Narrating the Body. New Perspectives on the Connection of Corporeality and Narrativity (c. 1500–1800)

Multiple disciplines such as gender, historical, or literary studies have been using different approaches to the body as a heuristic instrument. Bringing them together, improves our skills in analyzing the influence of the body on several levels, ranging from content and materiality to writing practices and formations of subjectivity.

This interdisciplinary symposium invites scholars to reflect upon the intersections of corporeality and narrativity. Which role did the body play when writing? How did this materialize? How did the body influence the narrative about the body and the author? Which tropes about the body were typical for the early modern period? Furthermore, in which ways did people not only write with but on their bodies? How did such signs alter the ways in which a body was read?

Then on a methodological level, we ask, how we can trace the physical in the sources. Additionally, what approaches are most apt to grasp the ways in which the author's body forms the text and its narrative and how the latter shapes the author's body and/or the image it draws thereof? In short, the symposium aims at examining the interplay between the corporeal and the textual.