The conference examines artistic processes and forms that deliberately challenge continuous time or break with chronology. This can mean, for example, that writers, musicians or artists repeat themselves, take up supposedly obsolete (media) techniques, work in outdated genres or simply ignore the current developments of an artistic field. The articulation and evocation of the experience of no longer being a contemporary of one's own epoch has often been described as a typical feature of late works and theorized as such. But the phenomenon can also be found where the course of history is undermined or ignored, because artists or writers are not part of a literature and art market or knowingly do not want to participate in its dynamics. Equally it applies to works that, for political reasons such as dissidence, did not take part in the historical development of an 'official literature' or 'state-sponsored art'.
Literary and art criticism along with musicology tend to assume (explicitly or implicitly) the linear development of an artistic or literary oeuvre in line with historical experience. However, when studying the work of a writer, an artist or a composer, it is often precisely those phenomena that run counter to such development that catch one’s attention: phenomena of prolepsis and deliberate anticipation, of return and repetition, of regression, belatedness and of withdrawal from the present. The presentations will investigate the conditions that provoke such forms of belatedness and anticipation, as well as the way philology, music and art history deal with these complex temporal phenomena.
The event is part of a collaborative project between two working groups of Humanities scholars from the University of Oxford and the UdK Berlin (curated and organized by Karen Leeder and Barbara Wittmann). It is financed by the seed funding ‘Oxford x UdK. Partnership in Arts and Humanities’ from both universities, as well as a grant from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the UdK.
See the full programme here: