Inscription and the Horizon: Melchior Lorck's Prospect of Constantinople 1559)

27 November 2012, 14:30-17:00
Professor Bronwen Wilson (ART)

How can the embodied experience of travel, with its diverse vantage points and its temporal character, be condensed into visual forms? This is one of the questions generated by visual imagery produced in the context of early modern travel to the Ottoman Empire—considered here in the example of Melchior Lorck's Prospect of Constantinople—in which Europeans endeavoured to translate experiences of moving between familiar and unfamiliar worlds.

Istanbul

Inscription and the horizon emerge in topographical imagery as pictorial signs that reference two different modes of experience. The former is the embodied experience of mark making with its material traces of the artist's presence at different moments. This durational nature of time also characterizes the horizon, which resonates with early modern usage of the term prospect, from the Latin prospectus, meaning to look out, anticipation, expectation and anxiety. Inscription and the horizon were not mutually exclusive, particularly in topographical views; the tension between these two modes of visualizing the near and the far gestures to what is at stake in the spaces between dominions, spaces that are sometimes difficult to control. As I am proposing here, these modes often come up against each other in cross-cultural encounters, precisely because inscription aspires to knowledge close at hand, while the horizon exposes the limits of what can be seen and the limits of our understanding.

Rhetoric and the Political Theory of Ideologies

4 December 2012, 14:30 -17:00
Professor Alan Finlayson (PSI)

Political theorists have long argued over how best to understand and evaluate political ideologies - these things we call 'Conservatism', 'Anarchism' or 'Liberalism'. What are the forms of thought made of? What are their boundaries? Are they products of history and tradition, or continually reinvented by politicians? Are they used cynically, as a way of pretending to believe things, or do they - in some way and to some extent - shape the ways in which people think their politics? This paper looks at two prominent approaches: one which emphasises the arrangement of political concepts and one which emphasises the fluidity of political signifiers. I argue that both are partly right, but that ideologies are best thought of in terms of rhetoric - as a set of argumentative potentials, ways of making a case and appealing to peoples' reason, culture and emotions as a consequence the study of political ideologies overlaps with the kinds of research undertaken in History, Philosophy, Literature, Linguistics and even Art.

All sessions are held in Arts 01.06. 

Open to research postgraduates, academic staff, and early career researchers. Each session is limited to 25 places, booking essential. 

Please email Helen Horsman H.Horsman@uea.ac.uk to reserve your place.

Photograph: Istanbul. Photographic Collection, School of Art History and World Art Studies, University of East Anglia.