Du 12 octobre 2007 au 13 octobre 2007
Universität Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau
5th Landau-Paris-Symposium on the Eighteenth Century (LAPASEC)
One of the great endeavours of the Age of Enlightenment was the explanation, justification and promotion of individual experience through a sensorial apprehension of Nature. Considered as the source and foundation of all objective knowledge, the circulation of sensorial data through the body and into the mind was first presented (Locke) as a sobering substitute to a purely 'hypothetical' or dogmatic explanation of the world and as the necessary first step towards a rational comprehension of it. In turn, the work of the senses and its complex relationship to the 'pleasures of the imagination' became one of the central concerns of philosophers, scientists and artists alike, and the 'age of sensibility' increasingly conceived sensorial experience as a vital counterpoint to 'cold reason', even, with the Gothic, allowing a tentative reintroduction of darkness to balance the glaring light of rationalist thinking.
In the wake of the study of the psychology of taste inspired by Locke and Shaftesbury, criticism became concerned with the way in which art affects our emotions. Thus Dubos, in Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719), defines taste as a sixth sense. Hutcheson (1725) follows Shaftesbury when he regards taste as an internal sense concerned with both morals and art, and Montesquieu (quoted above) saw it as an organ of the "body machine". Many writers in the Enlightenment period agreed that good taste is based on universally valid principles: Voltaire (1764) and Hume (1742) wrote on standards of
taste while Hogarth, in his Analysis of Beauty (1753) was, typically, concerned with "fixing the fluctuating Idea of Taste".
A more relativist viewpoint emerged in the second part of the 18th century when Alexander Gerard (1759) defined the term as a responsive faculty of imagination complementing the effort of the artist - taste is to the critic what genius is to the artist. Kant, in the context of discussing the sublime, also quoted above, insists on the different notions of taste held in different periods.
The 5th LAPASEC symposium will try to explore several issues. To begin with, the question whether the notion of taste really became more relativist in the latter part of the 18th century. A particular focus will be on *the sense of sight* in the context of discussing taste / - an issue concerning aesthetics, philosophy, art
history, literature and literary criticism. Given the fact that much of the discussion outlined above is, implicitly, a defence of the attitudes (or in Bourdieu's terms, the habitat) of a self-defined, wealthy, educated, male, leisured, and exclusive elite, we intend to explore the politics of taste as propagated, for example, in the Academia del buon gusto (Palermo 1718), the English Society of Dilettanti (1732) and the Parisian salons. Our intention is to unite in our "Landau salon" scholars from the fields concerned here and from different countries.
Papers are invited on the problematics of taste as sketched before, preferably with a focus on sight. Subsequent symposia will be dedicated to the exploration of taste in the contexts of hearing and smelling (2008) and touching and tasting (2009). A selection of papers will be published in the LAPASEC series in a volume of proceedings in 2008 by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
For more information check the LAPASEC website:
www.uni-landau.de/anglistik/LAPASEC/index.htm
Please send a title and abstract (100 words) of your proposed paper to
Professor Peter Wagner: wahpe@t-online.de
AND Professor Frédéric Ogée: frederic.ogee@univ-paris-diderot.fr
mailto:frederic.ogee@univ-paris-diderot.fr>
Not later than 10 April 2007
