Book Reviews and Beyond: The Transformations of Literature and Art Criticism in Periodicals Between the 18th and the 21st Century
Book Reviews and Beyond. The Transformations of Literature and Art Criticism in Periodicals Between the 18th and the 21st Century
Milan, 3-5 juin 2020
Although unquestionably all-pervasive within the history of modern and contemporary press, the ‘review form’ has been to present an understudied practice. In fact, this multi-faceted, cross-disciplinary form that has persistently accompanied the different phases in the evolution of “print-capitalism” has hardly been analysed from a theoretical perspective. This dismissal by the academic world is certainly peculiar, if not manifestly contradictory; however, it significantly testifies of the difficulty of investigating such a slippery object of study critically.
The very ‘physiognomy’ of the book or film review, inherently wavering between the duty to inform and the needs of the market, influenced as it is by the definition of ‘taste’, makes this form difficult to tackle with a sound methodological approach. Since the beginning of the XVIII century, the book and film review has proved to be an essential interface between cultural supply and demand, and it has always been something more than a weapon to reach fame and recognition. Depending of the position gained in the literary or film fields, the review has often determined the success or failure of a creative enterprise, of a name or reputation. This particular device has been the yardstick of the most diverse sensibilities and tempers, from the learned expert to the passionate amateur. In this, its proliferation has foreshadowed the changes in the reception processes of works no longer provided with an ‘aura’ and therefore prone to the whims of a mass audience, whose judgments ultimately assessed their value.
For these reasons, it is hard to trace the evolution of the ‘review form’ from a single point of view while focusing on the mechanisms that have triggered its fortune. As a crucial touchstone of intellectual production, the review still performs its essential normative function, contributing to outlining the ever-evolving “horizon of expectations” of its audiences, often identified with an ideal corpus which should epitomise a shared canon. On the other hand, as a social process, the review tends to keep track of the continuing dialectics between mainstream aesthetic values and their renegotiation in distinct contexts and/or communities of consumption.
In the light of the rapidly-changing scenario of media and technologies, the conference “Book Reviews and Beyond” aims at exploring this compelling area of research in accordance with the interdisciplinary perspective of periodical studies, with particular focus on the period from the eighteenth century to the turn of the new millennium.
Scientific Committee:
Paolo Giovannetti
Andrea Chiurato
Mara Logaldo
Organizing Committee:
Dario Boemia
Stefano Locati
Laura Sica
Website
The website for the conference is now online at beyondbookreview.iulm.it. It contains all the links to follow the event in streaming on YouTube day by day. Simultaneous translation into English will be available for all presentations or sessions held in Italian by clicking on the “English” button.
For information about the event, and other questions about the conference program, please contact the Organizing Committee (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).
Interactive Map
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Future States: Modernity and national identity in popular magazines, 1890-1945
Future States, a nearly carbon-neutral conference (NCNC) hosted by the Centre for Design History, University of Brighton, is now open for registration. The conference explores the constructive tensions between modernity and nationalism in popular magazines across the globe, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Running from 23 March – 5 April 2020, this is a landmark event in magazine studies, with talks by 35 leading scholars from 15 countries, and multiple Q&As and discussion forums. But there are no air tickets, hotel bookings, or conference packs – and no registration fee. Attendance at Future States is free, and open to all.
Future States is a new kind of academic conference for the world of the internet, and the era of climate crisis. This is a new way to share knowledge, making full use of the amazing capacities of digital technology. Presentations at Future States are recorded in advance, and are viewed by participants at their leisure; discussion threads remain on the site as a permanent record of the proceedings, alongside multiple further resources: reading lists, images, links to archives and research centres. Future States is the future of conference-going. Do join us!
To register, and to view abstracts of all the conference papers, visit our website: www.futurestates.org
The conference
In the early decades of the twentieth century, ideals of technological modernity and American consumerism had a normative influence on cultures across the globe: magazines in Europe, the US, Latin America, and Asia, inflected a shared internationalism and technological optimism. But there were equally powerful countervailing influences, of patriotic or insurgent nationalism, and of traditionalism, that promoted values of cultural differentiation. Future States explores these dialectical constructions of ideal modernity in the magazines of different countries, exploring how national cultures drew on – or resisted – currents in international modernism, and also informed and constituted this global culture.
Keynote presenters
Professor Patrick Rössler (Erfurt University)
Spearheading the iconic turn: A survey of illustrated magazines during the interwar period – the example of Germany
Professor Faye Hammill (Glasgow)
Travel as nationalist practice in Canadian magazines
Professor Claire Lindsay (UCL)
Advertising in Mexican Folkways
Professor Michel Hockx (Notre Dame)
Modern Chinese magazines and moral censorship
Week One (23 29 March)
Opening remarks: Professor Andrew Thacker (NTU), Future States co-director
Keynotes: Prof Patrick Rössler, Prof Faye Hammill
Panel 1: Francophone Modernities
Dr Chara Kolokytha (Northumbria): Le Génie du Nord: Sélection and the advocacy of an international “Nordic” culture
Prof Adrien Rannaud (Toronto): To be or not to be modern: The paradox of modernity in French-Canadian magazines during the 1930s
Laura Truxa (EHESS): Visual modernism and its others in VU
Panel 2: The Soviet World
Dr John Etty (Auckland GS): Performing ideology: Communism and modernism in Soviet graphic satire
Phaedra Claeys (Ghent): Safeguarding Russian culture as a cultural reality or as a cultural construct? The case of the news magazine Illustrated Russia
Dr Michael Erdman (British Library): Issue: class, volume: nation : Periodicals in the construction of Soviet Turkic identities
Panel 3: Youthful Identities
Prof Richard Junger (Western Michigan): “The young man of to-day is not the young man of fifty years ago”: The changing image of United States men as portrayed in cover art of popular periodicals, 1880-1920
Dr Elena Ogliari (Milan): Negotiating modernity and tradition in Irish periodicals for juveniles (1910s-1920s)
Dr Christophe Premat (Stockholm): Promoting youth between the two world wars: The case of the magazine Télémaque in France in 1934
Panel 4: Australia – Home and Abroad
Dr Susann Liebich (Heidelberg) and Prof Victoria Kuttainen (James Cook): Currents of international travel: Australian magazines and travel writing about the Asia-Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s
Dr Louise Edensor (Middlesex Dubai): The Native Companion: E. J Brady’s ‘home-grown’ literature and modernist aesthetics
Prof Melissa Miles (Monash): The city, race and labour in Australian design magazines of the 1930s
Panel 5: Transnationalism
Prof Max Saunders (KCL): Transhuman transnationals: The future states of J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal
Prof Carey Snyder (Ohio): The global dialogics of The New Age
Dr Nissa Ren Cannon (Boston): American on Sundays: The Paris Tribune’s Sunday magazine section
Dr Jaleen Grove (Ringling College): Magazine Digest: The visual rhetoric of a Canadian Jewish magazine before and during wartime
Week Two (30 March - 5 April)
Opening remarks: Dr Tim Satterthwaite (Brighton), Future States co-director
Keynotes: Prof Claire Lindsay, Prof Michel Hockx
Panel 6: Latin America – Transitional Cultures
Dr Laura Fólica (Catalonia): Between the local and the international: The role of literary translation in Revista Nosotros (1907-1943)
Prof Hanno Ehrlicher and Dr Jörg Lehmann (Tubingen): Indigenism as nationalism: The case of Amauta
Claudia Cedeño (Tubingen): The ancient and the modern woman in Mexican Folkways
Panel 7: The Age of Extremes
Prof Konrad Dussel (Mannheim): Pictures for German communists: The newspaper supplement Der Rote Stern in the Weimar Republic
Prof Vike Martina Plock (Exeter): Klaus Mann’s Decision: The unfinished story of a modernist magazine
Prof Antonella Pelizzari (CUNY): Modernity and distraction in Fascist Italy: Photography in 1930s Rizzoli illustrated periodicals
Panel 8: Representing the Modern
Dr Jean-Louis Marin-Lamellet (Savoie-Mont Blanc): Scrambling for a cooperative future: The Arena magazine, reform discourses and the production of national identity (1889-1909)
Dr Margaret Innes (Syracuse): Photo-History and radical print media’s national turn
Pedro Castelo (Birkbeck): Nationalism and modernity: A cultural and intellectual debate in Portuguese architectural magazines of the mid-century
Panel 9: The Power of Photography
Dr Emma West (Birmingham): “The Greater Britain of Fascists”: Politics and photomontage in Action (1936-1940)
Dr Guilia Pra Floriani (Heidelberg): Transmediality and the construction of a national imagery: Portraits of Republican leaders in the Chinese popular media (1912-1913)
Josie Johnson (Brown): Mutable modernity: Margaret Bourke-White’s Soviet photographs in magazines
Panel 10: Postwar Modernities
N Zeynep Kürük-Erçetin (Boğaziçi): The American image in the Turkish context: A close reading of the translated content in Resimli Hayat magazine
Roozbeh Seyedi (Leiden): Fight for what? The forgotten “Revolutionary Spirit” of modern art in Iran
Prof Anne Reynes-Delobel (Aix-Marseille): Caliban (1947-51): A forum on the future of Europe
Contact Us
Visiting address
- Erasmusplein 1
- 6525 HT Nijmegen
- The Netherlands
Postal address
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- 3514 HL Utrecht
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Founding Members
Peter Buse (University of Liverpool)
Pedro Castelo (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Andrea Gremels (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Everton Vieira Barbosa (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord)