La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 La Terre
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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 La Terre All sessions will take place at the Providence Biltmore Thursday, October 27, 2016 Session I: 12:00pm - 1:30pm Panel I.A: Landscape Painting (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Britany Salsbury (Rhode Island School of Design) Nicole Georgopulos (Stony Brook University), “‘The Cradle of Things’: Origins and Ontogenesis in Late Landscapes of Gustave Courbet” In early 1864, Gustave Courbet returned to his home region of Franche-Comté and painted a series of landscapes that took as their subjects various natural points of origin: grottoes, caves, waterfalls, etc. Through his loose and expressive facture, Courbet renders visible in these landscapes the ongoing becoming of the world, investigating the nature of origination and evolution. Courbet’s interest in such subjects comes just two years after the publication of the French translation of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which irreversibly unsettled the traditional understanding of humankind’s position within the world. The early years of evolutionary biology made clear the human body’s implication in the history of the earth: no longer could the body be understood in isolation from its environment; rather, it was embedded within a geological history that tied it irrevocably to the earth itself through a common point of origin. This paper situates these natal or ontogenetic landscapes within the context of the wider dialogue concerning the nature and origins of the body in mid-nineteenth-century France, extending from evolutionary biology to proto-phenomenology, and culminating in Henri Bergson’s notion of creative becoming. Seen through a phenomenological lens informed by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Grosz, it becomes evident that though Courbet’s landscapes do not take the body itself as their immediate subject, they constitute a reimagining of corporeality as both an epistemological and ontological category, a reordering of the understanding of the body’s place in the world. Érika Wicky (Université de Liège), “L’art du paysage à l’ère de la photographie” L’avènement simultané, au milieu du XIXe siècle, de la photographie, de la critique d’art et de la peinture de paysage1 a donné lieu à la publication de nombreux textes critiques sur le paysage photographique qui témoignent des réflexions suscitées par cette triple rencontre. Il s’agira de s’interroger sur la façon dont ces textes (critiques d’art, essais journalistiques, traités techniques, etc.), visant le plus souvent à valoriser le médium photographique, ont abordé les premiers paysages photographiques. On verra notamment comment, tout en l’articulant à la pratique picturale du paysage, certains auteurs ont dessiné une conception spécifique et une poésie particulière du paysage en photographie. Alors que le modèle pictural de la composition idéalisante prévalait souvent dans l’appréhension du paysage, ces auteurs ont souligné la possibilité qu’offre la photographie à l’opérateur d’effectuer un choix à travers le 1 Au sujet de la mode du paysage au salon de 1855 : « Étrange bizarrerie! C'est quand la nature est condamnée à mort, c'est quand l'industrie la dépèce, quand les routes de fer la labourent [...] que l'esprit humain s'empresse vers la nature, la regarde comme jamais il n'a fait, la voit, cette mère éternelle, pour la première fois, la conquiert par l'étude, la surprend, la ravit, la transporte et la fixe, vivante comme flagrante dans des pages et des toiles d'une vérité sans pair ». Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, La peinture à l’exposition de 1855, Paris, E. Dentu, 1855, p.19. NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 cadrage. Or, dans la mesure où l’absence de choix dans la pratique photographique constituait une des principales objections à l’attribution d’un statut artistique au nouveau médium, l’insistance portée sur les exigences du cadrage, présenté comme un mode d’expression de soi, constituait un argument majeur en faveur de l’art photographique. Cependant, en plaçant le cadrage au cœur de l’activité du paysagiste, les défenseurs du statut artistique de la photographie réactualisent une conception ancienne du paysage pictural à l’origine de laquelle se trouve le cadre. En effet, le paysage a souvent été évoqué comme le fruit du découpage opéré par une fenêtre2. Une anecdote parvenue jusqu’à nous rapporte même que le premier paysage de l’histoire de l’art serait né au XVIe siècle, alors qu’un soldat découpait un morceau choisi de la fresque de Lorenzo Lotto Le Mariage mystique de Saint Catherine34. Paradoxalement, les premiers auteurs qui, au XIXe siècle, ont évoqué le paysage photographique en termes de cadrage ont donc à la fois souligné et valorisé la spécificité du médium ainsi que son potentiel artistique tout en l’inscrivant dans une tradition ancienne. Therese Dolan (Temple University), “Terre-atorialism in the Art of the Pennsylvania Impressionist Painters” The sojourns in France taken by the Pennsylvania Impressionists, their exposure to the Impressionist aesthetic through the Paul Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York in 1886, and their contact with other American Impressionists helped them to see the potential of conveying their American landscape subject matter in newly expressive ways. Their depiction of seaside pleasures, secluded rural roads softened by snow, and quiet villages gently warming to the sun of late winter gained authenticity from their exposure to foreign art. They saw how they could infuse the feel of their home country, its particular light and native plantings, its colonial architecture and hand-crafted farm implements with a sense of their native traditions. They wed practical knowledge learned from hours in the studios at the Académie Julian, encounters with Monet at Giverny, and painting campaigns in the forests of Fontainebleau with their observations of the farmhouses, local streams and quiet villages of their native Bucks county environment to create a body of work that resonated with uniquely American freshness and spontaneity. If some of the technique of their art originated in a French syntax, the prose that emerged from their work was decidedly American, but not to the point claimed by William Gerdts who denies most of the French influence and credits its aesthetic as more related to the naturalism of Winslow Homer and the contemporaneous painting of George Bellows. *** Panel I.B: Women Exploring Unfamiliar Territories (WIF) (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: Cecilia Beach (Alfred University) Meera Jagannathan (University of Houston), “Trauma of Deracination in Flora Tristan: The Pariah as Traveling Metaphor” Poetics of dislocation is a recurring trope that haunts the colonial and postcolonial worlds, where the trauma induced by deracination is an overriding preoccupation. A similar sense of deracination 2 On retrouve encore cette conception sous la plume critique de Baudelaire : « Ils ouvrent une fenêtre et tout l'espace compris dans le carré de la fenêtre, arbres, ciel, maison, prend pour eux la valeur d'un poème tout fait » (Baudelaire, « Salon de 1859 : le paysage », Variétés critiques, Paris, G. Crès et Cie, 1924, p. 172). 3 Daniel Arasse, « Sept réflexion sur la préhistoire de la peinture de genre », Majeur ou Mineur ? Les hiérarchies en art, Georges Roque (dir.), Nîmes, Jacqueline Chambon, 2000, p.46. 2 NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 pervades Flora Tristan’s memoir where Flora, the dispossessed, struggles to find her place, and Florita, the narrator, facilitates this recovery through the act of narration. Recent investigations into this French- Peruvian feminist-traveler have focused on the wound of illegitimacy that contributed to her trauma of dislocation. Her dislocation within French society fueled Tristan’s search for her father’s family in the New World, where she discovered her abilities as a fine documentarian and recorded her impressions in the Peregrinations of a Pariah. I argue here that the Peregrinations is conceived by the writer to be, both a fine documentation of Peruvian life during the mid-nineteenth century and an affective trauma narration that helps the narrator-victim reconstitute herself. In this effort, the readers are conscripted by the narrator, who relies on their empathy for recuperating from the many wounds as they become her surrogate community. Taking my cue from Freud who writes in Studies of Hysteria that narrative recall helps victims of trauma work through its effects (what Freud calls “abreaction”), I study this work as Tristan’s attempt at recuperative exercise where she employs the mute figure of the Pariah in her self-refashioning. In this effort, Tristan relies on a very predictable appropriation of the marginalized Pariah who stands at once for the abject Other and for unspeakable, mute trauma. Here in lies a curious paradox: if the Pariah stands for both, a singular victimhood and for incommensurability, how does she then become a traveling metaphor that moves effortlessly from the Indian subcontinent to the New World? I argue that the figure of the Pariah, at once unique and universal, makes this possible by becoming a mask of performance for the transnational narrator who was urgently seeking a new identity. Cecilia Beach (Alfred University), “André Léo’s Italian Novels: An Ecocritique” Socialist and feminist writer André Léo, who is best known for her role in the Paris Commune, spent most of the final decades of the century in exile in Italy where she continued to write novels infused with the social and political issues of her time. During this period, she published five works of fiction that take place Italy: four novels published serially in Le Siècle and Le Temps between 1879 and 1889, and one children’s novel signed Bénédict and published by Heztel in 1887. In all of these novels, André Léo explores the relationship between the environment—both rural and urban—and the economic and cultural situation of the regions described.