Abstracts

Jan Baetens (Institute of Cultural Studies, Leuven): "Novelization as an example of the visual ‘contamination’ of the novel"

Introduction

Contemporary culture has often been defined by the notion of the “visual turn” (Mitchell), i.e. as the shift from a literary toward a visual paradigm in cultural relations and hierarchies. The case of the novelization is interesting from this viewpoint, since it may signify a “writing back” of the newly colonized sphere of literature. In fact, this antivisual reaction is much more complex and paradoxical than one might think at first sight. I will try to make this point by analyzing the genre of novelization in the light of three much discussed topics of medium theory: adaptation, remediation, medium specificity.

Novelization as anti-adaptation

For the definition of the genre (which has never been studied as such), I will start from different existing definitions, for instance : « Le procédé consiste à faire rédiger un roman à partir d’un scénario et à faire ensuite coïncider la ublication du livre et la sortie du film. Sauf cas d’espèce (...) ces ouvrages obtiennent une audience certaine, mais éphémère (quelques mois), et ne sont pas réimprimés. (Alain et Odette Virmaux, Le ciné-roman, 1984, note 23 p. 70) « The phrase comes from the back cover of a mass distribution paperback, the kind of book one finds in airport and supermarket stands (...). Neither a screenplay nor a novel but a novelization, this is a new genre of fiction that is itself the product of a new film-marketing technology. » (Teresa de Lauretis, « Becoming inorganic », Critical Inquiry, 29-4, 2003, note 24, p. 557)
These definitions and the analysis of some current examples show indeed that novelization are less adaptations than anti-adaptations, since they lack what seems typical of « real » adaptations, i.e. : a) intermediality (novelizations do not novelise movies, but scripts), b) the combination of « transfert » and « adaptation proper » (McFarlane) (novelizations are limited to operations of transfert, they don’t have to adapt anything that cannot be said in their own medium). A comparison with the historical aspects of the genre confirms this aspect of anti-adaptation. Novelizations have always existed, they were borne in the very fist decades of movie industry, and although there has been always a tension between « anti-adaptive » and « adaptive » versions of the genre, i.e. of versions which accept or reject their proximity with the movies, the « anti-adaptive » forces have become the dominant version. What remains of the « adaptive » version is located today in a rather elitist realm.

Novelization as anti-remediation

The problem with the first approach, novelization as anti-adaptation, is its exclusive focus on binary relationships between works and media. Contemporary adaptation studies (strongly influenced by cultural studies) tend to prefer an approach that tackles the broader social and cultural network. In such networks, hybridization seems to be the rule today, but in fact this hybridization is nothing new. Rather than being an aspect of postmodern civilization, the spread of hybrid works and structures, has to be linked with the emergence of « mass culture » (in the neutral sense of the word) after the industrialisation of Western societies. The key features of mass culture can be described as a triple process of : a) irruption of the new, b) proliferation by serialization, c) extension by adaptation (it is important to notice that these three processes tend to occur simultaneously : they are part of the same logic). If this is the case, and if novelization is a contemporary example of this logic, than it becomes possible to criticise the current use of the notion of « remediation/repurposing » (Bolter and Grusin), which dominates many discussions on adaptation and medium theory). Indeed, novelization, the success of which cannot be denied, seems to contradict in a rather direct manner all possible axioms surrounding the remediation theory. This contradiction can be solved if one accepts that remediation (which is very useful for the comparison of binary relations) is overruled by a different logic which is active at the level of the social network : for mass culture society, the important issue is not (only) to remediate, but also (and even more ?) the necessity of innovation, proliferation and extension, (partly) regardless of the media implied in all these operations.

Novelization as antiliterature

When we « look » at the novels themselves, one notices a strong opposition between what is done at the level of the « peritext » and what is done at the level of the « text ». The first multiplies all types of references to a visual subtext, the latter seems to avoid them carefully : on the hand because the style of a novelization is generally not descriptive at all ; on the other hand because a novelization does not mention the fact that it is actually describing of narrating a movie or a script (the genre is not part of the « ekphrastic tradition »). Does this mean that novelization is in the first place a work of literature, rather than a merchandizing item of the movie world ? Not at all : as far as reading is concerned, peritextual relations are always stronger than textual ones. Moreover, the way adapted books are marketed (they now resemble novelizations) proves clearly that the primary model is filmic. Even books that are not adapted are nowadays a) written in order to be filmed, b) read as if they ware adaptable to the screen. In other words, we are now living in a literary culture whose dominating model is filmic. Following Philippe Ortel, who argues that the dominating model of literature in the 19^th century was photography, it is not necessary that the dominated system mentions explicitly the influence of the dominating system, and the same is probably true for the relationships between film and literature in the 20^th century. To finish, I would like to make some general remarks on the way novelization helps us to fine-tune our definition of genre and medium (both notions have become mutually exchangeable in theoretical definitions). More precisely, I would like to argue that most definitions implicitly abuse of the axiom of medium « purity ». Although media hybridization is now generally acknowledged as a basic feature of all media, it should be possible to go beyond the idea of hybridization as « combination of different (separate) media ». If one accepts that a medium (as a specific combination of a technological support, a type of signs and a particular content) does only emerge gradually, one could also ask whether this emergence is not thought of too often in terms of a too narrowly defined « specificity ».

Jean BESSIERE: "CONTAMINATION AND THE SEMIOSPHERE"
Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle

By quoting the etymology of the words contamination and contagion, one points to the contact which is the condition of contamination or contagion, but one ignores that the contact should bear no consequences if the one who gets in contact is not receptive. Contamination cannot be disassociated from the possibility of reception, which characterizes the contaminated : the alien agent is welcomed. Moreover, the contaminated becomes the reservoir of this alien agent, and makes the disease collective. The alien agent is so welcomed that it becomes an identity of the individual and of the community. The alien is no longer an alien ; it is an insider which becomes determinant of the individual and collective behaviors and ethos. Contamination and contagion are the possibility of the manifest and conscious individual and community. When the epidemic is over, the memory of these specific behaviors and of this consciousness remains. In his "Discourse about the invention of a universal pathology" (La Notte : 1996), Giorgio Manganelli has stressed these paradoxes of any contamination, and has noted that the collective diseases, which contamination and contagion provoke, make everyone a participant to the other's death before he or she dies. Death becomes collective ; the anarchy and the fear which it triggers, do not contradict the order of society : every man senses the joy of death and finds his own way to this collective death.
By recalling that there is no contamination without the possibility of the reception of the alien and that collective diseases are times of consciousness for the community, by identifying contamination with a universal pathology's appearance, one suggests that contamination and contagion are double sided : promise of illness and death ; opportunity of consciousness and recognition of the paradoxical identity of the individual and of the community.
That is the lesson of the Ancient Greeks. That is the lesson of Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year.. Documenting and narrating the "Plague Year" sixty years after the last epidemic in England presupposes a kind of didactic intention : to demonstrate that the community is able to handle its own fate through the collective disease - London is described as a community with shows a specific organization and offers relevant pieces of information about the plague - and to make this disease its own identity and memory. This kind of demonstration is no longer possible one century and a half later. Pasteur's discoveries impose the idea that infectious collective diseases can be eradicated. Consequently, physicians are responsible for this eradication and become the main representatives and agents of the community. Remarkably, the current AIDS epidemic restores the old picture. Because no eradication of HIV is foreseen, because the disease becomes a kind of chronic disease, although it remains lethal, the present literature by HIV infected writers restore the individual and collective identities themes and the ethos , which the " universal pathology" triggers.
The duality of the " universal pathology " - anyone runs the risk to die because of this pathology, anyone may experience the redefinition of his or her identity by the alien agent, and be the witness to the same collective identity redefinition - prevents contamination and contagion from only exemplifying the antinomy of life and death - before Pasteur's time - and of disease and health - from Pasteur's time onwards. Universal pathology makes diseases social and cultural diseases.
From this duality which Manganelli's essay and Defoe's novel designate, a specific status of contamination and contagion can be inferred. Contamination and contagion are more than the dissemination of a disease. They allow a kind of translation of it. The pathogenic agent of the plague does not change. But when it moves from a flea to a human community, it becomes translated into a social and cultural event - the plague. One knows that the HIV has mutated and still mutates to get adjusted to the human body ; it has become the companion of our present societies. From fleas to human communities, from on type of HIV to another type, no faithful translation of the original element is conceivable. The contamination or contagion process is a paradox : it supposes the change of the alien agent inside the recipients' natural or cultural sphere. This translation allows the dissemination and the connection of the disease to any strata of the cultural sphere. Finally, the disease is one with the semiosphere with which any culture can be equated. It at once reforms the semiosphere and becomes one its constituents. Susan Sontag's expression - illness as a metaphor - should be reversed. The contagious disease is not construed as a metaphor by cultures ; our cultures interpret themselves as metaphors of contagious diseases.
What Y. Lotman has written about the semiosphere exemplifies this point, as, more recently, Dan Sperber's book, La contagion des idées, does as well. Researches on the media and communication refer to the "epidemic structure" of the media networks and of their functioning. These notations are linked to the issue of the competing metaphors which are used to construe social and epistemic descriptions. From this perspective, we will try to characterize the specificity and the relevance of the metaphor : culture as a contagious disease.
There are more specific developments of this metaphor. Some experts reads the whole system of contagious diseases a kind of semiosphere, whose balance should be kept. Man, by eradicating contagious diseases, prevents any stability of the contagion semiosphere., and allows the appearance of new diseases From this characterization of contagious diseases as a whole, results the idea that there are good and bad contagious diseases. Depending on the point of view, the good contagious disease may be the old ones - the ones which have become domestic, the ones which keep the system's balance - or the new ones - the ones which go against the balance . Remarkably, this evaluation of the contagious diseases according to the system they constitute and to their domestic or intruding status, is determinant of the presentation of hybridization in some Latin American and Caribbean novels. We shall address this issue by evoking Lupe Romazo's novel, Pesta blanca, Pesta negra (1988), and Chamoiseau's Biblique des derniers gestes and Pepin's L'Homme-au-bâton and Tambour-Babel.
We will conclude in offering a tentative comparative approach to this paradigm of contagion, by contrasting it with other medical paradigms.

Andrea Chegai: "Ravel e le contaminazioni dissimulate".
L'area concettuale della contaminazione (stilistica nella fattispecie) si insinua nella musica occidentale di tutte le epoche. Fra madrigale (profano) e mottetto (sacro), fra oratorio (mistico) e opera (laica), fra stile strumentale e vocale, aulico e popolare etc. Nel Novecento la contaminazione diviene strutturale e sostanziale: una risposta alla crisi di linguaggio maturata nel tardo Ottocento post-wagneriano, che in parte consente di aggirare la scelta di un 'unico' linguaggio. Stravinskij nell'eclettismo e nell'esplicita assimilazione di esperienze altrui maturò la propria indiscussa originalità. Il più schivo e aristocratico Ravel mantenne invece una incrollabile fiducia nelle forme classiche, ma non rinunziò per questo alle lusinghe dell'allusione, nella citazione, della contraffazione. L' ascolto e l'analisi di qualche composizione emblematica consentirà di mettere a nudo alcuni di questi aspetti, incrementando al contempo - è un auspicio - il piacere intellettuale dell'ascolto.

Alessandra Di Luzio: "FASHION AND CINEMA / FASHION IN CINEMA: CROSS-FERTILIZATIONS, CONTAMINATION, INFLUENCES"

The relationship between fashion and cinema is wide and multifaceted, both in terms of mutual contamination and on the basis of an aesthetic/theoretic point of view. This talk will analyse the issue with a multiple perspective, considering developments in film history from the very origins to the present time, but will also focus on specific filmic texts that present an exemplification of the terms of this exchange (of ideas, objects, people).

Firstly, we will try to track down a short history of dress in the cinema, by analysing the figure of the costume designer from his early appearance in the technical crew to his present function in the cinematic industry. The context of the analysis will be mainly the classic Hollywood film.

Secondly, we will examine the transfiguration of the fashion materials carried out through cinema, considering fashion both as a self-conscious cultural phenomenon and as a glamorous professional environment. In other words, we will consider some filmic situations - especially within two main classic genres, Comedy and Musical - which occupy a specific context inspired by the world of fashion (ateliers, fashion designers, mannequins, catwalks, dressing rooms, magazines, etc.).

In conclusion, we will consider differences and analogies between two similarly-named figures operating in the fashion business, the fashion designer and the costume designer. We will analyse in particular some key people in the world of costume for film (Edith Head, William Travilla, Orry Kelly, Travis Banton, Helen Rose, Adrian) and - mainly in the last two or three decades - some fashion designers who have successfully worked, although only occasionally, for the movie industry (Giorgio Armani).

The talk will be interspersed with sequences from the following films:

Singin' in the Rain (1952) by Stanley Donen

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) by Orson Welles

How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) by Jean Negulesco

Funny Face (1956) by Stanley Donen

Lady in the Dark (1946) by Mitchell Leisen

Roberta (1935) by William A. Seiter

Designing Woman (1956) by Vincent Minnelli

Vertigo (1958) by Alfred Hitchcock

American Gigolo (1980) by Paul Schrader

Mario Domenichelli: "Contagion and Contaminations in Otherland from Kipling to Ridley Scott, and somewhere else beyond".
L'esemplificazione comprenderebbe: Kipling ("At the end of the passage"); Conrad, "Heart of Darkness", "An Outpost of Progress"; Céline, "Voyage au bout de la Nuit"; Malraux; Gide (in fretta), Flaiano, "Tempo di uccidere"; G. Greene, "The Heart of the Matter"; e poi "Alien" (l'intera sequela, anche di altri autori, fino alla 'contaminatio' fatale tra umano e mostruoso nell'ultimo film, il quarto).

Paolo Fabbri: "Imprese testuali : motti e immagini"
in francese: "Blasons textuels: les mots et les images".
Alcuni autori, filosofi, scienziati,letterati (Croce, Benjamin, Bohr, Queneau e Calvino) si sono costruiti delle Imprese, nel senso araldico del termine, usando delle immagini e/o della scrittura. Una lettura semiotica dei loro procedimenti impiegati e del loro significato. A partire dall'"iconologia fantastica" di Calvino,un esperimento mentale di argomentazione figurativa.

Claudio Franceschi: "Contaminazioni e Cannibalismi nell'Evoluzione e nella concettualizzazione dei fenomeni biologici".
Centro Interdipartimentale "L.Galvani" per la studio della Biofisica, Bioinformatica e Biocomplessità, via San Giacomo 12, Università degli Studi di Bologna.

Si cercherà di evidenziare due paralleli fenomeni in cui contaminazioni e cannibalismi hanno un ruolo preminente . Il primo riguarda quello che viene assunto come il paradigma fondamentale di molte scienze e cioè l'Evoluzione: un fenomeno che vede in un lasso di tempo di quattro -cinque miliardi di anni non solo l'emersione dei sistemi biologici, ma anche la loro diversificazione e complessizazione, come conseguenza di una di una straordinaria serie di interazioni e di scambi informativi, unica e irrepetibile. La seconda riguarda gli sforzi teorici che nelle varie discipline ( genetica , immunologia) hanno cercato di concettualizzare i saperi biologici specifici. Si cerchera' di dimostrare che l'Evoluzione è non solo trasmissione verticale dell'informazione all'interno delle singole specie (piu' le mutazioni), ma anche trasmissione orizzontale (contaminazione e cannibalismo) di informazioni genetiche da altre specie che entrano, si inseriscono e si integrano nel genoma di specie diverse. Inoltre nell'Evoluzione sono fondamentali meccanismi che consentono all'"invasore" di persistere nell'"ospite" creando forme di parassitismo e di reciproca interazione di grande importanza biologica. Per quanto riguarda il secondo aspetto si cercherà di dimostrare che i cambi di passo e le innovazioni piu' importanti di una disciplina avvengono quando, dopo un periodo piu' o meno lungo di sviluppo "interno", idee nuove da altre discipline (non solo biologiche e/o scientifiche, ma anche filosofiche, economiche etc) invadono e si diffondono nella disciplina che fa allora un salto di qualita' innovandosi e trasformandosi. Queste contaminazioni e cannibalismi, che si trasmettono spesso attraverso metafore, sono fenomeni complessi e intriganti, e possono essere fonte di problemi metodologici e concettuali. L'interdisciplinarietà forse non esiste ed esistono piuttosto contaminazioni di paradigmi forti nati all'interno di specifiche discipline.

Giovanna Franci (University of Bologna):"Fashion as Art/Fashion in the Arts: Among 'Old Friends' "

If the dialogue between art and fashion in modernity can be traced back to the 1800s, the fusion or exchange between these two "old friends" reached its peak with twentieth century avant-garde. Today, however, there is something more. Over at least the last two decades there has been increasingly evident contamination between art, fashion, and communication: from fashion show/performances to music, from cinema to advertising, from specialized magazines to design, from photography to soap operas, as well as interior design and urban renewal in general. Fashion has entered museums, and far from being considered as minor or secondary, it has carved out its own autonomous space: from 'art-à-porter' to fashion as art. The barriers seem to have crumbled, leaving space for new and combinable aesthetics. And Fashion Studies have arisen to analyze the phenomenon. The first, most evident theme is revival of fashion trends from the past (Elizabethan lace and ruffs or crinoline in John Galliano; coquettes and lady pirates in Vivienne Westwood; Victorian corsets, laces, and garters in Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier and La Perla); or creative use of artistic and literary citations from one field or medium to another (Giacomo Balla in Laura Biagiotti; Lucio Fontana in La Perla; Andy Warhol in Versace, neo-baroque peplum in Balenciaga and Valentino); and so on. What is more interesting, however, is the exchange that occurs between art and fashion, beginning from twentieth century modernism, through postmodernism, up to the present. It is as if fashion, the most fragile and ephemeral of the arts, had already decided to establish a permanent tradition, while at the same time art seems to have changed its statute and language into the new habits, so to say, of fashion.

Djelal Kadir: "El culto a la higiene: Neoliberalismo y sanidad pedagógica".

El paradigma político y socioeconómico que rige actualmente es el Neoliberalismo. Desde 1989, con el derrumbe del sistema soviético, el Neoliberalismo no sólo goza de preeminencia ideológica, también domina incontestado y de manera triunfal. Esta conferencia propone, dentro del marco del tema de "contaminación", explorar este dominio, examinar la parte que desempeña el Neoliberalismo como culto desenfrenado en la higienización del discurso político, en la descontaminación de la docencia universitaria del conocimiento y en la privatización de la esfera pública para fines particulares. Se enfoca, sobretodo, en la relación entre el fenómeno del mercado libre y las libertades civiles, así como la relación que entabla el Neoliberal entre la formación universitaria, la ética social y la responsabilidad cívica.

"The Cult of Hygiene: Neoliberalism and the Sanitation/Sanity of Pedagogy"

Neoliberalism is now the reigning paradigm. Since 1989 and the fall of the Soviet system, Neoliberalism enjoys not only ideological preeminence, it also dominates unchallenged and with unchecked triumphalism. Within the framework of this year's Synapsis topic of "Contamination," this lecture aims to explore this dominance, to examine the role of Neoliberalism as rampant cult of hygienic catharsis of political discourse, the decontamination of university pedagogy and regimes of knowledge, as well as the privatization of the public sphere for particular ends. This lecture focuses, above all, on the relationship forged by Neoliberalism between the free market and civil liberty, as well as the relationship it establishes between university education, social ethics, and civic responsibility.