7th Landau Paris Symposium on the Eighteenth Century

October 8-10, 2009
Universität Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau

latest update January 17, 2009

As an interdisciplinary venture, the Landau-Paris-Symposia of the past years have focused on the exploration of the relations between taste and the senses. The 5th annual meeting, held in Landau in 2007, was dedicated to the study of sight and taste while last year’s 6th meeting tackled smell and hearing and their impact on taste in literature, music and art, with an occasional glance at philosophical dimensions. The final meeting on taste and the senses, to be held in Landau this year, will conclude the three-year series on this fascinating topic with papers on the sense of touching in its relation to taste.

Surely, one of the most amusing treatments of touch and taste can be found in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. By 1768, Sterne cast much of the century’s preoccupation with sensualism – and the growing fashion of sentimentalism in the arts – into a fictional travelogue whose aborted erotic scenes remain unforgettable. As Sterne’s Englishman in France feels the pulse of the “beautiful Grisett“ (sic) in a Paris shop (The Pulse), Yorick’s comment on touching, feeling, sentiment and erotic excitement are set in relation to what the narrator experiences as embodied femininity, beauty in extremis. Although in a typically Sternian manner, the meeting is interrupted by the woman’s husband, the description of the importance of touching then reaches a climax of sorts (The Gloves) as Yorick confesses, “she look’d into my very heart and reins (...) I could actually feel she did.“ The entire meeting of Yorick and the shopkeeper’s wife, described in three brief humorous chapters, is shot through with the century’s beliefs concerning the sense of touch and what it is capable of provoking – physically, emotionally (e.g., the reins as the seat of affections), and aesthetically. Sterne came almost at the end of a long line of philosophers and writers (from Locke to the French materialists) who had discussed the impact of touching and feeling on the human mind and body. If he directed this discourse into a bawdy dimension (see the very last sentence of A Sentimental Journey), it may well have been because he felt that the subject had been treated both too seriously and ad nauseam.1

We invite proposals for papers on important aspects of the relations between touching and taste in the long eighteenth century (European literatures, art, philosophy, music, and drama). Interdisciplinary papers are especially welcome. Please send your abstracts (about 100 words) to both Frédéric Ogée and Peter Wagner:

Frédéric.ogée@univ-paris-diderot.fr

and

wagner@uni-landau.-de

The deadline is 30 April 2009. The best papers from the conference will be published by WVT in volume 3 of the LAPASEC s