Call for Papers
Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Second International Conference, September 24-27, 2003
Seeing Vision Anew: American Women Writers and Visual Technologies
Zootropes, stereoscopes, radiography, praxinoscopes, radiography, and of
course photography and cinematography: the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were replete with visual technologies that reconfigured both the
materiality of viewing practices and what Walter Benjamin describes as the
“optical unconscious.” This panel proposal for the Society for the Study of
American Women Writers Conference (September 24-27, 2003) seeks to explore
the relationship between visual technologies that emerged in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and the textual work of American women
writers.
As Jonathan Crary has demonstrated, as early as 1820, the camera obscura
model of vision—which corresponds to a single and definable point—collapses
as a result technologies and scientific and philosophical inquiries into
sight. Not only did vision change, but the composition of the observing
subject radically transformed. The body, which had been excluded in the
camera obscura model, became in Crary’s words, “a visual producer,”
rendering distinctions between inner and outer, crucial for the camera
obscura model, immaterial.
How does the work of American women writers engage with and manifest
changes to the observing subject? How can these engagements and
manifestations be read in relation to American women writers’ attempts to
document women’s struggles for sexual, political, and psychological
emancipation? How can visual technologies and scientific inquiries into
vision contextualize and elucidate characteristics of literary texts such as
narration, omniscience, evidence, knowledge, as well as representations of
time, interiority, experience, subjectivity, and the body?
Please write a short (250-500 word) abstract and include it in the body of
an e-mail addressed to: fus31@hotmail.com or klamm@u.washington.edu by
January 20th. Questions and inquiries welcome. Every submission will receive
a prompt reply.
Panelists must become members of the Society for the Study of American Women
Writers. Information is available at http://www.unl.edu/legacy/SSAWW1.html
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