Social Elements
University of San Jorge (Venue in the city centre): Calle San Voto, 6-8 50003 Zaragoza, Spain
The Birth of the English Literary Symbol View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Samuel Bozoukov
The preference for a partial or total symbolization of the Eucharist in the English Protestant Reformation is a well-known fact, as it was for continental Europe. However, that the English word for “symbol” was born not out of sacramental discourse but of iconoclastic ideology is not. This paper tracks the birth of the English literary symbol through early modern religious texts that are at once iconophobic and iconophilic, expressing a desire for a licit, godly, and therefore impossible image. Although it is Calvin who, in his notoriously bitter distaste for the image, first distinguishes between symbola and verisimilar visibilia in continental Protestant thought, it is William Alley who first introduces the symbol into mainstream English theological and rhetorical discourse, likening its “secret” function to that of allegory. It is unlikely Edmund Spenser read or knew of Alley, and yet it is a spectacular synchronicity that England’s great allegorical poet would be the first English writer to include “symbol” in a literary work: The Faerie Queen. Indeed, it is the Palmer who tells Spenser’s iconoclastic knight par excellence, Guyon, to treat the bloody hands of a babe as a sacred symbol of eternal revenge. This paper concludes by contending that Samuel Taylor Colerdige’s notorious conception of the symbol, and his iconoclastic attack against allegory, hearkens back to his literary predecessor, particularly through the glorious and symbolic image on Guyon’s shield.
'To Find One before Whom We May Speak': The Image of a Maya God
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session D. Bryan Schaeffer
From a solely art historical perspective, Rilaj Mam— usually referred to as Maximon— is a sacred Tz’utujil Maya icon, a material and earthly manifestation of divine presence (called k’uh in Maya). However, Maximon, also known as the Mam or grandfather, is much more than that as he plays an integral role for the Tz’utujil Maya in maintaining an indigenous, pre-Conquest belief system. He “lives” in the lakeside town of Santiago Atitlan in the highlands of Guatemala, his multifaceted dimensions bolstering a rich environment of ritual life connected to the ancient Maya calendar and cosmological hearth, the time and place that birthed the cosmos. Maximon as effigy is literally situated at the center of the Maya universe, a meshwork of the natural landscape, divine presence, human and supernatural action, and the ritually incipient ancient calendar. These emic cultural geographies historically frame, and still pulsate within, modern-day Santiago Atitlan. In other words, Maximon sits at the very center of an ecology of images, whether produced by human hands or conceived of as being divinely created. This paper examines Maximon's connection, as effigy and god, to the natural landscape of Santiago Atitlan. The interplay between artificial, created image and natural landscape is significant for the modern and historical Tz'utujil Maya.
Outside the Frame: The Formal Qualities of Humanism and the Rights of Nature View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ann Pegelow Kaplan
Despite movement in cultural and legal spaces to reconceptualize nature from object to subject, scholarly thinking about photography has not thus far taken up the idea of nature as subject within the genre of portraiture. Instead, pictorial categories now conceived of as traditional and even naturalized relegate works that focus on combined elements of the natural world most often into the category of landscape. In the face of climate change and mass extinction, a key question of the contemporary era that has risen across nations and cultural contexts is of the possibility of rights for non-human entities. Previously I have addressed how the photographic portrait draws humans inside or outside the boundaries of being worthy of rights. This paper addresses a recently written section of the project, examining the question of why non-human beings have not been deemed appropriate subjects of the portrait.
