Organizer: Sean Silver
Contact the Seminar OrganizersThe Practice Turn: Reconstruction and Critical Making
In his 2004 essay The Production of Presence, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht repeatedly insists that it is time for humanists to "get our hands dirty." By approaching cultural objects and making them "present" to others, we would offer a response to the abstractions of lives which are increasingly virtual, to the distance between students and objects of culture, and to the specialized and sometimes exclusive lexicon of high theory. This seminar means to gather scholars who take that call literally, which is to say materially, haptically—people who are making literature and arts present by engaging in historical reconstruction, interpretive re-enactment, or critical making as a route to humanistic knowledge. Some of us mean to bring cultural and historical objects to life by making things: reconstructing historical recipes or chemical processes, making novels or poetry multisensory, or rebuilding and manipulating historical instruments with literary significance; other are rendering literature present by reconstructing historical or fictional places or events, recovering historical engraving, printing, or bookbinding techniques, or intervening in texts digitally or computationally; and so on.
This seminar means to think about these undertakings, each one different, as sharing or expressing a set of collective preoccupations. Where do we find literary or historical inspiration for work in what is sometimes called the "practice turn"? How do we prove our theoretical and intellectual understanding through making? And, finally, with a nod to the paradox that is risked, how do we justify the turn to manual practice by theorizing it?
In his 2004 essay The Production of Presence, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht repeatedly insists that it is time for humanists to "get our hands dirty." By approaching cultural objects and making them "present" to others, we would offer a response to the abstractions of lives which are increasingly virtual, to the distance between students and objects of culture, and to the specialized and sometimes exclusive lexicon of high theory. This seminar means to gather scholars who take that call literally, which is to say materially, haptically—people who are making literature and arts present by engaging in historical reconstruction, interpretive re-enactment, or critical making as a route to humanistic knowledge. Some of us mean to bring cultural and historical objects to life by making things: reconstructing historical recipes or chemical processes, making novels or poetry multisensory, or rebuilding and manipulating historical instruments with literary significance; other are rendering literature present by reconstructing historical or fictional places or events, recovering historical engraving, printing, or bookbinding techniques, or intervening in texts digitally or computationally; and so on.
This seminar means to think about these undertakings, each one different, as sharing or expressing a set of collective preoccupations. Where do we find literary or historical inspiration for work in what is sometimes called the "practice turn"? How do we prove our theoretical and intellectual understanding through making? And, finally, with a nod to the paradox that is risked, how do we justify the turn to manual practice by theorizing it?