"Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Modern" a talk by Barbara Vinken at The School of Arts and Aesthetics Auditorium, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Mehrauli Road > 6pm on 7th November 2013

Time : 6:00 pm (tea will be served at 5:30 pm)

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : The School of Arts and Aesthetics Auditorium, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi - 110067

Venue Info : www.jnu.ac.in | SAA Map
Nearest Metro Stations - 'Hauz Khas(Yellow Line)' &  'Delhi Aerocity(Orange Line)'

Event Description : The School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University invites you to a lecture 'Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Modern' By Barbara Vinken, Professor of Literature, Munich University and author of Fashion Zeitgeist and Angezogen/Dressed Up.

The dominant discourses in the 19th and 20th century cast fashion as the other of modernity.
It is seen as an oriental colony in the very heart of the West.
The twilight of fashion in the new egalitarian republics to come is proclaimed.
This clearly has not happened. Do we witness instead a generalized orientalization?

Supported by Goethe-Institut New Delhi Max Mueller Bhavan

Barbara Vinken is Professor of General and French Literature and Chair of the Department of Romance Romance Literatures and Literary Theory in at the University of Munich. She has published widely in distinct areas of research. Beside books on the Italian and French Renaissance (Petrarch and Du Bellay), French and British Enlightenment (Richardson and Laclos) French literature of the 19th century (Flaubert and Zola), and, more recently a book on civil war and Heinrich von Kleist, she wrote also much acclaimed books on gender and family politics ( Deconstructive Feminism and T he German Mother ), as well as on fashion theory ( Fashion Zeitgeist and Angezogen/ Dressed Up ). These subjects are no disconnected topics in Barbara Vinken’s work, but part of a theory of reading in continuation of the Konstanz and Yale Schools of Criticism. In this field, however, fashion is a subject entirely her own, in which the reading of texts turns into the reading of textiles, of poems and novels into the analysis of clothes and dress codes.

Her most recent work, Angezogen/ Dressed Up, which drew considerable attention at the 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair, enlarges and transposes the analysis of fashion to the study of implied gender relations, including these relations’ embeddedness in the processes and conflicts of globalization and de-colonization. With a new sense of the political, anthro-pological aspects of life and death, mourning and memory come into focus, as well as the always renewed threat of civil wars. In a recent interview, Barbara Vinken has defined fashion as a permanent “meditation of death,” a meditation that brings her work into close communication with contemporary art. In presentations at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in collaboration with Chris Dercon from Tate Modern Gallery London, Vinken’s work – which reaches from the radical modernist Flaubert to the post-modern scenery of Martin Margiela or Alexander McQueen – has become part of an international debate, wherein fashion figures as a form of art, a new art, last but not least, of facing death and dying.
More information on Professor Vinken’s work may be found at : www.barbaravinken.de/News/index/deutsch

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