Reimagining the fragment
This panel seeks to explore the fragment broadly construed as both a physical entity and a methodological approach. In the discipline of art history, the fragment calls to mind ancient marble bodies, like the Belvedere Torso, and the ways in which the unearthing of such objects in the Renaissance produced, as Leonard Barkan observes, a new “aesthetics—which is to say a philosophy and phenomenology proper to art itself.” At the same time, scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum and Linda Nochlin have demonstrated that the fragment can be understood to act as both as potent tool of and emblem for cultural and historical realms as disparate as medieval sanctity and secular modernity. This panel aims to embrace this temporal and epistemological breadth in its investigation of the fragment.
Questions for consideration include, but are not limited to:
- How does the fragment destabilize concepts of integrity?
- How does the fragment act as a temporal matrix, prompting acts of deferral and memory?
- How can encounters with the fragment reveal a previously hidden framework?
- How does the fragment act as an agent of mobility?
- How can the fragment engage issues of cross-cultural appropriation, dismantling, and re-use?
- How does the fragment disrupt, or promote, authorial performance?
We are interested in papers that examine these questions within the context of intermedial and transtemporal dialogue, opening up investigations of palimpsest, collage, and pastiche across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.
Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:
Carolina Mangone, Princeton University, mangone@princeton.edu
Jessica Maratsos, University of Cambridge, jam77@cam.ac.uk