Call for papers
Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies (DSLCC)
Popculture and mediated memory: the Czech comics.
Venice, 18 -19 April 2016
Deadline per papers proposal: 1st February 2016.
The Czech language and literature section of the Department of Linguistics and Comparative
Cultural Studies (DSLCC) in collaboration with the Workshop for the Literary Study of Comics
Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies (DSLCC), organizes the conference
Popculture and mediated memory: the Czech comics, aimed to study the relation between
mediated memory and the comics focused on the Czech comics.
As mediated memory we refer to the fact that mediated materials are the shared cultural bases on
which collective memory is built. In this process, popular culture forms, comics, pop and rock
music, and television as medium of lived daily life, hold a central and increasingly incisive role.
Collective memory (J. Assmann 1995) has to be mediated to circulate, and the historical changes in
memory are related to the change in the media production. Collective memory elements can be
transferred to the following generations only through their mediation with images, texts (also
audiovisual) and narrative conventions (A. Assmann 2011; A. Landsberg 2004; G. Lipsitz 2001).
Generational stratification of popular culture is such strong and complex that can draw and rely on
its own memory as a linguistic repertoire.
Through different papers and points of view, the conference is also aimed to study how in Czech
context comics became a cultural production source strongly bound to the formation of memory of
recent past, especially the periods of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Second World
War and the socialist period, but also the inter-war years. We refer to comics as Michal Kocián and
Zdeněk Ležák's Stopa legionáře I and II , also authors of Ve jménu Husa.
Beside a contemporary production facing the recent past, the study of mediated memory has to take
into consideration the past production. This production is tied from one side to an aimed historical
interpretation, and from another side to the propagandistic task of culture, especially in popular
culture. It is enough to quote the comics adaptations of the Resistance hero story, Franta Pérák,
from the 1948 version Pérákovy další osudy and the more recent Ondřej Neff's version as a superhero
in the 1988. Transmediated nature of memory is clearly expressed by Kaia Saudek's Major
Zeman a jeho 6 případů, the comics version of the Tv series The 30 cases of Major Zeman,
A further field of study is the complicated relationship between socialist culture and the comics:
from the regulations of the medium and the reception of the established cultural norms by the
author, to the production of underground culture. From the changes in Foglar's Rychlé šípy in the
1945-47 period to Karel Sadecký's Octobriana. These comics work as a medium of construction of
the past, a past that became communicative, shared, mediated and re-mediated memory (J. van
Dijck 2007; A. Erll 2011).
Papers may be related to (but not bound) the study of
 representation modes of historical national past in the comics;
 influence of retro as a way to relate history in the republishing and success of old comics
(vintage and retro);
 interrelation and correlation between comics and other media related to historical memory
and collective memory;
 influence of visual elements in the representation of historical period (colour, black and
white, accurate or stylized feature etc.) and its influence in the recognition mechanism of
historical period;
 reception of comics text related to individual and collective memory in the multimedia
cultural context.
Comparative analysis and single case studies are welcome.
Conference languages: Italian, English and Czech.
Please, sent an abstracts (max. 800 characters including spaces) and a short CV by: 1st February
2016 to the address tiziana.damico@unive.it
Works cited
A. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives, Cambridge
University Press, 2011;
J. Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity” in New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural
History/Cultural Studies (Spring - Summer, 1995), pp. 125-133;
A. Erll, Memory in Culture, Palgrave Macmillan 2011;
A. Landsberg, Prostethic memory. The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass
culture, Columbia University Press, 2004;
G. Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, University of
Minnesota press, 2001;
J. van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Cultural Memory in the Present), Stanford
University Press 2007;