Reading, describing, interpreting: Louis Marin between text and image
Lire, décrire, interpréter : Louis Marin entre texte et image
Published on Tuesday, February 07, 2023
Abstract
This conference would like to explore the manifestations and transformations of the interplay between text and image in the writings and thought of the philosopher and theoretician of representation Louis Marin (1931-1992), and their resurgence in other disciplines, but also to situate them in a multiplicity of contemporary attempts to reconfigure the links between image and text, work (of art) and discourse, art and literature.
Announcement
UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, 16-17 November 2023
Argument
The philosopher Louis Marin (1931-1992) has been mainly identified as a theoretician of the image. Around 1990, Norman Bryson linked him to the English-speaking “New Art History” and Thomas Mitchell cited him as one of those who shook art history from its “dogmatic slumber”. In France, Marin was an important source of renewal in art history, especially among those who wanted to distance themselves from the authority of André Chastel, for example. However, his influence can also be found in other fields, starting with literature, through his work on Pascal and Port-Royal, Montaigne, Stendhal, Perrault, or La Fontaine, to name but a few. However, in this field too, it is the image that is at the heart of his preoccupations, laying the foundations for a radical reconsideration of what is often referred to as “text-image relationship”. Authors such as Bernard Vouilloux or Bertrand Rougé have thus placed their work in this wake.
If this reconsideration of the relationship between text and image is so radical, it is because Marin was a theoretician not so much of the image as of the figure (to use a term widely employed by himself, which comes from rhetoric as well as art theory and theology), that is to say, the theoretician of the place where image and speech, perception and language, gaze and writing intersect – the place of their “concretion”, to use his vocabulary. It is a different relationship between these two essential levels of meaning that is at issue in his writings; different, at least, from that postulated by an art history of which Erwin Panofsky is often presented, rightly or wrongly, as the father: a historiography in which the text is situated upstream of the work of art, as its explanation, as the code of its reading, whereas what is affirmed in Marin’s work is a configuration in which the work (of art) and the discourse (or the text and the image within a work) refer to each other without a real priority ever being established. In this way, he is in line with a programme that Roland Barthes had explicitly formulated for literary criticism at least as early as 1963: to replace the analogy between parts of a work and documents external to it by the homology between the totality of the work and other totalities (discursive, social, historical, psychic...).
This conference would like to explore the manifestations and transformations of this interplay between text and image in Marin’s writings and thought, and their resurgence in other disciplines, but also to situate them in a multiplicity of contemporary attempts to reconfigure the links between image and text, work (of art) and discourse, art and literature. It will take place on 16-17 November 2023 at UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).
Submission guidelines
Proposals in French or English (max. 2500 characters) and a short CV should be sent to agnes.guiderdoni@uclouvain.be and giacomo.fuk@uclouvain.be
by 28 February 2023.
This conference is organised within the framework of the research project “Status and functions of description in Louis Marin: an inchoative conception of representation”, funded by the F.R.S.-FNRS (PDR T.0102.22).
Selection committee
- Agnès Guiderdoni, UCLouvain
- Giacomo Fuk, UCLouvain
Subjects
Places
- Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Event attendance modalities
Full on-site event
Date(s)
- Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Attached files
Keywords
- Louis Marin, image, texte, représentation, art, littérature, historiographie
Contact(s)
- Agnès Guiderdoni
courriel : agnes [dot] guiderdoni [at] uclouvain [dot] be - Giacomo Fuk
courriel : giacomo [dot] fuk [at] uclouvain [dot] be
Reference Urls
Information source
- Giacomo Fuk
courriel : giacomo [dot] fuk [at] uclouvain [dot] be
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Reading, describing, interpreting: Louis Marin between text and image », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Tuesday, February 07, 2023, https://doi.org/10.58079/1ahz
