Call for Papers: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity
06.09.2012-09.09.2012, Hamburg, Universität Hamburg
Deadline: 31.05.2012
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/iaa/Tagung_2012_narrating_spaces_e.html
It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that a city does not consist of buildings and inhabitants alone, but also of representations: of the stories that are told about it, in literature and art as well as in everyday life – or, as the architect Kevin Andrew Lynch has observed, that “Dickens helped to create the London we experience as surely as its actual builders did.” After all, narrative representations of the city constitute an appropriation of space: they assign meanings and ascribe certain uses to certain spaces.
This implies that there may not just be one version of a city, but several different narratives that constitute different cities: not one Florence, Paris, London, New York, or Berlin – or Hamburg for that matter -, but many. However, that does not necessarily mean that there is a happy pluralism of different narratives existing side by side. Thus, some stories are endowed with more cultural authority than others, depending, among other things, on who does the telling. The different stories that are told about a city are, therefore, in conflict with each other, creating conflicting spaces even in the same place.
Thus, formation and reception of said stories constitute space as a network formed by various relations, which has to be read and thus interpreted. In literary texts, it is therefore not to be regarded as a mere backdrop for the plot. Instead, its cultural formation as a relational network can be described and analysed. However, it is not only in the arts that space is produced relationally, through a system of meanings which can be read and decoded like a text. The performative production of space is always also narrative, and can be studied as such.
Continue reading “CfP: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity. 6.-9.9.2012 Hamburg, Germany. Deadline: 31.05.2012”