Imagining Worlds: Aesthetics and its Institutions in the Age of GoetheUniversity of Pittsburgh, 23-26 October 2014
The Goethe Society is delighted to announce the 2014 Atkins Goethe Conference, to be held in Pittsburgh next year.
Learn more about the conference.We are soliciting papers of 20 minutes, as well as proposals for panels, that address the wide range of cultural, scientific, philosophical, and socio-political practices during the Age of Goethe that imagined and constructed meaningful worlds. The goal of the program is to consider the various ways that Goethe and his contemporaries understood and used aesthetic categories across the range of disciplines, as well as the impact of their work on aesthetic theoreticians and practitioners from the 19th through 21st centuries. We want to organize sessions that consider not only the nature of art, but also the theoretical and institutional roles of art and aesthetics in the construction of nature and science, self and society, culture and politics, etc. Papers/panels might address:
- Topics in the fine arts (music and opera; dance; theater; painting, drawing, and sculpture; architecture; gardens) or decorative arts
- Art as a literary motif
- The aesthetics of genre in Goethe and his contemporaries
- Aesthetic self-fashioning and aesthetic education in Weimar
- The role of oppositional aesthetic categories in constructing social and political spaces (the beautiful vs. the sublime, the ugly, or the grotesque; harmony vs. carnival or chaos; purity vs. corruption or pollution; etc.)
- Critiques of aesthetic categories and institutions from the 18th-21st centuries
- Nature and Art: continuities and discontinuities
- Cultural institutions (collecting; collected works; museums; schools; libraries; the theater; reading; salons; publishing; etc.)
- Aesthetic sociality (Geselligkeit): conversation and epistolary correspondence
- Festivities as socio-aesthetic form
- Representation (image; metaphor; symbol and allegory; representing affect), including representations of Goethe in art from the 18th century to the present
To be considered, please submit a proposal (250 words) by 1 April 2014.
Direct any inquiries to Clark Muenzer.