Announce

Unviersité de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse (France) 24–25 September 2020

The Shape of News and Public Opinion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe and America

Our age, in which news travels the world in a split second and fake news has become all too common, has much to learn from the study of the writing and dissemination of news in the early modern era. The modes of news transmission underwent significant change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition to being passed on orally or in manuscript, news rolled off the printing press in increasingly diverse forms.

This conference, intended for early-career scholars, will explore the news revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mostly in France, the British Isles and colonial America, but papers on other geographical areas in Europe are welcome, particularly if they seek to map out news networks on the European continent. Various sources may be looked at, such as newspapers, correspondence, placards and bills, broadsides, pamphlets, art reviews and fiction — when it deals with news and news processing. The following two themes will be given special treatment:

• Forms of journalism: what did informing people mean in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and America? Did it mean communicating news, taking part in controversial debates, arousing interest through provocation or emotion, commodifying news, passing judgments and/or creating literary objects? This may be studied with reference to the media used (types of texts, content?), the target audience (what authors for what sort of readers?), as well as spatiality (the geography of news, the metropolis vs. peripheral areas, international news networks and cultural transfers, translations).
• The formation of a public sphere: papers may explore the dynamics underpinning relationships between purveyors of news and readers. They may also study the shaping of public opinion as well as discuss the very notion of public opinion with reference to the political and economic features of France, Britain and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Papers may address — but are by no means limited to — the following topics:

• The circulation of news and news networks in a specific geographical area (primarily the British Isles, France and colonial America) and between various geographical areas (through translation for example): e.g. the translation and recycling of English newspapers in eighteenth-century France; the circulation of news between England and its American colonies.
• Material aspects of news writing and of the circulation of news (for example, technical, logistic, economic or legal aspects): e.g. Benjamin Franklin and the free post in colonial America.
• Readership: what social groups were targeted? What textual strategies were used?
• News, rumour and “fake news” as used for propagandistic purposes.
• The circulation of news and the emergence and development of political news in times of crisis: e.g. the British Civil Wars, the American Revolutionary War or the French Revolution.
• News and censorship: modes of censorship and their impact; the debates over censorship: e.g. Milton’s vindication of a free press in Areopagitica.
• Champions and critics of the press and/or journalists: e.g. the debate between Fréron (the founder of L’Année littéraire) and the French philosophes.
• The press and art reviews: e.g. the reviews of art events in Le Mercure; Diderot’s reviews of the Salons in Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique.
• Fiction writers who were also news writers (Defoe, Marivaux, etc.); literature and the press; the representation of the press in fiction; the use of fiction in news writing.
• The press and gender: female journalists, female readers, etc.

Paper proposals (approximately 250 words in English or in French + a short bio) should be submitted to the organisers by 30 April 2020. The programme committee will send notifications of its selection no later than 15 June 2020. A selection of papers will be considered for publication.

Organising committee:

Laurent Curelly, Professor of English, laurent.curelly@uha.fr

Christine Hammann, Senior Lecturer in French Literature, christine.hammann@uha.fr

Véronique Lochert, Senior Lecturer in French Literature, véronique.lochert@uha.fr

Proposals are invited for the ninth annual Scientiae Conference on disciplines of knowing in the early modern world (roughly 1400–1800), which will take place at the University of Amsterdam, 3–6 June 2020.

Our keynote speakers will be Sven Dupré (University of Amsterdam/Utrecht University) and Florike Egmond (University of Leiden).

The major premise of the Scientiae Conference is that knowledge during the early modern period was pre-disciplinary, involving complex mixtures of theories, practices and objects which had yet to be separated into their modern ‘scientific’ configurations. Scientiae addresses natural history, natural philosophy, and the 'scientiae mixtae' within a wide range of related fields, including but not restricted to Biblical exegesis, medicine, artisan practice and theory, logic, law, humanism, alchemy, magic, witchcraft, demonology, divination, astronomy, astrology, geography, cartography, music, antiquarianism, experimentation, and commerce, as well as climate change, the relations between text and image, and gender.

The Programme Committee welcomes proposals for 20-minute papers from any disciplinary perspective, yet we would like to encourage submissions that seek to examine modes of early modern knowledge formation and application that cross traditional disciplinary, national, geographic, linguistic or intellectual borders. The sessions are intended to foster discussion that transcends the disciplinary scope. We explicitly invite proposals for less traditional formats, like debates, roundtables, or hands-on workshops.

Individual papers should include a 250-word abstract and a 1-page CV. Proposals for panels, debates, roundtables or workshops should contain a single 250-word description of the theme under discussion, along with a 100-word outline per participant.

The deadline for submission is 15 January 2020. Please send your proposals to: pertransibunt@gmail.com.

For more information, see: http://scientiae.co.uk/

Organizers: Fabrizio Baldassarri & Matthias Roick

Venue: ICUB-University of Bucharest Dates: 19–20 March 2020

Website: http://here or http://here

Invited Speakers: Francesco Barreca (Museo Galileo), Dominique Brancher (Basel University), Sabrina Ebbersmeyer (Copenhagen University), Christiane Frey (Humboldt University Berlin), Christia Mercer (Columbia University), Iolanda Ventura (University of Bologna)

Submission deadline: 15 December 2019

Call for papers: The workshop is intended for scholars from different fields of early modern studies, who want to explore alternative paths in the narration of early modern culture. Rather than proceeding along well-trodden paths, non-linear narratives aim to shed new focus on the less well-known corners, and move in the more ‘secluded’ regions of the past. When applied to the writing of history, the idea of non-linear narratives invites, on the one hand, to deliberate the theoretical nature of narrative structures and temporalities; on the other hand, it raises practical questions on how to employ non-linear narratives in historical writings and find alternatives to ‘genealogical’ writings that track the lineages of new, ideas, practices, and institutions.

Through several case studies, such as expanding the perspective on outsiders, heretics, women, and losers, or inspecting new frontiers of knowledge (from ontology and metaphysics, to cosmology, alchemy and botany, and to ethics and politics), or constructing alternative (hi)stories and narrations, such as eclecticism, opposing methodologies, and unearthing shadows in the age of evidence and light (such as irrationality enshrined in the age of reason), the workshop is not intended to simply present one’s own research, but aims to reflect on the role of alternative narrations while telling a different story.

Interventions aim to both investigate non-linear narratives, their actors, methodologies, and disciplines, and answer these methodological questions.

• How would you describe the ‘grand narratives’ in your field? To which extent do they still dominate your field, explicitly or implicitly?
• How does your own research relate to these narratives? Where do you see the critical, revisionist potential of your research? How much an alternative narration surfaces in your field, and does it reveal more engaging reflections? What is the result of this enlarged perspective?
• Where do you see points of contact between your historical research and present discourses? Why do you think that these points of contact can be best described and analyzed in terms of a non-linear narrative?

“Other ways of thinking literature and the arts: the scholastic path (1500–1700)”

UCLouvain, 16–18 November 2020.

In the early modern period (16th–17th centuries), the theoretical reflections on letters and arts regularly drew inspiration from the specific field of scholastic philosophy (that is, logic, ethics, physics and metaphysics), which was then taught at all universities as a propaedeutic to the higher faculties (medicine, law and theology). By “theoretical reflections on letters and arts”, we are referring to the vast amount of treatises related to poetics, rhetoric, symbolics, art theory and (religious) images; to the historiographical writings constituting the history of literature and arts; to the dedicatory letters and theoretical prefaces to literary texts; to the commentaries on ancient texts such as Aristotle’s Poetics, Horatius’ Ars Poetica, Pliny’s chapters on painting; and to other such works. We take into account the texts composed in the 16th and 17th centuries, either in Latin or in one of the modern languages.

Using the methods, concepts or language of scholastic philosophy often enabled the authors of such texts to develop a rational and systematic discourse on literature and the visual arts, in order either to define the latter, to describe their various subgenres, to reflect on their modes of production and reception, or to evaluate the quality of specific works with regard to the truth or verisimilitude of their representation of the world. In practice, the presence of scholastic philosophy in such theoretical texts can take various forms, involving from case to case:

• The scholastic conception of the hierarchy of arts and the tree of disciplines;
• The scholastic way of reasoning (induction, deduction, syllogisms, pro and contra debates, opening presentation of the counterarguments…), either applied to the object or observed inside it (for instance, the interpretation of epigrams as a deductive genre);
• The scholastic way of defining and describing the res (“matter and form” definition, “genre and difference” definition…) and the verba (identification of the various senses of equivocal words), and the corollary distinction between debates on things and debates on words;

• The scholastic conceptions (in physics and medicine) of the faculties of the soul (with all the related concepts : internal senses, imagination, memory, patient and agent intellect, species and conceptus, cognition and appetition, affects, vital and animal spirits…) as a way to explain the mental processes involved in artistic/literary creation and reception;

• Scholastic axioms commonly taught in the schools, or authoritative quotations supporting the expressed viewpoint;
• But also, as a counterexample, the “dry” and intricate scholastic language and the controversial or denigrated scholastic theories.

The congress aims at conducting an inventory and an analysis of those borrowings and influences, and at illustrating them with concrete case studies. We will pay particular attention to the phenomena of transformation, translation, simplification or complexification affecting the scholastic contents once applied to the theory of letters and arts. Moreover, we will appreciate papers providing information on the scholastic curriculum of the authors and on the intellectual context of their writings.

We welcome 30-minute papers, in French or English. Please send an abstract of maximum 300 words and a short biography (50–100 words) by 30 November 2019 to the electronic address: aline.smeesters@uclouvain.be. The abstracts will be reviewed by a committee. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 15 December 2019.

This congress will take place at UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). It is part of the Schol’Art project currently ongoing at UCLouvain under the direction of Ralph Dekoninck, Agnès Guiderdoni, and Aline Smeesters. More information on the project is available on our website: http://on our website

Chères et chers collègues,

La revue Dix-Huitième Siècle publie des articles dans toutes les disciplines d’études du 18e siècle (lettres, philosophie, histoire, histoire des sciences, histoire des arts, musicologie, inédits…), sans restriction d’école méthodologique. Elle ne se limite non plus à aucune ère géographique déterminée.

Nous appelons des contributions individuelles pour la partie Varia de la revue. Les articles qui seront publiés doivent être inédits, et en français. Ils comptent entre 30 et 40 000 caractères, espaces et toutes notes comprises.

La revue reçoit les articles de Varia tout au long de l’année, à l’adresse : dhs@sfeds.fr Après avoir été strictement anonymés, ils sont évalués par le comité de rédaction et les experts de la revue Dix-Huitième Siècle, qui se réunissent trois fois par an.

Nous nous réjouissons de recevoir vos propositions,

Sophie Audidière

Directrice de la revue Dix-Huitième Siècle

et tout le comité de rédaction, Laurent Châtel, Sophie Marchand, Gilles Montègre, Élise Pavy-Guilbert, Odile Richard-Pauchet, Alain Sandrier, Pierre Wachenheim

https://www.cairn.info/revue-dix-huitieme-siecle.htm

Plus d’informations sur la page de la revue : https://www.sfeds.fr/publications-18eme-siecle/revue-dix-huiti%C3%A8me-si%C3%A8cle/