Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying
University of Birmingham: June 26th 2009
CALL FOR PAPERS
Death is everywhere yet nowhere in Western culture. Corpses litter Hollywood film; the threat of violence propels most mainstream narratives; the recently-recovered or slowly dying make bookshelves groan. But the pain of death, the banality of physical, of undignified, decline, is oddly absent. Visual culture provides an ever more dominating forum for contemporary society's depiction of, and dealings with, death. It provides our main representations of illness or of grief, of wounded bodies or ghosts, of death by stupefying risk, tragic misadventure or unpalatable crime. It offers the most vivid imaginings of what is feared in pre-death, glamourised in the afterlife, and punishable in both-of a morality to mortality.
Accompanying a NHS community-based arts initiative on 'Living with Death, Dying and Loss', this interdisciplinary symposium will discuss the following:
· What are the psychological, philosophical or ideological qualities and implications of the visual representation of death?
· How does gender, sexuality, or race, for example, impact on the representation of illness, murder, suicide, or grief?
* What is the structural or aesthetic function of death in Visual culture
* How is the exchange between death and visual culture historically or geographically specific?
* How does visual practice or medium affect the representation of death and its cultural significance?
Abstracts (max. 300 words) to be submitted by April 30th 2009 to Dr Michele Aaron: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Keynotes:
Dr Havi Carel (University of West of England) author of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006) and Illness (2008)
Professor Christopher Townsend (Royal Holloway) author of Art and Death (2008)
Dr Michele Aaron
Senior Lecturer
American and Canadian Studies
University of Birmingham
UK
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