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Sym: 0703.19
Date: 10 maart 2007
From: Francien Petiet <f.petiet@uva.nl >
Subject: Sym: 0703.19: International conference 'Free access to history: the past in the public sphere' (Call for Papers), Amsterdam, 17-19 January 2008
International conference
'Free access to history: the past in the public sphere'
Call for Papers
Call for papers international conference: Free access to history:
the past in the public sphere, Amsterdam, 17-19 January 2008
Throughout Europe, attitudes towards the past changed in the decades
around 1800, rendering, in effect, history a matter of public
interest. This process transfers historical sources and interest
from private associations, collections, monastic communities, noble
estates and royal palaces (in short: from non-public enclosures)
into the public sphere.
This change is part of the European modernization process. The shift
from private to public occurred both in an intellectual and in a
concrete-material sense, involving the establishment of museums,
libraries, archives and university institutes, as well as the
dissemination of texts, documents and historical knowledge by way of
text editions, philological studies, historical novels, plays,
operas and paintings, monuments and restorations.
Views of the past changed in the process, sometimes to the point of
counterfactual (re-)invention. In their search for fresh sources,
antiquaries, philologists and historians produced a new past.
Fragments, remnants and ruins were cherished as irreplaceable
connection point with a receding reality, and were reconstructed or
reconfigued into what should constitute a coherent and meaningful
History. This rendered the past both accessible, a matter of
tradition, continuity and identification, and foreign, exotic,
colourful.
The interface between private and public engagement with the past
was the locus of contrary interests and fields of expertise; it was
shared and contested between antiquarians, artists, nationalists,
academics. Who could appropriate which sources? What impetus was
stronger, competition or collaboration? In how many different
pursuits could a given individual participate? And was the best mode
of access to the past that of painstaking source-inventory, or else
that of a visionary, intuitive empathy - was, in other words, the
past best brought back to life by the informed historian, or by the
inspired artist?
At the same time, the past so reconfigured was claimed by different
orientations and loyalties. Did the past provide indentification
roots for the nation, the city, the region, the family, the
religion? Which virtues did it exemplify?
Contributions are invited which address these issues in the
late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century de-privatization of
the past.
Topics may include:
- the dynamics of private-to-public transfer:
institutionalization, conflicting claims, contested ownership;
- intermedial recycling and re-mediatization: from chronicle to
painting, from novel to opera, from oral ballad to dramatic poem,
etc.
- how access to the past was provided: restorations, editions,
collections, investigations;
- the past as sensation
- fragmentation and de-fragmentation: the urge to collate and
integrate vs. the cult of the fragmentary
- the public instrumentalization of history, the relationship
between private and public-collective histories
- methods of doing the past: amateurs, professional, visionaries
- the creation of a new past by manipulations and forgeries.
The conference is organized by the research group The
Construction of the Literary Past, Faculty of Humanities,
Universiteit van Amsterdam and the Huizinga Institute. On behalf of
the research group:
- Marita Mathijsen-Verkooijen (Chair of Modern Dutch
Literature)
- Joep Leerssen (Chair of Modern European Literature)
- Lotte Jensen (postdoctoral researcher)
Proposals can be submitted until 1 June 2007 to Dr Lotte Jensen,
L.E.Jensen@uva.nl, Dept. of Dutch Literature, Universiteit van
Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB Amsterdam, Netherlands
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