Chèr.e.s collègues,
Nous vous invitons à la dernière séance de notre projet sur la notion de "Prescritive literature" aux États-Unis qui aura lieu le mercredi 23 novembre 2022 à 14h30 (Maison de la recherche de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 4 rue des Irlandais, Paris 5e, Salle du Conseil, 1er étage et en ligne : https://meet.google.com/hav-mrms-fge).
Nous écouterons deux interventions :
– Ksenia Gusarova (the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the Russian State University for the Humanities) “Advertisement as prescription: Cosmopolitan and the education of post-Soviet consumer”
– Alice Morin and Jens Ruchatz (Phillips-UniversitätMarburg) “The recipe’s photographs. Image-Word-Relations in print culture and beyond”
Veuillez trouver les résumés de ces deux interventions ci-dessous.
Bien cordialement,
Christen Bryson et Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry (Sorbonne Nouvelle, CREW)
Ksenia Gusarova (the Institute for AdvancedStudies in the Humanities, the Russian State University for the Humanities)
“Advertisement as prescription: Cosmopolitan and the education of post-Soviet consumer”
The talk will interrogate the verbal and visual rhetoric of advertisements in the early Russian-language issues of Cosmopolitan. Launched in 1994, this periodical became the first western glossy to be published in the post-Soviet space and proved hugely popular, setting the record for the highest magazine circulation in the world outside the USA a decade later, in 2005. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, its former population’s lives changed dramatically, even in Moscow, the privileged imperial capital: the government’s attempts to reform the economy brought extreme poverty for millions of people, whose desperation was exacerbated by the newly emerged ideological vacuum. In this context, global brands featured in the pages of Cosmopolitan were obviously beyond the reach of the vast majority of readers and the ads, rather than driving actual purchases, invited fantasies of escape into the dream world of glamour and success. At the same time, they mapped the social contours of this new world and spelt out the norms which could at least partly be projected onto the readers’ everyday practices. Focusing on cosmetic ads, which explicitly dictated the normative definition of femininity, I will show how Cosmopolitan at once aimed to civilize the uncouth (post-)Soviet consumer and to pull down the previously erected civilizational bulwarks of socialist morals and ‘goodtaste’.
Alice Morin and Jens Ruchatz (Phillips-UniversitätMarburg)
“The recipe’s photographs. Image-Word-Relations in print culture and beyond”
Before the advent of photography and its photomechanical reproduction recipes had only been rarely accompanied by pictures. However, around 1900 the common imagery of food stuffs and kitchen utensils becomes supplemented by visualizations of cooked dishes as well as step-by-step photographs of food preparation. Whereas the recipe has been thoroughly studied as a pertinent text type or as an indicator of eating habits, its relation to pictures have hardly ever been recognized as meriting scientific attention. By looking at various examples across the history of cooking publications, mainly books and magazines with a brief look at online forms, the paper wants to go beyond the dominant, but blurry concept of ‘illustration’ and distinguish diverse types of image-word-relations. In tracing the history of photographic recipe picture, the paper attempts to demonstrate how the recipe changes from an instructive text to a kind of literature that is mainly designed to indulge in imaginatively and sensually, marginalizing the use as cooking manual.
Ksenia Gusarova is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the RussianState University for the Humanities. Her field of research interests encompasses cultural history of the body in western modernity, with a focus on fashion and beauty culture, which she views as an intersection of aesthetical, medical, moral and political concerns.
Alice Morin is postdoctoral research associate with the “Fragmentwanderungen” project (A Media-Based Comparison ofFragment Migration: Photographs in Periodicals and Books in the 20th Century) conducted at the Philipps-Universität, Marburg, as part of theinterdisciplinary research unit Journalliteratur. She was awarded a PhD in American studies in 2018, from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle where she also taught American history and cultural history. Her dissertation examined the editorial uses of photographic images in mainstream, high-end fashion magazines(1960s-1980s), mass corpora scrutinized from their production to their re-uses.She was also scientific advisor to the centennial exhibition Vogue Paris. 100 Years (Palais Galliera- Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris,2021-2022). Her latest work focuses on the (transnational) circulation of editorial photography in the 20th century.
Jens Ruchatz is Professor of Media Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. He was deputy speaker of the research unit (FOR2288) “Journalliteratur,” in the context of which he leads the project “A Media-Based Comparison of Fragment Migration: Photographs in Periodicals and Books in the Twentieth Century”. He also acts as principal investigator of the project “Pictorial Picture Critique in Social Media. Explicit and Tacit Theorizing of the Digital Image.” His publications cover a wide range of media, from the magic lantern and film to telegraphy and print media, exploring media relations from a historical perspective. Among his current research interests are the history and theory of photography, the mediality of magazines, media reflection in popular movies, culinary media, and television series. He is currently co-editing an edited volume titled “Food – Media – Senses”, to be published in 2023.
Source: Christen Bryson