6th Landau Paris Symposium on the Eighteenth Century

October 23-25, 2008
Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7)

Conference Organizers

Peter Wagner
Institut für Fremdsprachlichen Philologien, Fach Anglistik
Universität Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau

Frédéric Ogée
UFR d’études anglophones
Université Paris7

Programme

Friday 24 October 2008

9.00: Frédéric Ogée, Université Paris Diderot & Peter Wagner, Universität Landau
Opening remarks

Morning Chair: Robert Mankin, Université Paris Diderot

9.15: Jeffrey Hopes, Université du Maine, Le Mans
Speaking proper : elocution, pronunciation and tasteful conversation in eighteenth-century England

10.00: Isabel Karremann, Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München
Writing deafness in a culture of polite conversation: The case of Duncan Campbell

10.45: Coffee break

11.00: Lennard J. Davis, University of Illinois at Chicago
Deafness and Taste

11.45: Downing A. Thomas, University of Iowa
“L’un veut du vif, l’autre veut du languisant”: Hearing and Taste in the Querelle des bouffons

12.30-14.30: Lunch

Afternoon Chair: Jeffrey Hopes, Université du Maine, Le Mans

14.30: Christina Lupton, University of British Columbia (visiting Assistant Professor, University of Lund, 2008-9)
The Parson’s Pen: Sermons and Sincerity in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

15.15: Anja Müller, Universität Bamberg
Artful Improvement or Corruption of the Mother Tongue? The Morality of Eighteenth-Century Hearing and Arthur Hill’s Campaign for Improving Sound on the English Stage

16.00: Coffee break

16.15: Ottmar Ette, Universität Potsdam
The Animals in the Jungle, by Night. Alexander von Humboldt's 'Das nächtliche Thierleben im Urwalde' and the 'Humboldt-effect'

17.00: Oscar Kenshur, Indiana University
The proudest of the senses

19.30: Conference dinner

Restaurant Marty, 20 avenue des Gobelins 75005 Paris (Métro « Les Gobelins »)

Saturday 25 October 2008

Morning Chair : Frédéric Ogée, Université Paris Diderot

9.30: Pierre Dubois, Université de Tours
David Hartley, musical taste and the mechanism of hearing

10.15: Sophie Vasset, Université Paris Diderot
"An agreeable Percussion of the vibrating Air upon the Auditory Nerves": understanding the power of music in 18th-century medicine

11.00: Coffee break

11.15: Christoph Heyl, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitaet, Frankfurt am Main
Horrid Howling or Sublime Sensation? Taste and the Scottish Bagpipes in the Long Eighteenth Century

12.00: Stefania Consonni, University of Bergamo
Whistling Lillabullero: Some Reflections on Sterne and Intermediality

12.45-14.30: Lunch

Afternoon Chair: Peter Wagner, Universität Landau

14.30: Louise Barnett, Rutgers University
Olfactory Texts: Jonathan Swift and the Shaping Power of Smell

15.15: Christoph Houswitschka, Universität Bamberg
“By this time the company began to hold their noses”: The Aesthetics and Morals of Smell in Eighteenth-Century Novels

TOP

Call for Papers

In the wake of the study of moral psychology inspired by Locke and Shaftesbury, critical inquiry became concerned with the way in which art affects our emotions. Thus Dubos, in Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719), defines taste as a sixth sense. Hutcheson (1725) follows Shaftesbury when he regards taste as an internal sense concerned with both morals and art, and Montesquieu sees it as an organ of the “body machine”. Many writers in the Enlightenment agreed that good taste is based on universally valid principles: Hume (1742) and Voltaire (1764) wrote on standards of taste while Hogarth, in his Analysis of Beauty (1753) was, typically, concerned with “fixing the fluctuating Idea of Taste”.
A more relativist viewpoint emerged in the second part of the 18th century when Alexander Gerard (1759) defined the term as a responsive faculty of the imagination complementing the effort of the artist – taste is to the critic what genius is to the artist. Kant, in the context of discussing the sublime, insists on the varying notions of taste held in different periods.
Taste is an issue that concerns aesthetics, philosophy, art history, literature and literary criticism, but also social history, gender, and post-colonial criticism. Much of the discussion outlined above turned out to be, implicitly, a defence of the attitudes (or in Bourdieu’s terms, the habitat) of a self-defined, wealthy, educated, male, leisured, and exclusive elite, and one of our central aims is of course to explore the politics and ideology of taste.
This research programme, launched under the aegis of the Landau Paris Symposiums on the Eighteenth Century (LAPASEC), is designed to explore the question of taste in its relation to the five different senses. The 5th LAPASEC symposium, held in Landau in 2007, started exploring some of the issues involved, with a particular focus on the sense of sight. The next conference, to be held in Paris in October 2008, will focus on discussions of taste relating to the senses of smell and hearing, while the last conference, in 2009, will concentrate on the senses of touch and taste. A selection of papers will be published in the LAPASEC series in a volume of proceedings in 2009 by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.