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The ‘Second World’ in Contemporary British Writing
| Termin |
16. September 2022 - 18. September 2022
|
| Veranstaltungsart |
Tagung |
| Einrichtung |
Philosophische Fakultät II |
| Veranstalter |
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik |
| Veranstaltungsort |
Melanthonianum, Hörsaal XX und Medienraum |
| Straße |
Universitätsplatz 9 |
| PLZ/Ort |
06108 Halle (Saale) |
Beschreibung
The conference investigates contemporary British writing published after the fall of the Berlin Wall, whose narrative focus lies on the Eastern and Central European past of the Cold War period – the so-called ‘second world’.
At a time marked by the congruence of dystopian anxieties and ‘the monotony of post-heroic’ liberal democracies (Krastev and Holmes 2019), post-1990 literary explorations of ‘really existing’ socialist systems of the Central and Eastern European past appear both at odds with the expectation that contemporary culture should respond to present-day concerns, and oddly significant. Since the end of the Cold War, an increasing number of British writers, including Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Fiona Rintoul, Tom Stoppard, Tibor Fischer, Ian McEwan, Ella Hickson, and Francis Spufford, have employed characters and settings of the so-called ‘second world’, whose states had claimed to have structurally established idea(l)s that were once considered utopian. Moreover, the apparent desire to review and imaginatively revisit past ‘utopias’ has been conceptualized by Zygmunt Bauman as retrotopia, the desire to retrieve – through creatively engaging with ‘genuine or putative aspects of this past’ – the utopian potential that it represented.
While there is considerable research on representations of British writing on and during the Cold War period, scholars have paid much less attention to the ways in which British writing in the three decades since the fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’ has continued to imaginatively engage with what had been, and arguably still is, viewed as a possible alternative to both capitalism and democracy for many in the West as well. The keynote lectures and papers of the symposium explore narrative conceptions of the private, the political, and the civil in the second-world setting in general, and retrotopian perspectives on totalitarian ideology in particular.
Hinweise
For planning purposes, we kindly ask you to register for the conference by filling out the registration form and returning it by 9 September 2022 to: secworld@anglistik.uni-halle.de
There will be no fee for attending the conference.
If you prefer to attend only an individual lecture and/or session, please let us know via e-mail.
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