You are warmly invited to join us for the next Reading & Reception Studies
Seminar
on Thursday, 3 June, at 5.30 pm in Rooms 329-330, Third Floor, Senate House,
Malet Street, London WC1, when
Prof. Marcia Pointon will be giving an illustrated presentation on
'Portraiture, Fiction and Historical Evidence: Joseph Roth and Thomas Mann'.
The lecture will be followed by a discussion, and the meeting will conclude with
a glass of wine at around 7.30 pm.
I'd be very grateful if you could bring this to the attention of anyone who
might be interested to come.
With best wishes,
(Dr) Elinor Shaffer
The Reception of British Authors in Europe Research Project
Director: Dr E. S. Shaffer, FBA
12B Ridgmount Gardens
London WC1E 7AR
Tel. & fax 020 7323 6861
http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/rbae
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Abstract:
Portraits have long been identified as sources of historical knowledge. The
National Portrait Gallery was founded upon this assumption, and portraits are
commonly employed by historians to illustrate their work. Yet precisely how an
image of an individual now dead can constitute a form of historical evidence -
itself a deeply contested category - has seldom been seriously examined. In
this paper I consider how the melding of imaginative and empirical material,
and the narratization of the materiality of portrait- painting, contribute to a
notion of authentic presence and historicity within novels by Thomas Mann and
Joseph Roth.
Marcia Pointon was formerly Pilkington Professor of the History of Art at the
University of Manchester. She is now a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck, and an
Honorary Research Fellow at the Courtauld. Her most recent books are Hanging
the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England
(Yale, 1993) and Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representation
in English Visual Culture 1665-1800 (OUP, 1997). This year she has held
Fellowships at the Yale Centre for British Art and at the Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. In 2005 she will be a
Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute and a Fellow at the Huntington
Library, California. Her book 'Brilliant Effects: Jewellery and its Images' is
nearing completion.
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