Workshops

In the workshop "Theorizing Image Descriptions: Literature and/as Alt Text" with Seo-Young Chu (CUNY), we aim to discuss alt texts as a tool for literary scholarship. Alt texts call attention to the translatability of aesthetic elements from image to text and the powers and instabilities they, as practice of representation, unavoidably entail: What is made visible or discussable? What resists language? What is neutralized and what is highlighted? Discussing image descriptions, we thus suggest, is an opportunity to explore new ways of approaching fundamental questions about mimesis, aesthetics, ekphrastic poetics, epistemology, and close reading as well as the relationship of such topics to categories such as race and gender.
Theorizing_Image_Descriptions_Abstract (PDF, 1 MB)