Living Languages

Dr Stephan Ehrig reports on the IMLR/University of Liverpool study day at Tate Liverpool

August Sander,
Circus Workers, 1926-32
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London, 2017

The IMLR had jumped at the chance of hosting a study day on 30 September at Tate Liverpool’s fascinating exhibition Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 (on until 15 October), in collaboration with the University of Liverpool’s Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. The exhibition focused on the juxtaposition of two key German artists of the Weimar Republic: the photographer August Sander and the painter Otto Dix.

Sander’s photography, most notably his ambitious positivist project People of the 20^th Century, presented in (almost) unbroken chronology, features authentic faces of the 1920s only divided into categories defined by profession or class. Tate combined this stream of images with a timeline of political, social, cultural and technical data of the Weimar Republic that presented the simultaneity of social, cultural and technical progress with the increase in political and ideological extremism in a genius way.

In contrast, Dix’s often grotesque and deliberately shocking portraits document the savage effects of war and prostitution and satirise the wealthy and influential. Sander’s photographic portraits of ordinary Germans can seem mundane, but that contrast offers a clue to their power. The apparent objectivity of the camera lens draws viewers into Sander’s documentation of the social reality of Germany between the two World Wars, inviting them to wonder what became of that overwhelming gallery of ordinary faces. Otto Dix’s paintings featured the war-impacted vision of the trenches and battlefield from a German expressionist perspective, and the many portraits of prostitutes, street children and capitalist factory owners added a completely different quality to Sander’s images. Therein lies the stimulating exquisiteness of this exhibition, and Liverpool can be very happy to be hosting this exhibition.

The study day gave us the chance to take the exhibition material to a different level and to further explore one of the most important and fascinating periods in twentieth-century history through the work of two of Germany’s greatest artists. If for many in the English-speaking world, the images of Berlin glamour and decadence in the hit musical Cabaret have come to represent the Weimar Republic, then the works of Otto Dix and August Sander offer a rather different set of images. Through lectures, discussions, and direct study of selected works in the exhibition, the study day set these works in a wider cultural, social, and political context, and at the same time explore the connection between art and politics at this most important cultural and political turning-point.

The day started with a lecture by Professor Frank Krause (Goldsmiths, London) who focused on the literary depictions of smell in German, French and English narratives of the Great War and therefore provided an excellent introduction to the impact of WWI on Weimar and European culture. His talk was followed by Professor Matthew Jefferies (Manchester) who elaborated on Sander and Dix with a special focus on the ‘strange revival of physiognomy in Weimar Germany’ which heavily impacted portraiture. After lunch, the participants of the sold-out event had the opportunity to walk through the exhibition (again, in many cases) and apply the content of the talks to the pictures themselves. A workshop followed, in which the speakers and audience discussed their ideas and impressions in smaller groups. The day ended with a talk by Professor Matthew Philpotts (Liverpool) who gave an outlook on both Sander and Dix after Weimar, through the Nazi period and after WWII.

The research day provided a unique opportunity to understand that historical moment directly through the portraits of those who lived through it and to learn from the artistic vision of those who were trying to make sense of it.

Dr Stephan Ehrig, teaching fellow in German, Durham University

How is literary production constrained by political, cultural and social factors? A new IMLR research project funded by the AHRC asks this question in relation to French literature from 1980 to the present day. Dominic Glynn explains more:

Arguments about the decline of French literature in terms of readership and quality have been made frequently in recent years. Listening to some commentators in the media, everything has gone to pot: where are the likes of Gide or Sartre (Houellebecq?!), the intelligentsia asks. This project challenges these arguments by studying literary production in France over the last thirty years.

Traditionally, two approaches have dominated the study of literary practice in France. One focuses on the social world in which literature is produced, while the other studies what is produced, the literary texts. However, there is a lack of theorised cross-over between them. Current evaluation of the process of literary production (writing, translating, editing, publishing, disseminating) is therefore skewed and partial. The Literature under Constraint (LUC) project addresses this lacuna in scholarship by developing a rigorous methodology that bridges the gap between these two approaches. As a result, it will be possible to examine evolutions of style and genre with respect to the shifting constraints on writers. The aim is to elucidate which factors (mind-sets, political context, social environments, intermediaries) shape and constrain literary production, but also to explore whether constraint bolsters creative activity.

LUC argues that literature is a moment of private, individual expression brought into the public space by various intermediaries (literary agents, editors, graphic designers, critics). The project therefore takes issue with the romantic vision of the writer as sole author, working in isolation from the world, which still colours much literary scholarship. To this end, LUC investigates French literature from 1980 to the present day using and challenging theories developed in cogent disciplines such as art history, book studies and sociology.

The principal aim of the project is to build a transnational and multi-disciplinary network to investigate how social, political and cultural constraints have shaped literary production in France from 1980 to the present. By the end of the program of activities, a closely linked cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary research team will be established. The team will have formulated a robust methodology that combines textual analysis with sociohistorical study.

The network assembles a cutting-edge interdisciplinary research team that includes renowned experts in the fields of French literature sociology and related fields (translation studies, book history). It also involves Early-Career Researchers (ECRs), and Postgraduate Research Students (PGRs). By forging collaborations with universities and cultural organisations in Europe, US and Canada, the team will promote UK research in the humanities at an international level. In so doing, it will challenge semi-institutionalised boundaries between the humanities and social sciences in UK and abroad.

The network is putting together a packed programme of events. Researchers interested in joining the network or finding out more about the network’s activities are encouraged to sign up to the project’s newsletter by emailing LUC-REQUEST@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

Dominic Glynn, Lecturer in French Studies, IMLR

Dr Ted L L Bergman and Dr María Luisa Lobato report on their recently organised conference at the University of St Andrews.

On 3-5 July 2017 we held an ‘International Conference on Medicine, Literature and Culture in the Early Modern Hispanic World’ with the aim of bringing together experts in medicine, literature, history, and related or connected disciplines, including the visual arts, to share research and ideas with a focus on medicine and its role in the Spanish-speaking world in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.

What might seem like a rather specific topic resulted in attracting about fifty attendees, among them speakers from dozens of institutions, either in the USA, UK, Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, Germany or Belgium. Some of those attending were medical doctors, others were historians of medicine, yet others scholars of the visual arts, while the majority came from a literature background and had adopted multi-disciplinary approaches in their research on medical themes. More and more, historians have been acknowledging and promoting the role of Spain and its colonies in advancing medical knowledge and practice, working to dispel the myth —a vestige of the ‘leyenda negra’ or ‘black legend’— that early-modern Spain was somehow scientifically backwards in comparison to its European neighbours. As the awareness of a more accurate image of Spain and its colonies increases among historians, scholars in other disciplines, such as those gathered together at our conference, were able to join in painting a clearer picture of what it meant to be a healer or a patient in the Spanish Empire at the time.

Perhaps the principal conclusions to be drawn from the conference were that ‘medicine’ is often contemplated in terms of professional practice and book learning but it cannot be reduced to these. In fact, the professional and academic aspects of medicine may not even correspond to the majority of cases of practice or the principal means through which medical knowledge was transmitted during the early modern period. These conclusions reinforce those drawn by the editors and contributors of the 2014 book Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire, a work that was one of the main inspirations of our July 2017 conference in which ‘medical cultures’ were explored in talks on a very wide range of topics, often bound together by a common genre or theme. For example, one panel looked at both comic sketches and full-length serious plays from seventeenth century Spain, providing an opportunity for speakers and the gathered audience to discuss varied theatrical representations of physicians on stage, as well as the intricate intersections of life, art, and performance in the context of sickness, injury, and healing. Another panel featured three talks on the subject of syphilis in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish prose fiction and provided a fruitful opportunity to contrast, compare, and discuss different authors’ approaches to representing and thematising the disease. Other talks were related through geography, as in the case of a panel that looked at the relationship between the local and the global when new medicines were ‘discovered’ in the colonies and entered a wider Imperial context.

The invited plenary speakers also demonstrated the depth and breadth of ‘medical cultures.’ Dr Alexander Samson from University College London spoke of ‘Medical and Botanical Knowledge of the Early Modern Hispanic World,’ vindicating the role of Spain in advancing medical knowledge throughout Europe. Thanks to the Spanish Empire’s extensive communication networks and New-World discoveries, its botanists and physicians made major contributions that were readily acknowledged in England and elsewhere at the time, but seem to have been forgotten or ignored by many modern historians.

Dr María Luz López-Terrada from the INGENIO institute at CSIC and the Universitat Politècnica de València titled her talk ‘Between Empiricism and Magical Thinking: Female healers in Baroque Medical Culture.’ The presentation described an ongoing research project that aims to detail the work and lives of women members among the majority community of medical practitioners in early-modern Spain, those without a university degree who employed a variety of healing techniques, some of which brought them in conflict with legal and religious authorities.

Professor M. Pierre Civil (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) spoke on the ‘Representations of Doctors in Paintings and Engravings of the Spanish Golden Age,’ looking at the relationship between written word and imagery in the self-fashioning of physicians who sought to influence public perception of themselves and their profession as they disseminated their ideas.

Professor Christoph Strosetzki from the Universität Münster presented on ‘Juan de Cabriada, Iatrochemistry and Quinine,’ exploring Cabriada’s defence of the discipline in the context of contemporary evaluations and reevaluations of Galenism and Paracelsism. The case of quinine, a drug derived from the New-World quino tree and new to Europe, was used by Professor Strosetzki to more accurately locate Cabriada’s place among different sides of a debate that pitted experimental medicine against the authority of classical authors.

The conference attendees welcomed the opportunity to share their research in an environment of collegiality and erudition, especially the opportunity to get in touch with the latest approaches on how to study medicine in literary, artistic and cultural expression. The success of the conference and the higher-than-expected turnout make the prospect of future conferences on a similar theme very promising, perhaps not on annual basis, but certainly with regularity given the proven widespread international interest in the subject matter. We the organisers warmly thank the IMLR for its significant support.

References: John Slater, ‎Maríaluz López-Terrada, ‎José Pardo-Tomás, eds, (2014) Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate)

Dr Ted L L Bergman (St Andrews University) and Dr María Luisa Lobato (Universidad de Burgos)

Charlotte Walmsley (Cardiff) discusses a recent conference held at Cardiff University: ‘Transnational Memory, Translation and Adaptation’

On 31 May, Cardiff University hosted a conference on ‘Transnational Memory, Translation and Adaptation’, with the support of the Institute of Modern Languages Research and the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. This one day event was organised by a committee of PhD students based at Cardiff University’s School of Modern Languages, which included me, Nicolas Martínez and Stephanie Munyard.

The conference emerged from our hopes to bring together two burgeoning fields in Modern Languages research: Memory Studies, and Translation & Adaptation Studies. As Dr Siobhan Brownlie highlights in her innovative study Mapping Memory in Translation (2016), these ‘boom areas’ are rarely brought into dialogue, despite the productive potential of examining the influence of memory on cultural production, transmission, translation and adaptation. Cultural and linguistic products, such as translations and adaptations, are ‘vessels of historical memory’ (Brownlie 2016: 1); they participate in memory politics across different spaces and time periods. During our one day conference, we wanted to bring to light and theorise the multiple intersections between processes of cultural production and memorialisation.

The conference featured two keynote speakers, Dr Siobhan Brownlie from the University of Manchester and 2015 Eisner nominee and graphic novelist, Jonathan Clode, alongside early career academics and PhD researchers from across an array of disciplines, including Modern Languages, Creative Writing and English Literature.

Siobhan Brownlie, first keynote of the day

Dr Siobhan Brownlie’s keynote on the topic of ‘Tales of Travelling Memory, Transcreation and Politics’, explored the migratory nature of cultural memory. Brownlie examined Refugee Tales (2016), a collection of refugees’ stories orally recounted to authors who then adapted them into text, as a case study of what she defines as ‘travelling memory’. Brownlie drew parallels between the physical act of border crossing undertaken by refugees, and the process of transmitting their stories to audiences across both concrete and cultural borders.

Panels focused on three key themes: multilingualism and transnational heritage; adapting traumatic and politically divisive memory; and shifts in translations and adaptations through time. Discussions during the first panel centred on language use as a site of political and cultural contestation in multilingual contexts and the potential weaponisation of translation. The second panel elucidated the challenge of adapting historical trauma to text, and the politics of representing experiences coded as unrepresentable or unspeakable. The final panel examined how changing cultural and memory landscapes can alter the construction and transmission of texts, raising interesting questions about what shifts and what remains static in memorialisation, translation and adaptation.

Jonathan Clode, on visually representing stories of British soldiers executed during WWI

Jonathan Clode’s final keynote of the day illuminated the creative process of crafting stories from memories. Clode talked us through the inception, production and transmission of To End All Wars: A Graphic Anthology of The First World War (2014), highlighting the role of the graphic novel to preserve memories, portray hidden lives and provide catharsis for the creators themselves.

We ended the day with a cheese and wine reception, to give time to mull over the discussions of the day and continue conversations. It was wonderful to welcome early career and PhD researchers from across the UK, alongside academics and writers working in multiple fields. Overall, the event was a great success and offered an exciting opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion and exchange, while showcasing innovative scholarship on the themes of memory, translation and adaptation. The IMLR was thanked for its support.

Works cited:

Brownlie, S (2016) Mapping Memory in Translation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan)

Charlotte Walmsley, Cardiff University

Margaret May is currently finishing the first year of her two-year part time Master of Research in Modern Languages degree at the IMLR. Here she offers some views on her studies:

Ensconced in a well-upholstered leather armchair in the studious quiet of the Periodicals Room at Senate House Library, I pause from my engrossing novel to consider how fortunate I am to be studying for my Master of Research in Modern Languages at the IMLR. For a few hours it has felt like being transported to a bygone age, far from the goal-oriented demands of modern academic life. In fact, several of my fellow-students are snoozing on the equally comfortable sofas; despite the incessant clicking of laptop keyboards, this room is still a haven for the world-weary, or just sleep-deprived, in the heart of Bloomsbury.

The higher up one climbs in the four publicly available floors of the library, the quieter and more like a retreat it becomes – apart from the wind that, whatever the season, appears to buffet all sides of this iconic Art Deco building. Naturally, the latest digital search technology is available if you need to find something in a hurry, but you can still browse the stacks making serendipitous connections or just following a whim – or sometimes feeling overwhelmed by the weight of scholarship accumulated here.

But there are other reasons to be grateful for the opportunity to study here. There’s an amazing variety of research interests in the nine institutes of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) – the majority also based at Senate House – and a corresponding number of events to attend if you have the time and inclination. Because there’s no undergraduate teaching here, SAS genuinely feels like a scholarly hub, where people can take time to reflect. The staff are friendly, informal and supportive, and because in each institute there are relatively few students, you feel special. And if at times you may feel a bit isolated in your particular area of study, you soon discover it’s a place where researchers from all over the world come to develop and share their ideas. An enormous amount of purposeful networking and interaction clearly goes on all along these unassuming 1930s corridors, and it’s a privilege to be able to attend seminars, conferences and student-led graduate forums where work in progress is presented to an enthusiastic and responsive audience of early-career and more established colleagues – sometimes a truly inspiring and exciting experience, and always thought-provoking.

Most of my fellow-students probably had a fairly clear idea of their topic when they embarked on their degree. This wasn’t the case for me, but over the first year of my (part-time) MRes the luxury of being able to read widely under guidance from my supervisor has meant that my thinking has evolved in unexpected ways. I haven’t yet quite firmed up the title for my dissertation but in working towards defining a manageable, less ambitious topic than I originally envisaged, I’ve discovered the pleasures of popular literature from the early twentieth century, learning along the way about the invention of the vast pneumatic postal network in Berlin and the development of the city’s tram network. Exploring the massive growth of consumer culture as portrayed, for instance, in the works of Georg Hermann, I realised with a jolt of surprise that the expansion of the railways meant cheap, scentless, mass-produced roses from the Riviera, the equivalent of today’s supermarket or service-station offerings, were readily available in north European cities more than 120 years ago – and were no doubt purchased for the same reasons as today.

But for all that I have had ample time to pursue such interesting byways, the MRes is a very focused degree. The main intention is to prepare you for the rigours of doctoral study. Time management, networking, the pitfalls of interviewing techniques, optimising the use of libraries and archives, confidence-building in presentation and critical approaches to theory – all are part of the programme of research skills workshops, usually held on Saturdays to ensure that students from other colleges and universities can also attend, incidentally providing valuable alternative perspectives. It has taken time to understand the relevance of some of these training sessions, but keeping an open mind and indeed welcoming an expansion of horizons has been one of the challenges. We even undertook a brief fieldwork session: a ‘memory hunt’ for mnemonic markers and traces in Tavistock Square. Other workshops introduced me to practical resources such as the various bibliographic software packages – in fact this year there were about eighty different training opportunities on offer from SAS or the individual institutes. One skill in particular I am sure I’ll need when I start to focus in depth on my dissertation next term: practising regular freewriting as a way of overcoming writer’s block. Or of course blogging might be another way to deal with it!

Bursaries are available for the MRes. Find out here how to apply.

Margaret May, IMLR MRes student 2016/18