Veranstaltungsart: Konferenz

The first annual conference of the project The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe (CAPONEU) discusses a variety of understandings of the political novel as a genre. It probes genre-theoretically and genre-historically informed approaches to defining the political novel and to paradigmatically illustrate this mutable genre with respect to specific novels that emerged in heterogeneous contexts.

The conference will provide us with an opportunity to critically examine and expand on the tentative definition of the political novel that we have formulated as a consortium: “The political novel in Europe is a set of procedures by which a novel is coded and decoded as political in a particular constellation of circumstances (epistemological, historical, literary, national, political and linguistic). It is hence identified through the complex process of reworking and becoming (reappropriation, repositioning and rearrangement of different sets of circumstances), resulting in the novel being recognised or even misread as political, a cross-genre more than a genre.” The conference will also address a variety of methodological ways in which the political novel can be analysed, involving two interrelated levels of literary and cultural enquiry: text-immanent analysis and contextual (text-extrinsic) analysis. To this end, the speakers will historicise the various forms of the political novel and flesh out the aesthetic, epistemic, political, ethical, moral, etc. norms that guide both their own and historical understandings of what (does not) count as a political novel.

Wednesday, 27 Sep 2023

1.15 pm

• Patrick Eiden-Offe, Eva Geulen (both ZfL), Zrinka Božić (University of Zagreb): Introduction

2.00 pm
Institutions of Genre
Chair: Patrick Eiden-Offe (ZfL)

• Zrinka Božić (University of Zagreb): Rethinking politics of an unfinished project
• Mark Devenney (University of Brighton): Thinking fictions of the political

4.00 pm
A Genre between Estrangement and Identification: Perceptions and Perspectives
Chair: Ivana Perica (ZfL)

• Zvonimir Glavaš (University of Zagreb): “From Charlemagne to the title of the King”: Political novel between estrangement and recognition
• Tomasz Mizerkiewicz (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań): Perceptions in the political novels

5.45 pm
Fishbowl

Thursday, 28 Sep 2023

10.00 am
Identity, Social Stratification and the Politics of the Novel
Chair: Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta)

• Polina Mackay (University of Nicosia): Intersectional politics in the ‘cancerland’: Reading Natasha Brown’s Assembl
• Marina Protrka Štimec (University of Zagreb): “Perché i xe bestie?!” Politics, race and exclusion in Vladan Desnica’s Zimsko ljetovanje (The Winter Summer Holiday)

12.00 pm
The Political Novel and Political Readings of the Novel: Feminist Perspectives
Chair: Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta)

• Mirela Dakić (University of Zagreb): What is novel in the political novel? The perspectives of contemporary feminist theory

2.00 pm
Flourishing Repoliticisations
Chair: Aurore Peyroles (University of Regensburg)

• Magda Potok (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań): The repoliticisation of Spanish culture and the dispute over the political novel in the context of the economic crisis of 2008
• Vedrana Veličković (University of Brighton): Brexit and the political novel/The politics of Brexlit

4.00 pm
Academic Fictions
Chair: Aurore Peyroles (University of Regensburg)

• Rahul Putty (Manipal Academy of Higher Education): Not a book for burning: Reading the political in academic fiction

5.00 pm
Fishbowl

8.00 pm
Roundtable
Moderator: Johanna-Charlotte Horst (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

• “Literatur in Krisenzeiten: Was kann der Roman tun?” (Literature in Times of Crisis: What Can the Novel Do?)
  With Heike Geißler, Alhierd Bacharevič and Maryam Aras (in German language)

Friday, 29 Sep 2023

10.00 am
Individual Subjects and/against Collectivity
Chair: Johanna-Charlotte Horst (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

• Andrea Milanko, Ana Tomljenović (University of Zagreb): The picaresque novel: Claiming the unclaimed existence
• Paul Stewart (University of Nicosia): The individual and incorporation: Fundamental operations of the political in Beckett’s Molloy

12.00 pm
Blurred Boundaries
Chair: Kyung-Ho Cha (ZfL)

• Shambhavi Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi): Reading Hubert Fichte’s literary works as political

2.00 pm
Eastern/Western Chronotopes
Chair: Kyung-Ho Cha (ZfL)

• Rossie Artemis (University of Nicosia): Of people and chronotopes – Berlin in the early novels of Nabokov and Shklovsky
• Błażej Warkocki (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań): Political parameters of East European queer novel: The case of Lubiewo (Lovetown) by Michał Witkowski

4.00 pm
The Political Novel in Europe: A Case Study
Chair: Kyung-Ho Cha (ZfL)

• Nenad Ivić (University of Zagreb): Is Pierre Michon’s The Eleven a political novel?

5.00 pm
Fishbowl

There is no shortage of critiques of utopian imaginaries for being coded in colonial, Western, masculine, Christian, and extractive ideologies. Utopia has been, and continues to be, an often violent gesture that chooses the future of select groups and certain forms of life at the expense of others. Is utopia, then, still worth keeping in a world that has been so damaged through its violent deployments? Is it possible not to treat utopia merely as a model of abstract futurity based on escapist projections of a harmonious ideal? What happens when utopia is conceived not only as a way of imagining a better future but also as a way of intervening in the present by addressing the past? Can utopia welcome ambivalence, disquietude, paradox, opacity, and uncertainty?

This symposium draws on the notion of coding, which is deployed in multiple areas ranging from genetic coding and cybernetics to politics and art, and understands it as a mode of languaging that aims at engineering futures. This notion helps to reveal the difficulty of engaging with the transmissions and effects of utopian projects and the encoded logics they impose on social and environmental possibilities. It also allows for thinking about the possibility of de-coding the codes of extractive utopias by attuning to the anti- and decolonial cracks in colonial histories, practices, and discourses where new and unforeseen models of utopia might emerge. To this end, the event seeks to gather scholars, theorists, and practitioners working on the possibility of alternative models of the future and the present that account for and attempt to repair historical and contemporary colonial ecologies.

The symposium aims to develop critical approaches to the concept and project of utopia from literary studies, post- and decolonial studies, science and technology studies, comparative literature, environmental humanities, psychoanalysis, history, anthropology, sexuality and gender studies, and beyond. The ensuing discussion will emphasize the implicit biases and disparities of power built into, and often obscured by, utopian and dystopian world-making.

In English

With

Spencer Adams
Leonardo Caffo
Lara Choksey
Hilda Fernandez-Alvarez
Tereza Hendl
Caleb Fridell
Özgün Eylül İşcen
Mateusz Janik
Chiara Di Leone
José Antonio Magalhães
Davide Prati
Patricia Reed
Oliver Silverman
Stephen Temitope David
Fátima Vieira
and
Ж

Organized by

Marta Aleksandrowicz (ICI Berlin), Michela Coletta (ICI Berlin / FU Berlin / University of Warwick), Sarath Jakka (ICI Berlin / ISRF), Ben Woodard (ICI Berlin)

An ICI Berlin event organized in collaboration with the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.

How to Attend

At the venue: Registration will open on 13 September 2023