Aesthetic Imaginaries in Text and Image

This is a workshop where contributors to an essay collection in progress will present and discuss their writings, with one assigned commentator for each essay. The idea is to provide the ground to foster direct engagements with the concept of the aesthetic imaginary, yet at the same time ensuring that the individual focus in each essay is not eschewed. The seminar is open to all who are interested in following the conversation on “aesthetic imaginaries.” (see below for program)

Opening the seminar on Friday 28 April at 10 in Auditorium L (Sydneshaugen) is writer and professor of English Steve Tomasula (University of Notre Dame) with a talk titled:

“Ascension, A Novel: A Reading/Presentation of an Image-Text Novel in Progress.” 

"Ascension is a story of nature as it was. And is. And might become. It is the story of how our changing conception of nature, and the means we use to depict it, change the “natural.” And ourselves. It is the story of how we continually remake the world in our own image and in turn are remade by it."

The full abstract can be found below.  

Seminar event, Bergen Public Library (café) 17 00: 

In connection with the seminar, Steve Tomasula will read from his collection of short fiction, Once Human: Stories. A manga artist who is afraid that she herself is slipping into a cartoon version of life, a lab technician who makes art with the cloning technology she uses at work, a sociologist hunting for the gene that makes some people want to take risks—these are some of the characters that populate the image-text fictions in Once Human. Exploring the spaces where life is shaped by science and the technologies we bring into being, Steve Tomasula’s characters often find that the harder they look at the world, the less they can say. Through the words and images that make up these stories, a map emerges that charts the territory of human longing and the failure of poetry, science, and technology to explain the “why” of the world, if not its “how.”

Steve Tomasula is the author of the image-text novels VAS: An Opera in Flatland, the acclaimed novel of the biotech revolution, The Book of Portraiture, IN & OZ, and TOC: A New-Media Novel. His short fiction has appeared in Bomb, McSweeneys, the Iowa Review, and many other publications. A Howard Fellow, he lives in Chicago, and can be found at www.stevetomasula.com.

The event is open to all interested!