The next conference of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland will take place at the University of Bristol, 4-6 September 2019. The lead panel for the conference will be Citizenship, with a number of regular as well as one-off panels.

If you are interested in contributing a paper to any of these panels, please send your proposal directly to the e-mail address of the convenors listed below. Proposals for papers should be 150-200 words and should reach the relevant convenors by 5 April 2019.

http://www.ags.ac.uk

In the eighteenth century, Lessing’s Laokoon distinguished between the ‘temporal arts’ of literature and the ‘spatial arts’ of painting and sculpture. This panel will explore the concomitance of these notions of ‘temporal and spatial art’ brought together in the form of graphic narratives and comics.

Still images showing single moments in space and time may create a sense of temporal flow and spatial movement through their sequential order, their size, their colouring and shading, the ‚gutter‘ (the space between the panels), their framing, even the destruction of such frames. Speech within comic panels situates us within ‚real time‘, which may conflict with the stasis of the image. How does this differ from cinematic and literary narrative, already much explored by critics in terms of space and time? What are the particular possibilities afforded by the combination of static image and word? Germanic artists are situated within a rich European tradition of woodcut novels, sequential art, and graphic narratives. Papers might explore German-specific or comparative graphic narratives.

Convenor: Erica Wickerson (St John’s College, Cambridge); ehf20@cam.ac.uk