Doctoral Workshop in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies in English (2/7)

06.03.2024

Pr Simon Swift, UNIGE

Dr. Patrick Jones, UNIGE

À déterminer

The Modern and Contemporary fortnightly workshop (Mod Con) is a well-attended workshop for PhD students and staff from all CUSO universities. The workshop was transferred to an online format in Autumn 2020 and Spring 2021 and remained popular among doctoral students and early career scholars from the CUSO network. We returned to in-person, while offering Zoom attendance, in 2022 and have had a series of successful workshops. In order to facilitate the participation of doctoral students from other universities so that we can maintain this forum, we are hereby applying for funding again for 2024. The workshop is a valuable space for the exchange of ideas between doctoral students working on modern and contemporary literatures of the English-speaking world. The 2024 programme will include talks, workshops and professionalisation seminars. and it will remain an important space for work-in-progress papers from doctoral students.

Democratic Anarchy and the Ends of Politics Matthew Scully (UNIL)

I will discuss my forthcoming monograph, Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature, which draws on a range of American authors from Harriet Jacobs and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Toni Morrison and Ocean Vuong. Following the insights of queer theory, Black Studies, Asian American Studies, political theory, and aesthetic philosophy, the book develops a critique of the many narratives of democracy that in fact possess anti-democratic ends. Literature offers a key resource for such a project because, as I show, both literature and politics depend on acts of representation through which various notions of equality become contested. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion of the process involved in publishing the first book, as well as the questions it opens for future research projects.

UNIGE

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