which the scientific model of the practice of experimentation is transferable to music performance.
Crucial to these objectives is the material engagement in artistic practice, including the generation of concrete artistic outputs by the PI and other team members. The practice of music – understood as a fundamental methodological tool for the generation and exposition of new knowledge, will contribute decisively to innovations in both theory and practice, opening up opportunities for both scholarship and future performance practices. While exploring alternative approaches to music performance, this project will deliver concrete examples of such possibilities, situating itself at the frontline of the burgeoning field of Artistic Research.
Combining theoretical investigation with the concrete practice of music, this project presents a case for change in the field of musical performance. Alongside critical reflection on the state-of-the-art, it proposes a graspable and ‘audible’ alternative to traditional understandings of ‘interpretation’ in musical performance.
Hosted at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music, it will benefit from, and contribute to, the wider discourse on Artistic Experimentation, the Centre's current research focus.
Max ERC Funding
1 497 241 €
Duration
Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2018-01-31
