Staging style, between image and text

Measuring style: the literariness of stylometric features

Author: Simon Gabay, Université de Genève

Abstract

Stylometry has been used by scholars for a few decades to identify computationally the author of a given text. The nature of the features used remains however uncertain: is it really a style that we observe, or just an idiolect? We will use traditional stylistics to evaluate the interpretative yield of stylometric features.

Bio

Simon Gabay is a philologist specialised in 17th c. French texts and he is Maître assistant en humanités numériques at the University of Geneva.

Style - appropriation - parody. Habitus or visual rhetoric? Some thoughts on Manet, and on hermeneutics in art history

Author: Michael F. Zimmermann, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

Abstract

The vagueness of the difficult notion of style is proverbial. As a method escaping rational definition, exclusively appealing to the authority of connoisseurship, the analysis of style nowadays is suspicious. Yet its role in the hermeneutics of art history remains central. Should we be satisfied with circular definitions, or with attributions that characterise a style of an artwork newly considered simply on the basis of the desciptions of previous art works? Do the limits of such a strategy discredit the analysis of style altogether (according to the "intentional fallacy" argument)? We will seek to answer this question, using the example of Édouard Manet, by reflecting on the relationship between the procedures that an artist typically adopts, for example because he or she has learned them from his or her teachers, and the visual rhetoric he or she strategically adopts with respect to a chosen subject. Why did Manet have to "become" Velasquez before he could become Manet -- just as Proust had to parody Flaubert before he could transform Jean Santeuil into "Marcel"?

Bio

Michael F. Zimmermann is the chair of art history at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. Its publications focus on 19th century art, as well as its relationship with history of science.