"...content generates its shape itself, and requires form; the interior creates its exterior; the artistic idea gives rise directly to its embodiment.”
Jan Patočka
This international conference is intended for all Czech and international doctoral students on full-time or part-time study programmes in the fields of art history, theology, literature, music, and other cultural and historical disciplines. The aim of the conference is to enable students to present the results of their research so far, to introduce new and current insights based on their work on their dissertation, to compare their methodological approaches, and thus to support their research activities.
The theme of the conference, “Content and Form”, with its subtitle quoting one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, has been deliberately chosen so as to attract as wide a range of doctoral students from humanities study programmes as possible, and to provide sufficient scope for the choice of theme and approach. Papers presented at the conference can discuss works in the fields of the visual arts, theology, cultural history, literature, music, and so on. Reflecting the quotation from Jan Patočka, papers should deal with the relationship between content and form. Everything has its content and form, and they influence and determine each other, whether we are dealing with artistic, literary, musical, or theological works or ideas. Papers should focus on how the content determines the eventual form, and, at the same time, how the form of a work influences the content; whether it can shift it in a different direction, clarify it, underline it, or, on the contrary, whether it can suppress it. Papers may also consider the question of whether it lies in the artist’s power to determine the exterior form for a specific content, or whether every content chooses its form itself, as indicated in the statement quoted above from Patočka’s collection of essays Umění a čas (Art and Time). The theme allows papers to examine the artist’s approach to creating a work at any phase of the genesis of the work, or to consider later views and the development of opinions on a work that has been created.
