Exploring the Family through Comparative Literature (Arts Weeks 2021)
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Panel event on what it means to read comparatively, discussing representations of the ‘family’ across time and media, from Goethe’s Werther to illustrations of Rousseau’s Julie and Thomas Lehr’s 2010 novel September. Fata Morgana
This event will explore the notion of comparative literature by focusing on the theme of the ‘family’ across cultural contexts, in different epochs and between media. Ann Lewis will approach Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther through the illustration of its family tableaux, teasing out manifold connections with the textual and graphic images of Rousseau’s bestselling Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. Joanne Leal will explore how Goethe's engagement with Hafiz provides a starting point for Thomas Lehr's examination of father-daughter relationships across an Iraqi-US-German divide in his 9/11 novel September. Fata Morgana. These texts and images of the family will serve as a springboard for a discussion of what it means to read comparatively.
Joanne Leal is Professor of German Studies in the Department of Cultures & Languages at Birkbeck and programme director of the BA Modern Languages. She undertakes research primarily in the area of twentieth and twenty-first century German literature and film. She works on gender and sexuality in film and literature and on the representation of significant social issues in the contemporary German novel, including migration and social exclusion. She is also interested in constructions of the family in literature, film and other visual media and recent publications include co-edited the volume Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory with Silke Arnold- de Simine (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Ann Lewis is Senior Lecturer in French Studies, also in the Department of Cultures & Languages at Birkbeck, and programme director of our new programme, BA Comparative Literature & Culture. Her research focuses on eighteenth- century French literature and culture, and especially text and image relations. She has co-edited various collections in these areas, including: Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization, Interpretation, with Silke Arnold-de Simine (Legenda, 2020); Picturing the Eighteenth- Century Novel Through Time: Illustration, Intermediality and Adaptation, with Christina Ionescu (special issue JECS, 39.4, 2016); and 'Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture', with Markman Ellis (2012). She is author of Sensibility, Reading and Illustration: Spectacles and Signs of Sensibility in Graffigny, Marivaux and Rousseau (Legenda, 2009) and is working on a book length study of the figure of the prostitute in eighteenth-century France.
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