conference: Picture This!

The University of Pennsylvania/ Penn Humanities Forum
Word and Image 2005-2006 presents:

Picture This!
Symposium on Photography and Narrative in Contemporary Literature
9:00 am-5:30 pm
Friday, March 17th
Penn Humanities Forum
3619 Locust Walk

pre-registration (required): 215.573.8280.
Free. Public invited.

In 1837, when Nicore Niepce and Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre invented a 
process called daguerreotype, they probably had no idea of the flood of 
photographic images that would follow. Early photographs were unable to 
capture movement, but they could offer documentary evidence of persons or 
objects, or rival an older artistic medium, painting. In recent years, 
photography has stepped up its competition not only with the painted image, 
but also with the written word. Novelists like W.G. Sebald and Orhan Pamuk 
include photographs in their work, interspersing their words with images. 
What is the function of these photographs? How do they change the literary 
text? And how do we read them?

Presented by the Penn Humanities Forum, Departments of German, English, 
Romance Languages, and History of Art, and Program in Comparative 
Literature and Literary Theory.

Program

9:00am
Welcome

Wendy Steiner, Co-Director, Penn Humanities Forum
Liliane Weissberg, Topic Co-Director 2005-2006, Penn Humanities Forum

9:15am  10:45am
Mapping the Terrain
Session Chair: Marlies Schweitzer (Penn Humanities Forum)

Ulrich Baer (New York University), “Desiring Stories: How Photographs 
Engender Narrative.”
Nancy Shawcross (University of Pennsylvania/Penn Humanities Forum), “The 
Archives Project: Snapshots from a Discontinuous Narrative”

10:45am-11:00am  Coffee Break

11:00am - 12:30pm
Theorizing History
Session Chair: Maurice Samuels (University of Pennsylvania/Penn Humanities 
Forum)

Marcy Dinius (Penn Humanities Forum), “From the Birth of Photography to the 
Death of the Author: Melville and DeLillo.”
Gerhard Richter (University of California, Davis), “Unsettling Photography: 
Kafka, Derrida, Stefan Moses”

12:30pm -2:00pm  Lunch Break

2:00pm  3:30pm
Crime Scenes
Session Chair: Alexandra Pappas (Penn Humanities Forum)

Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), “Revisiting Benjamin’s 
Scene of the Crime”
Karen Beckman (University of Pennsylvania/Penn Humanities Forum), “‘Nothing 
to Say’: Mortal Words and Photographs”

3:30pm- 4:00pm  Coffee Break

4:00pm- 5:30pm
Mourning and Melancholia
Session Chair: Liliane Weissberg

Anneleen Masschelein (K.U. Leuven/ Universiteit Amsterdam), “Can Suffering 
Be Exquisite? Notes on Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain and Three Types of 
Autofictional Staging of Grief”
Adrian Daub (University of Pennsylvania), “W.G. Sebald’s Invisible 
Captions: Photography and the Construction of Melancholia

Liliane Weissberg
Graduate Chair, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Sciences
University of Pennsylvania
747 Williams Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
215 898-3343
215 898-7332

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