Intuition and form: André Jolles (1874-1946), life, works, posterity
International Conference (Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore, 1-2 July 2015)

André Jolles is one of the most important representatives of the morphology of literature active in the early 20th century. He was a scholar of aesthetics, ethnology and folklore, a privileged interlocutor of Warburg and Huizinga, an accomplished Italianist and Romanist, lecturer and translator from English, Italian and French. His method of analysis of cultural productions – as epitomised in his celebrated Einfache Formen (a book that today we can only read in a reconstructed text) – significantly antedates those, now best known, of Auerbach, Curtius and Frye. The relative reputation of Jolles among the scholars of his time, or slightly later, was followed by a substantial oblivion, accompanied by a heavy damnatio memoriae, because of its adherence to Nazism. Even the late reception, in structuralist terms, of Einfache Formen, published in French translation in 1972, contributed only partially to a thorough reconsideration of his views.
The conference, organised by the Department of Humanities of the University of Udine in association with GERCI (Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches sur la Culture Italienne) of the Université Stendhal in Grenoble and with the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, aims to focus on Jolles’s life, works and influence and to investigate the possibility of applying his formal categories within the various disciplines. The program is divided into four main areas:
1. The genesis of Jolles’ critical and aesthetic thought, through contributions that show in particular a) how its reflection on the morphology of literature could be considered both as an extreme example and as an overcoming of positivism, or b) how his categorization of aesthetics is conditioned by the early-twentieth-century idea of “form”: influences, relationships, and parallel reflections on the idea of form (eg. the morphology of Goethe, the relationship with the Warburg’s Pathosformeln, the thought of Riegl and Worringer).
2. Jolles’s biography, with particular interest on new discoveries – oriental and classical studies, private letters, works on various arguments, publishing and cultural initiatives, translations, travels, family and military life, academic work, books read and annotated by him, the reconstruction of his library, witnesses of his contemporaries.
3. Jolles’ work and its reception in the various areas: literature (as for instance Neuschäffer’s or Cottino Jones’s works within Boccaccio studies, Jauss’ categorial system; Jolles’ inclusion in the horizon of structuralism; history of art; architecture; archeology; folklore and ethnology; fairy tale studies and the picaresque; classics; creative writing; theater).
4. Jolles’s dialogue with Italian and European intellectuals, his correspondence (eg. with J. Huizinga and A. Warburg); attempts to analyze Italian and European literary works according to Jolles’ categories.

Abstracts in Italian, French or English, of no more than 400 words and accompanied by a brief bio-bibliography of the author, should be submitted by March 16, 2015 to the following addresses:
silvia.contarini@uniud.it
filippo.fonio@u-grenoble3.fr
maurizio.ghelardi@sns.it

A collective volume is planned with the proceedings of the conference.