Transfusions of Joyce
If the old dictum that “a picture says more than a thousand words” should be true, why is it that visual adaptations of literature are usually frowned upon as trivializations or as intrusions into the sacred realm of high art? This dismissive perspective has, of course, never stopped film makers, cartoonists, comic artists, or youtube clippers from their creative engagement with literary texts, be they popular or canonical, and James Joyce’s works are no exception to this rule. As of now, there are several movies, a seemingly endless series of sketches and cartoons, some of which grace the covers of the James Joyce Quarterly, and even some comics which each in their own style and method work on the stories and novels and seek to negotiate an intermedial transfer or re-visitation.
Our section, the fourth Joyce panel at a Krakow April Conference, will address such adaptations and explore the transformative potential of intermedial encounters with Joyce’s work. Papers may discuss single images or extensive adaptations for the screen or the graphic novel; they may compare different approaches or perform a close reading of visual experiments with individual chapters, episodes, passages or even sentences; they may suggest imaginative possibilities which could be realized in the near or distant future or they can turn back to projects that were dismissed in the past.
While the focus of the section will be on visualisations of Joyce, we are also interested in other transformative representations, re-imaginings, and recreations, including soundscapes, digital renderings, apocrypha, or alternative stories arising from Joyce’s oeuvre.
Please send an abstract of approximately 200 words with a short biographical note to Katarzyna Bazarnik (k.bazarnik@uj.edu.pl) and/or Dirk Vanderbeke (vanderbeke@t-online.de). The deadline for paper proposals is January 15, 2020. Paper proposals will be reviewed anonymously, and the authors will be notified about their acceptance via email. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2020.
For registration and further information, please consult the conference website at https://april.confer.uj.edu.pl/