Lecture Series: Narrated Fashion. Cuts, Texts, Patterns in Literature and Media
Lecture series summer semester 2023, Wednesdays 6-8 p.m., Goethe University Frankfurt
Location: Goethe University, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main
Room: Campus Westend, IG Farben building 411
A cooperation between the Goethe University Frankfurt (Dr. Iris Schäfer, PD Dr. Martina Wernli) and the Technical University of Darmstadt (Prof. Dr. phil Alexandra Karentzos)
Online access
Lecture Series Program
19.04.2023 Lecture Series: Narrated Fashion. Cuts, Texts, Patterns in Literature and Media
Dr. Iris Schäfer (Goethe University Frankfurt), PD Dr. Martina Wernli (Goethe University Frankfurt), Prof. Dr. Alexandra Karentzos (Technical University of Darmstadt)
Abstract
The clothing of fictional characters described or written in literature is “released from the burden of objective reference” (Kraß 2006, 1), as Andreas Kraß pointedly puts it in Written Clothes, but points to a significant interdependence of the imaginary and the real, as this is the case “The appeal of fashion […] in its ability to blend both worlds into one another and to give real life a mythical quality and at the same time to imagine life To give it a predicate of reality.” (Ibid. 11)
03.05.2023 ‘Through the Looking Glass & What Fashion Found There: Lewis Carroll’s Literary Heroine as Style Icon’
Prof. Kiera Vaclavik, Ph.D. (Queen Mary University of London)
Abstract
Lewis Carroll writes virtually nothing about the physical appearance and clothing of his most famous protagonist and both he and Sir John Tenniel – the illustrator whose influential images first brought Alice to life in the public imaginary – were temperamentally and ideologically opposed to fashion and its strictures. It is difficult to imagine a less promising start for a style icon, and yet this is precisely what Alice has become.
