Multiple disciplines such as gender, historical, or literary studies have been using different approaches to the body as a heuristic instrument. This interdisciplinary symposium invites scholars to reflect upon the intersections of corporeality and narrativity. Which role did the body play when writing? How did the body influence the narrative about the body and the author?

Presentation

Multiple disciplines such as gender, historical, or literary studies have been using different approaches to the body as a heuristic instrument. Bringing them together, improves our skills in analyzing the influence of the body on several levels, ranging from content and materiality to writing practices and formations of subjectivity.

This interdisciplinary symposium invites scholars to reflect upon the intersections of corporeality and narrativity. Which role did the body play when writing? How did this materialize? How did the body influence the narrative about the body and the author? Which tropes about the body were typical for the early modern period? Furthermore, in which ways did people not only write with but on their bodies? How did such signs alter the ways in which a body was read?

Then on a methodological level, we ask, how we can trace the physical in the sources. Additionally, what approaches are most apt to grasp the ways in which the author's body forms the text and its narrative and how the latter shapes the author's body and/or the image it draws thereof? In short, the symposium aims at examining the interplay between the corporeal and the textual.

Program

Thursday, 8 June 2023

• 9:00–9:10 : Jan Blanc (Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Geneva): Opening Message
• 9:10–9:30 : Vitus Huber (University of Geneva): On Influences and Interdependences of Corporeality and Narrativity: An Introduction

Session 1: The Power of Narratives

Chair: Martin Rueff (University of Geneva)

• 9:30–10:15 : Sarah Toulalan (University of Exeter): “Childish folly:” Representing Sexual Acts Among Children in Seventeenth-Century Pornography
• 10:15–11:00 : Effie Botonaki (University of Thessaloniki): “Fraile” Bodies Writing and Disrupting Life-Narratives
• 11:00–11:15 Coffee Break
• 11:15–12:00 : Benjamin Steiner (University of Munich): Body and Power: Narratives of the Body in Early Modern Political History

12:00–13:45 :  Lunch

Session 2: Autobiographic Writing

Chair: Frédéric Tinguely (University of Geneva)

• 13:45–14:30 : Andreas Würgler (University of Geneva): Narrating her Life as an Amazon: Katharina Franziska von Wattenwyl’s Mémoire (1714)
• 14:30–15:15 : Stanis Perez (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord): “Mon ame ne prend autre alarme que la sensible et corporelle:” Les Essais de Montaigne en tant qu'autobiographie corporelle

15:15–15:45 Coffee Break

Session 3: Women's Bodies

Chair: Christine Weder (University of Geneva)

• 15:45–16:30 : Sonia Wigh (University of Exeter): “Delicate lips, wicked words:” Exploring Female Physiognomy in Early Modern South Asia
• 16:30–17:15 : Nadine Amsler (University of Fribourg): The Pregnant Body in the Letters of Empress Maria Theresia to Maria Beatrice d’Este

17:15–18:00 Break

Keynote

Chair: Marie Houllemare (University of Geneva)

• 18:00–19:30 : Lyndal Roper (University of Oxford): The Body of the Peasant and the Story of the Peasants’ War 1524–1526

Dinner

Friday, 9 June 2023

Session 4: Narrating Vulnerability

Chair: Taline Garibian (University of Geneva)

• 9:00–9:45 : Micheline Louis-Courvoisier (University of Geneva): Sensation, expression, transmission du symptôme: la puissance dans la relation thérapeutique du 18^e siècle
• 9:45–10:30 : Nicole Nyffenegger (University of Bern): Shakespeare's Skin Narratives and the Stage

10:30–10:45 Coffee break

Session 5: Colonial Narratives

Chair: Guillemette Bolens (University of Geneva)

• 10:45–11:30 : Robert Folger (University of Heidelberg): Somatic Writing and Colonial Semiosis in Colonial Latin America: The Case of Diego de Landa
• 11:30–12:15 : Aldair Rodrigues (State University of Campinas): Conflict Readings of African Body Markings in the Colonial Archive (Brazil, 18th Century)

12:15–13:00 : Final Discussion