In light of the ongoing humanitarian and moral crises in the world – Gaza, Ukraine, the Mediterranean, to name a few – the question becomes urgent: Why work with literature? Literature can illustrate and problematize moral and political problems; it often acts as a seismograph for contemporary movements. The purpose of the seminar is to examine how literature and language (incl. metaphor) can approach the social and political unease of the present, and what steps it takes to deal with the seemingly unmanageable.
Guest speakers are Mary Cosgrove, Professor in German at Trinity College Dublin / Coláiste na Tríonóide and Ingvild Folkvord, Professor in German at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. The seminar is held in connection with the midway evaluation of Even Teistung's doctoral dissertation project.
Programme
10:00 – 10:10: Introduction
10:10 – 10:50: Mary Cosgrove (TCD): Figurations of the In-Between in Sibylle Berg’s GRM. Brainfuck (2019)
10:50 – 10:55: short break (coffee arrives)
10:55 – 11:35: Even Teistung (UiO): “Greetings from the Shithole”. Homelessness, Community and Agency in the Refugee Experience, by way of Arendt, Anders and Erpenbeck.
11:35 – 11:40: short break
11:40 – 12:20: Ingvild Folkvord (NTNU): Literature, a ‘Training Ground’ for Dealing with Complex Identity Formations? The Prose of Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt and Lena Gorelik
12:20 – 13:20: lunch
13:20 – 14:00: Keyvan Allahyari (UiO): Eastern Africa as Reparative Geography: Shailja Patel’s Migritude
14:00 – 14:15: coffee
14:15 – 14:55: Johan Schimanski (UiO): Flight, Homelessness and Reading in Ali Smith’s Autumn
14:55 – 15:00: short break
15:00 – 15:30: summing up