GSH - Genoa School of Humanities
Via Parini
Genova
Italy
Organisers:
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GSH - GENOA SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
22nd - 27th August 2016
THE GAZE
Speakers and Seminar Leaders:
Pietro Bianchi
Maria Borio
Giorgio Cesarale
Lorenzo Chiesa
Luisa Lorenza Corna
Stefano Ercolino
Chiara Fenoglio
Raffaello Palumbo Mosca
Established in 2013 and directed by Lorenzo Chiesa and Raffaello Palumbo Mosca, the Genoa School of Humanities (GSH) offers weekly series of seminars in English held by scholars of literature, philosophy, and other subjects, as well as by novelists, poets, filmmakers, and psychoanalysts.
The topic of our seminars of Summer 2016 is the gaze, which we will approach in our consolidated interdisciplinary way from the perspectives of film-studies, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, poetry, and philosophy.
The gaze is not simply the eye. The gaze obviously intersects with the organ of sight and the field of vision, yet is not exhausted by them. Jean-Paul Sartre famously observed that the gaze transcends the convergence of two ocular globes in our direction. It may also be materialised by the sound of a hesitant footstep or the light movement of a curtain. Jacques Lacan insisted on a fundamental asymmetry between seeing and being-seen. As he once put it: “You never look at me from the place at which I see you”. In psychoanalysis, the gaze stands first and foremost for a libidinal object, one with which we fall in love. Why are we fascinated and seduced by the way in which the other looks at us? How does the inscrutable gaze of the other manage to break our narcissistic infatuation with the mirror image? Film studies have taken up these motifs and developed them to understand the conscious and unconscious relation between the spectator and the image on the screen. Given such a context, can we additionally speak of the gaze of the filmmaker? If so, what role does it have in the cinematographic experience?
The gaze is also more generally embedded in the differential structure of language, while language cannot do without a “scopic” component. At its basics, narration itself – whether fictional or critical, subjective or objective – relies on the adoption of a certain “point of view”. Literature and poetry may decide to openly privilege their visual element, for instance in ekphrasis, where the description of a scene or a work of art take centre stage. Does this rhetorical device not point at the synesthetic presupposition inherent to the very possibility and act of writing? And, following Giorgio Agamben, could we suggest that poetry, with its suspension and deactivation of the apparent immediacy of meaning, provides us with nothing else than language’s exhibition, admiration, and contemplation of itself?
The GSH proposes itself as a venue where young scholars have a real possibility to deepen their knowledge, not only by attending seminars, but also by actively discussing in an informal context their own research projects with highly qualified teachers and among themselves. One of the basic ideas of the GSH is that learning is enhanced by the suspension of formalisms, hierarchies, and the principle of authority that usually define traditional academic contexts. Each day revolves around one or two presentations by an invited speaker and is enriched by roundtables, small study groups, and debates that are always attended by one or more seminar leaders. The exchange of knowledge and ideas is facilitated by the limited number of students (max 15), and by the interdisciplinary nature of the seminars.
Speakers/seminar leaders at the GSH are leading international figures in their academic and extra-academic fields. They are based both in Italy and abroad. Participants are thus exposed to different cultures, teaching methods, and disciplinary perspectives. They are also enabled to establish new research networks and acquire practical information on how to access PhD and post-doctoral programmes.
HOW TO REACH US
Seminars are held in Genoa, Via Parini 10, in a nineteenth century villa. From Genova Brignole railway station take bus number 43 toward Nervi. Get off in Via Albaro; cross Piazza Leopardi and you reach Via Parini.
REGISTRATION FEES
6 days of seminars: €300
5 days of seminars: €250
4 days of seminars: €200
3 days of seminars: €150
2 days of seminars: €100
Please, pay by bank transfer to:
Spazio Musica (reason for payment: GSH)
Bank: CA.RI.GE.
IBAN: IT72 M061 7501 44800000 0260 880
Payments should be received no later than 1 August 2016.
Please, send a copy of the payment receipt to [email protected]
PROGRAMME:
Monday 22 August:
10:00
Welcome and introduction to the Summer 2016 seminar series (Raffaello Palumbo Mosca & Lorenzo Chiesa)
10:30
“Seeing, Dying: The Ekphrastic Gaze in Postmodern Culture” (Stefano Ercolino)
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
15:00
Roundtable on Stefano Ercolino’s seminar (chair: Raffaello Palumbo Mosca)
17:00
Drinks and nibbles
Tuesday 23 August:
10:30
“Amelia Rosselli: Variation, Document, Gaze” (Maria Borio)
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
15:00
Roundtable on Maria Borio’s seminar (chair: Chiara Fenoglio)
Wednesday 24 August:
10:30
“The Writer’s Gaze on Reality: Novels and Reportages” (Raffaello Palumbo Mosca)
12:00
Q&A /Discussion
15:00
Roundtable on Raffaello Palumbo Mosca’s seminar (chair: Chiara Fenoglio)
Thursday 25 August:
10:30
“Lacan and Cinema: Gaze, Imaginary, Formalization” (Pietro Bianchi)
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
15:00
Roundtable on Pietro Bianchi’s seminar (chair: Giorgio Cesarale)
Friday 26 August:
10:30
“The Gaze and the Drive” (Lorenzo Chiesa)
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
15:00
Roundtable on Lorenzo Chiesa’s seminar (chair: Giorgio Cesarale)
Saturday 27 August:
10:30
“The Gaze and the Baroque: Psychoanalysis, Painting, Architecture” (Lorenzo Chiesa)
12:00
Q&A / Discussion
14:30
Roundtable on Lorenzo Chiesa’s seminar (chair: Luisa Lorenza Corna)
16:30
Roundtable: “Look at me! / Why are you looking at me?”
17:30
Drinks and nibbles
Seminars are held in English, unless all participants speak Italian
SUMMER 2016 SPEAKERS AND SEMINAR LEADERS:
Pietro Bianchi works at the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University, North Carolina. He was previously Research Fellow in the Theory Department of the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (2009-2010). He has published articles on Lacanian psychoanalysis, film studies, and literary theory. His monograph Jacques Lacan and Cinema: Imaginary, Gaze, Formalization is forthcoming in 2017 with Karnac Press. He is a member of the Milan based OT/Orbis Tertius – Ricerche sull’immaginario contemporaneo and works also as a film critic for the Italian magazine Cineforum and the web journals Doppiozero, Le Parole e le Cose and Connessioni Precarie.
Maria Borio is a poet and a literary critic. She holds a BA and a PhD in Italian literature. She has written on the poetry of Vittorio Sereni and Eugenio Montale, and published the monograph Da Montale alla lirica contemporanea (2013). She is currently working on a project on Italian poetry from the 1970s to the present day. Her poems have been published in several journals and literary websites. A selection of her works entitled Vite Unite was included in XII Quaderno italiano di poesia contemporanea (2015). She is the editor of the poetry section of the journal Nuovi Argomenti, previously directed by Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Giorgio Cesarale is Associate Professor at the Università Ca’ Foscari of Venice, where he teaches political philosophy and coordinates the seminar series “Teoria critica e politica”. He serves as a member of the editorial board of Micromega and as a corresponding editor for Historical Materialism. His major publications include: La mediazione che sparisce. La società civile in Hegel (Carocci, Rome 2009); Hegel nella filosofia pratico-politica anglosassone dal secondo dopoguerra ai giorni nostri (Mimesis, Milan 2011); Filosofia e capitalismo. Hegel, Marx e le teorie contemporanee (Manifestolibri, Rome 2012). He edited Giovanni Arrighi’s Capitalismo e dis(ordine) mondiale (Manifestolibri, Rome 2010).
Lorenzo Chiesa is Director of the GSH and holds visiting positions at the European University at St Petersburg and the Freud Museum of the same city. He was previously Professor of Modern European Thought at the University of Kent, where he founded and directed the Centre for Critical Thought. He also taught at the University of New Mexico, the Istituto di Scienze Umane of Naples, and the Institute of Philosophy of Ljubljana. He published books on psychoanalytical theory (Subjectivity and Otherness, MIT Press, 2007; Lacan and Philosophy, Re.press, 2014) and on biopolitical thought (The Italian Difference, Re.press, 2009 – with Alberto Toscano; Italian Thought Today, Routledge, 2014). He has edited and translated books of Agamben and Virno into English and of Žižek into Italian. His new monograph on Lacan, The Not- Two, has been released by MIT Press in April 2016. A book on freedom, The Virtual Point of Freedom, is forthcoming in Autumn 2016 with Northwestern UP. He has been translated into more than ten languages.
Luisa Lorenza Corna teaches in the faculty of Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies of the University of Leeds. Her main research interests are Marxism and aesthetics, post-war Italian art and architecture and theories of the metropolis. She has written about art and architecture for various journals, amongst which, more recently, Domus and Mute. At the moment she is editing and translating, with Jamila Mascat and Matthew Hyland, an anthology of Carla Lonzi’s art historical and feminist writings for Seagull Books. She is also a co-organiser of the research seminar Marxism in Culture (www.marxisminculture.org) at the Institute of Historical Research, London.
Stefano Ercolino is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College (Seoul, Korea). A former Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University (USA) and DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow in the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), he is the author of the monographs The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947 (Palgrave 2014) and The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” (Bloomsbury 2014) (Italian edition: Bompiani 2015).
Chiara Fenoglio holds a PhD in Italian literature and is a member of the Literary Jury for the prestigious “Premio Campiello”. She is also a literary critic for “La Lettura”, the cultural supplement of the newspaper “Il corriere della sera”. She has published a number of essays in national and international journals, and is the author of two monographs: “Un infinito che non comprendiamo. Leopardi e l’apologetica cristiana dei secoli XVIII e XIX (winner of the Tarquinia-Cardarelli Prize), and La divina interferenza. La critica dei poeti nel Novecento. She collaborates with the publishing house Mondadori.
Raffaello Palumbo Mosca is Director of the GSH and a literary critic. He holds a PhD with honors in Romance Languages from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Italian literature from the University of Turin. He has taught Italian literature in the US (University of Chicago) and the UK (University of Kent). He is the author of a number of essays on modern and contemporary European literature and history of literary criticism published in top American and European journals (“Lettere Italiane”, “Modern Language Notes”, “Raison Publique”, “Nuovi argomenti”, “Studi Novecenteschi”, and others). His book L’invenzione del vero. Romanzi ibridi e discorso etico nell’Italia contemporanea won the International Tarquinia-Cardarelli prize in 2014. He is also a reviewer for Books In Italy and an author for the publishing house Zanichelli.
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