Floating, disappearing, and virtual islands from the Aegean to the Pacific: Weird entanglements of fiction and reality

Speaker: Maria Boletsi (University of Amsterdam/Leiden University)
Respondent: Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University)

March 21, 2024
12:30-2:00 pm ET
Online

In this seminar Maria Boletsi will trace an emerging weird turn in literature, art, and scholarship, in response to a disorienting present of intersecting crises—crowned by the climate emergency—and future uncertainty. This turn meshes speculative fiction, art, and science to imagine nonhuman perspectives, rethink our relation to the world, twist positivism and realism, and imagine alternative futures. The genre of weird fiction, partly through its 21st-century revival in New Weird fiction, resonates in this turn, but its forms and themes now enter mainstream cultural production (e.g. realist literature), testing new vocabularies, narratives, and modes of living in the Anthropocene. With the weird as a lens, Boletsi will turn to a constellation of islands, which twist the literary tradition of isolated, autonomous islands in classic utopias and rethink the relation between fiction and reality, and literature’s autonomy/heteronomy, in an increasingly weirded 21st century. Approaching these literary sites from a contemporary vantage point, she will trace the ways they negotiate the relation of fiction and reality as a response to a contemporary condition in which already disappeared and rapidly disappearing worlds jeopardize the existence of the future. Insisting on literature’s heteronomy but also on a distinction between fiction and reality (porous as it may be), they project this distinction as a condition for futurity and for multiple possible worlds. 

This seminar is co-sponsored by the SNFPHI. Click on the link below to register.