We’re thrilled to announce the Call For Papers for our trilingual collaborative conference – Disturbed Faces (Visages perturbés / Verstörte Gesichter).

Disturbed Faces will be hosted by the literature program at the University of Geneva and the Swiss Association of General and Comparative Literature.

When: 3rd-5th November, 2022 at the University of Geneva

Call for Papers

The human face is a part of the body as well as a sensorimotor process and an intersubjective and social phenomenon. A bodily place, it is located at the level of the head, but it often manifests the emotional and expressive state of the body as a whole. Sensorimotor process, it causes sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and kinaesthesia, and this reciprocally: we perceive and we are perceived through our face. It establishes self-awareness as a subject capable of entering into relationship with other living beings. The face attracts our attention at all times, but especially when a health crisis forces us to rethink our way of communicating – masked, from a distance or by interposed screens. 

In literature and the visual arts, the face can be the central element in the construction of characters. The physical aspect, the expressiveness and the modifications of the face manifest emotions and thoughts. The face thus positions the characters in their relationship to others and defines their role and function in the plot. Finally, it allows and establishes the possibility of identification with the characters during the reception. So what happens when this preeminent role is disrupted? How is a disturbed face constructed, represented or thought out and how can it be put into perspective with other forms of relation to the face? What role and what impact does it have on the construction of the characters, on their relationships and on the plot in literary works and the visual arts (comics, cinema, installations)? 

The annual ASLGC colloquium – which will be held from 03 to 05 November 2022 at the University of Geneva in collaboration with the international research project Literature and the Face: A Critical History (Australian Research Council) – aims to explore the representations and constructions of the ‘disturbed face’ in literatures around the world, favoring an approach that is both interdisciplinary and intersemiotic. It thus seeks to bring together literary study, the visual arts and other disciplines in which the face plays an epistemological role (philosophy, sociology, medicine, law), starting from the principle that the face is never given as it is and that it is always constructed in a discursive as well as a semiotic way in the broad sense, in a cognitive and emotional way as well as in a cultural and social way.

Organizing committee

Prof. ass. Evelyn Dueck
Prof. Guillemette Bolens
Prof. Martin Rueff

Terms of participation

The research presented must not have been the subject of a previous publication or communication. Interventions can be given in French, English, Italian or German. The communication proposal (the submission of a one-page summary and a short biography) must reach the organizing committee before January 31, 2022 at the following addresses: 

evelyn.dueck@unige.ch and guillemette.bolens@unige.ch