International Word & Image Conference to Focus on Theme of Intimacy in Literature and the Visual Arts

WORCESTER, Mass. – Approximately 45 art historians, literary scholars, sculptors, and filmmakers from such countries as Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States will attend a conference to present papers and participate in conversation on the theme of intimacy in literature and the visual arts.

The conference, titled “An International Word & Image Conference: ‘Intimacy,’ ” will be held from June 28 - 30 at the University of Paris 7. The event is sponsored by the international French/English journal Interfaces, the University of Paris 7, and the College of the Holy Cross.

The representation of intimacy, the paradoxical display or publication of private concerns, behaviors and sentiments, has always been a central issue in literature and the visual arts. In both fields, specific genres or strategies have often been devised that could mediate such a representation. The conference will examine the way that issue has been tackled in all literary and visual media.

The conference will feature as its plenary speaker Michael McKeon, professor of English at Rutgers University, and author of The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). His address is titled “Literary and Graphic Images in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century England.”

The conference, held every other year since 1986, marks one of the largest gatherings of international scholars in the humanities around a single theme.

Members of the Holy Cross faculty have been part of this multi-disciplinary conference since its inception 21 years ago. Maurice A. Geracht, professor of English at Holy Cross and co-president of the International Word and Image Conference, has been involved in the conference since its founding and is also co-editor of Interfaces. The current issues are Vol. 25, “Envisioning Shakespeare” guest-edited by Helen Whall, associate professor of English; and Vol. 26, “Representing Illness in Literature and the Arts” edited by Geracht.

In addition to Geracht, two other Holy Cross faculty members will present at the conference and represent the College: Virginia Raguin, professor of visual arts, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, associate professor of English.

Interfaces, co-edited by the University of Paris 7 and Holy Cross, is a bilingual illustrated journal focusing on the dividing line — the “interface” — between language and the image, two means of expression different and yet inseparable. This interface was displaced when the cinema made the image move, then speak, thus making time its medium and creating a new type of discourse. But the old interface between language and the static image still remains and its power is enhanced by modern technology.

Papers submitted for the conference will be considered for publication in Interfaces.