International seminar on literature and crisis
International seminar on crisis and literature will take place on February 10, from 12:00 to 19:00, in M-213
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iCal calendarThe seminar will present a newly published book, The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis.
Discussions will explore how literature reflects crises and how crises have influenced cultural development—particularly literature—over time, fostering new genres and literary forms.
The keynote speakers are Prof. Robert Eaglestone (University of London) and Prof. Raili Marling (University of Tartu).
Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy and on Holocaust and Genocide studies. He is the author of eight books including Literature: Why it Matters (2019); The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature (2017) Truth and Wonder: A literary introduction to Plato and Aristotle (2022) and the editor or co-editor of ten books more, including Brexit and Literature (2018).
Crisis, Hope and Literature
This talk will put forward the argument that despite its grim connotations, crisis calls for hope, drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s recent essay The Spirit of Hope (2024, original German 2023). Han makes a case for hope in the face of the multiple piling up crises we are currently facing. His argument, which both draws on and supersedes Heidegger, suggests that hope is a fundamental mood, which discloses the world to us and may act as an antidote to collective fear and despair that characterises our time. However, at the core of this work is a long polemic with Hannah Arendt’s conceptions of natality and of forgiveness, and a repeated assertion that “Hope is a catalyst for writing… Poetry is a language of hope”. The talk will dwell on these questions: How convincing is Han’s account of hope? Does Arendt’s less positive account offer us more resources? Is literature where hope lies?
Raili Marling is Professor of English Studies at the University of Tartu. Her main research interests include gender in modernist and contemporary literature and cultural practices; affects of neoliberalism; the reception of gender in the postsocialist context; the possibilities of combining affect and discourse studies; politics of representation. She has published extensively on these topics internationally and in Estonian. She is the editor of Care, Control and COVID-19 Health and Biopolitics in Philosophy and Literature (2023), author of the first Estonian textbook on gender studies and has collaborated with various governmental and non-governmental organizations on gender issues.
How to represent slow crises: Fiction in the age of uncertainty
We live an age in which crisis has become ordinary (Berlant 2011). This creates intense insecurity, especially since many of the crises are examples of what Rob Nixon (2011) has called “slow violence”: inexorable, but invisible processes that become apparent only when it is too hard or perhaps even impossible to do anything. This creates a major representational challenge, as it is hard to convey something that defies the expected criteria of eventfulness. It is particularly hard to convey the affective atmospheres of this ordinary, yet anxiety-filled time. The talk will focus on how fiction can fill this gap, on the example of fiction written during COVID-19, the global crisis that has also been called a boring apocalypse.
Contributors presenting their chapters include Prof. Chiara Battisti (University of Verona), Dr. Harvey Wiltshire (University of London), Prof. Piret Viires) and Dr. Ksenia Shmydkaya (Tallinn University). Prof. Eneken Laanes and Prof. Marek Tamm (Tallinn University) will offer their perspectives on the book and its themes.
The seminar will be opened by the book's editors Julia Kuznetski, Chiara Battisti and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and moderated by Ksenia Shmydkaya. At the end of the seminar, a general discussion will take place. To facilitate this discussion, sample chapters will be sent in advance to registered participants for prior reading.
Participants will enjoy a sustenance break and a reception at the end.
There will also be an opportunity to participate in a lottery and win a copy of the book!
For questions and additional information:
Julia Kuznetski
julia.kuznetski@tlu.ee