June 18 – #HAMLET⏐KOMPLEX 🗓
Peter W. Marx (Universität zu Köln)
June 18, 2018, 6-8 p.m. (c.t.), 00.212 (Philo II)
Book Launch & Talk
Please find more information on this event on the poster.
Please note: The event will be held in German.
June 19 – Encountering Pictures: Materiality, Conceptualist Photography, and the Subject 🗓
Julia Polyck-O’Neill (Brock University, Canada)
June 19, 2018, 12-2 p.m., 02.102 (Philo II)
The idea that artistic practice, after the massive shifts initiated by conceptual art, takes into account, and is accountable to, the material reality of human relations suggests a radical reconceptualization of art’s social, cultural, economic, and political position and role. According to this reading, I consider how conceptualist photography has the capacity to contribute to such considerations to an even greater degree, by means of the visual-cognitive dynamics inherent to the photographic encounter. With its unique epistemological and ontological bearing, such an encounter has the potential to proffer a significant phenomenological intervention: one that uses both evidential and abstract-conceptual information to simultaneously promote deep reflection and propose new perceptions of the world in relation to the self. In comparatively analyzing Canadian artist Jeff Wall’s primary strategies in staging photographic images, I uncover how historic and more recent theoretical and philosophical discussions and material practices in photography emerge from and import specific but variable sets of relations that effectively participate in the construction of subjectivity according to both individual and collective scales.
Julia Polyck-O‘Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer, and is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program (Culture and Aesthetics) at Brock University (St Catharines, Ontario, Canada) and Visiting Lecturer in the Obama Institute at JGU Mainz.
You can download the poster for this talk here.
June 19 – Punks and Gay-Cats: Vulnerable Youth in the Hobo Narratives of Jack London and A-No 1 🗓
Owen Clayton (University of Lincoln, UK)
June 19, 2018, 10 a.m.-12 noon, P 102 (Philosophicum)
Dr. Owen Clayton is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, UK. His research interests include transatlantic visual culture and working–class studies. His first monograph, Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915, came out with Palgrave MacMillan in 2015. He has published articles on photography and class in the work of William Dean Howells and Jack London, and recently edited a special issue of the journal History of Photography. His current monograph project is on transient workers (‘hobos’) in American literature.
June 18 – Climate Theories in Early American Literature 🗓
Prof. Michael Boyden (Uppsala University)
June 18, 2018, 12-2 p.m., P 5 (Philosophicum)
Environmental humanists routinely take their departure from the romantic ecology of the mid-
nineteenth century, dismissing earlier climate theories as racist, unscientific, or overly impressionistic. Drawing on a number of salient examples, this lecture revalues the pre-1850 period as one of intense climatic sensibility in American literary culture. It argues that early climate theories fused science and sentiment, culture and climate in ways that citizen science, public health, epigenetics, and new materialist philosophy are aspiring to do at the present juncture. Moreover, unlike modern climate science, with its reliance on statistics, remote sensing, and performance indexes, these climate theories – often anachronistically understood as environmental determinism – eschewed philosophical speculation and prioritized experiential, sensory knowledge as a crucial interface between the emotions, thought, and the natural world. The oft-lamented dualism of Western philosophy, which has been taken as the root of our troubled relation to the environment, was less pronounced in the climatic doctrines that we tend to consign to a naïve, predisciplinary phase in the history of climate awareness than in current debates on global warming. The lecture thus offers a plea for more historical awareness in the climate debate and warns against overly monolithic narratives of ecological modernization.
Michael Boyden is Associate Professor of American Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Predicting the Past: The Paradoxes of American Literary History (Leuven UP, 2009). He has a new book project underway entitled Climate and Sensibility in American Literature, 1780-1850.
You can find the event poster here.
June 12 – Biopolitics and Infrastructure 🗓
Prof. Christopher Breu (Illinois State University)
June 12, 2018, 6-8 p.m., P 103 (Philosophicum)
This talk draws upon biopolitical theory and Marxist theory to reinvigorate an economic, social, technological, and ecological conception of infrastructure. Given the recent material turn in critical theory, it is high time to reconsider the Marxist distinction between infrastructure and superstructure. If, during the cultural turn, the superstructure was privileged to the point of an almost complete effacement of the infrastructure (or base), in our own moment of proliferating infrastructures, biopolitical production, and ecological crisis, the concept of the infrastructure needs to be both affirmed and retheorized. This talk begins this work.
Christopher Breu is Professor of English at Illinois State University, USA.
You can find the event poster here.
May 29 – Suspense/Desire/Repetition: Serial Poetics and the Early American Novel 🗓
Prof. Matthew Pethers (University of Nottingham)
May 29, 2018, 6-8 p.m., P 103 (Philosophicum)
While literary critics have increasingly addressed questions of temporality across a wide range of early American genres, book historians have yet to fully consider the role that temporality played in the production, distribution and reception of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century texts. In beginning to redress that oversight, this talk will consider three interrelated models of print time – Narrative Time (formal and thematic chronologies), Reading Time (sequences and durations of consumption) and Market Time (aggregate publication rhythms) – as they were articulated during the post-Revolutionary period via the staggered material embodiments of early American literature. More particularly, I intend to analyse the serialized novel, and how its distinctive dynamics of progress and delay were connected to the interconnected poetics of narrative suspense, readerly desire, and market repetition that underlie the crucial role periodical and fascicule publication played in the development of American fiction. Examining texts such as Judith Sargent Murray’s sentimental novel The Gleaner and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s picaresque novel Modern Chivalry, I will explore how early American authors and publishers tried, and at times failed, to use the extended temporalities of serialization to legitimate and commercialize the culturally suspect novel-form.
For more information see the poster