Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be – A Conference by Giorgio Busi-Rizzi (UNIBO/KU Leuven)

The ACME Speaker Series Presents:

 

“Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be.
Some Notes towards a Phenomenology
of the Nostalgic Feeling”
Giorgio Busi-Rizzi (UNIBO/KU Leuven)

 

 Mardi, 3 novembre 2015, à partir de 10h30
Séminaire LE
(ISLV – bât. A1, Place du XX Août, Liège)

 

seth_hats_004(c) Seth

 

This presentation aims to conduct a survey of several graphic novels revolving around the theme of nostalgia and/or adopting aesthetic features that elicit it. I will start by reconstructing the historical evolution of the concept of nostalgia, following its metamorphosis from medical to psychological to everyday discourse, from a fully negative connotation to the richly nuanced semantics the term has nowadays, encompassing, at least in its extended use, the whole spectrum of feelings till the escapist jouissance of retro and vintage. I will then isolate a series of features that can help navigate through the concept of nostalgia, following some axes that help better understand its implications, and try to explain what seems to make comics so suitable to express or stimulate nostalgic feelings. Finally, I will briefly discuss the corpus of graphic novels I am currently researching on, quickly showing how, in my view, each of the selected work finds its own peculiar way to deal with nostalgia.

 

Giorgio Busi Rizzi is a PhD student with a joint supervision by the Universities of Bologna and Leuven. His research project focuses on nostalgia in a selection of graphic novels. He is interested in comics studies, narratology, humor theories and translation, and TV series.

 

The ACME Speaker Series is organized by the Comics Research Group ACME (http://www.acme.ulg.ac.be/) and sponsored by BeIPD-COFUND ULg.