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Boris Roman Gibhardt: Configuring Poetic Time
Configuring Poetic Time
(p. 361 – 374)

Boris Roman Gibhardt

Configuring Poetic Time
Figures of Movement and Perception in Marcel Proust’s "À la recherche du temps perdu"

PDF, 14 pages

  • gaze
  • physiology
  • history of science

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Boris Roman Gibhardt

is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University. At Bielefeld University (Germany), he has been a member of the Department of Art History faculty since 2014. At the Free University of Berlin, he qualified for a tenure position in general and comparative literature and German studies in 2015. Since 2015, he has been coeditor of the German and French scientific review journal Regards Croisés. His research interests include word and image studies (eighteenth to twenty-first centuries), aesthetics in the age of Goethe, and the modern novel, such as the works of Marcel Proust.
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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