VR Webinar: Eighteenth-Century Fiction in Post-Digital Art

Amelia Dale will deliver the 6th installment of our new series, 'Seeing Double: Books, Narratives, and Virtual Realities', on 4 November 2020.

Detail_of_The_120_Days_of_Sodom,_or_the_School_of_Libertinism

Date and time: Wednesday 4 November, 1:00-2:00PM AEST

Registration: Closed

Abstract: There is a unique history of engagement in “postmodern” and conceptual elements of contemporary art with eighteenth-century fiction. These engagements demand our critical attention. In this talk, I examine how experiments in the gallery arts have rewritten, repurposed and translated eighteenth-century text across mediums, and by so doing, have questioned medium itself. Such works ask what it means to read writing from the past through the lens of the “post-digital” present, a time when the disruption brought upon by digital information technology has already occurred, in other words a post-revolutionary period of the digital information age. What does it mean to read eighteenth-century fiction when e-readers are ordinary rather than fresh, when obsolete VR machines rot in deserted shopping centres? As a starting point, I will examine Paul Chan’s e-rewritings of the Marquis de Sade’s works, particularly Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage (written 1785), via his installation “Sade for Sade’s Sake” (2009). In Chan’s digital work Sade’s writings morph into film, sculpture, drawing, installation, fontwork, and codex book. For Garrett Stewart, key to “Conceptualism 2.0”––the art that follows the “first wave” of conceptualism––is transgression across different mediums. In this talk I discuss how eighteenth-century fiction’s citational practices, and its self-reflexivity as material and visual paper objects have been refracted through the transmediality of post-digital art. Eighteenth-century fiction’s materiality, mediation, and formal organisation is written anew through the medial disruption of recent art history.

Photo of Amelia Dale

Speaker: Dr Amelia Dale is the author of The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Bucknell University Press in 2019). She has published widely on gender, genre, the history of reading and theories of quixotism. Current research includes a large collaborative project on Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760-1794) with Nicola Parsons, a study of Jane Austen’s late work alongside the volcanically induced climate disruption of 1816-7, and an exploration of the repurposing of eighteenth-century text within contemporary art and literature. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Studies in the Novel, Romanticism, The Library and the edited collection Romantic Climates: Literature and Science in an Age of Catastrophe. She is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics.

Image: Detail of The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinism, Wikipedia Commons

More Information

ERCC

ER-CC@unimelb.edu.au

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