Project coordinator : François Jacquesson (LACITO up until 2019)
The project was submitted within the framework of the 1st Call for Projects organised by PRES Sorbonne Paris Cité. It received funding from USPC and brought together researchers and students from CNRS, INALCO and the University of Paris 3.
The members of the project examine different types of "image narratives" in Europe and Asia (China, India, Japan, Tibet), when compared with their textual source and studied, whenever possible, in their living context. This perspective in no way sets out to subordinate the figurative arts to the texts, nor to reduce the specificity of each "medium", but seeks to provide a comparative method precisely in order to try to determine what in each field is distinctive, and what remains comparable.
The project is therefore organised around two axes :
(A) the "narrative support" axis : text, series of images and in some cases theatricalised narratives
(B) "cultural" axis since the study will be conducted in different cultures.
The team is made up of researchers and students or post-docs who specialise in these cultures and who belong to various disciplinary fields : anthropology, history, art history, linguistics, literature.
At the Centre for Himalayan Studies Pascale Dollfus took part in this project. Since 2013 she has been carrying out comparative research with a focus on "stories in pictures". Alone or in pairs, she works on :
the Buchens as storytellers and the paintings that act as a support to their stories ;
the lives of the Buddha – painted or sculpted : analysis of narrative processes (with François Jacquesson and Nils Martin) ;
the lives of Jesus in the Christian Western world : Images and performances (with François Jacquesson).
A "Narrativity" colloquium was held on 25–26 November 2015 at INALCO, 65 rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris. Programme
Digital resources : Borobudur (Java) Narrative Cycles within the framework of the project
Pascale Dollfus and François Jacquesson visited this site for a week in June 2016. The purpose of this visit was twofold : on the one hand, to see how the sculpted images were organised and to understand the scope of the successive destructions and reconstructions ; and on the other hand, to observe how today’s audiences visit and understand this monument.
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