POLITICAL READING OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Theory and practice of political interpretation of literary texts in Post-Socialist countries, Western Europe and the United States

WORKSHOP PROGRAM

International workshop in organized by Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures, University of Zurich, Department of and Comparative Literature and Department of Political Science of (CU – UZH Joint Seed Funding).

DECEMBER 5th, 2019 Filozofická fakulta UK, Náměstí Jana Palacha 1/2, Praha 1, Room P104

17:00 LECTURE: Damien BERGER Political aesthetics as method – some general reflections

DECEMBER 6th, 2019 Swéerts-Sporckův palác, Hybernská 3, Praha 1, Room H303

9:30-10:00 INTRODUCTION 10:00-11:30 FIRST PANEL (Chair: Tomáš GLANC) Jan SOWA (10:00-10:15) Politics as the Real. Trauma, the outside of the text (le dehors du texte) and the limits of apolitical reading of literature Hana BLAŽKOVÁ (10:15-10:30) Authenticity in the early 1990s as a placebo of politics: Jan Lopatka, Michal Viewegh and others Jan MATONOHA (10:30-10:45) Dispositives of silence, injurious attachments and discursive emergence of silencing: towards a critical assessment of gender politics in Czech dissent and exile literature DISCUSSION (10:45-11:30) 11:30-12:00 COFFEE BREAK 12:00-13:30 SECOND PANEL (Chair: Františka ZEZULÁKOVÁ SCHORMOVÁ) Dobrota PUCHEROVÁ (12:00-12:15) The politics and aesthetics of South African anti-apartheid literature Tereza JIROUTOVÁ KYNČLOVÁ (12:15-12:30) Chicana Feminist Literature, U.S.-Mexico Border and the Case of the Juárez Murders Mateusz CHMURSKI (12:30-12:45) Life-writing, representation, r/evolution? Polish cultural wars and the reception of Gombrowicz DISCUSSION (12:45-13:30) 13:30-15:00 LUNCH 15:00-17:00 THIRD PANEL (Chair: Jan SOWA) Stefan SEGI (15:00-15:15) Crime and punishment in the 90s: Czech crime fiction as a means of social criticism Olga PAVLOVA (15:15-15:30) Citizen, Nation, and History Through the Perception of Vladimir Sorokin Matthias MEINDL (15:30-15:45) Manifesto of the Russian Poet Kirill Medvedev and his Methodological Background FINAL DISCUSSION 15:45-17:00

ABSTRACTS

Political aesthetics as method – some general reflections Damien Berger, Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Lucerne In literary texts which usually do not formulate any explicit political program, the question of political aesthetics as method (not as the object of reflection) becomes even more urgent than in theoretical texts: One can ask about the possibility of a method that looks upon literary practices as political forms of articulation without neglecting their specific literaricity. The question is then whether the distinction between immanent and political reading is a false alternative. Such problems shall be discussed using the example of Theodor W. Adorno's reading of Stefan George with its potentials and limitations.

Authenticity in the early 1990s as a placebo of politics: Jan Lopatka, Michal Viewegh and others Hana Blažková, Department of Czech Literature and Comparative Literature, Charles University The claim of literary authenticity in the early 1990s is related to the depoliticization of most spheres of society. In this period, people from the Czech literary field rhetorically rejected all their social roles and commitments. Writers were supposed to create a new, “natural” literature not influenced by politics. One of the most frequently used words by literary critics was “authenticity”. They appreciated authenticity (actuality) of the novels. One of the most popular genres was the so-called authentic (biographical) literature. Another meaning of this term was related to the post-dissident circle, which was influenced by Jan Lopatka´s work. For them, authentic literature resulted from the moral integrity of the writer. I will attempt to reconstruct the different meanings of the term authenticity and to show that the authenticity replaced politics as the source of meaning and the referent outside of literature. I will focus on the ways in which social and political issues were misrepresented by overuse of the term “authenticity” as well as on conflicts about the definition of authenticity itself.

Life-writing, representation, r/evolution? Polish cultural wars and the reception of Gombrowicz Mateusz Chmurski, Sorbonne Université Since 2005, Poland faces backlash attempts to ban “LGBT ideology” which, in turn, attribute a vital role to the nonnormative identities and their expression, in particular when canonical authors and texts are concerned. Simultaneously, the LGBTQ+ movements seek a genealogy of their fights to which the edition, publication, and reception of life-writings possibly becomes a recontextualized and politicized representation: “aesthetic (mimetic) and political (acting on behalf of)” (Couser, 2016: 3). Among the numerous publications bringing marginalized issues to public consciousness, the reception of Kronos by Witold Gombrowicz (first published in 2013) exemplifies both the will to redefine boundaries of literature and intimacy and the tendency to deny the place of nonnormative self-expression in the literary field. Seeing that those laconic notes on sexual life, health, finance, and career combine into an intimate chronology and have subsequently initiated an important debate in the Polish press, we will focus on their full journalistic reception—ranging from extreme-right periodicals to those of progressive left. I propose to question both the contemporary, if voyeuristic, over-exposure of intimacy, and its political instrumentalization in Polish culture wars in order to observe both factors common to the contemporary literary field and those particular to post-communist countries.

Chicana Feminist Literature, U.S.-Mexico Border and the Case of the Juárez Murders Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová, Department of Gender Studies, Charles University Chicana literature is unthinkable without its geographical rooting in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and its explicit feminist and anti-capitalist stance. This position is thoroughly exemplified in the writings by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. The twin cities of El Paso and Juárez form a backdrop for her novel Desert Blood (2005) that takes up the ongoing gender violence faced by female maquiladora workers. As frequently argued, the effects of the 1993 ratification of NAFTA gradually turned Ciudad Juárez into a major hub of transnational trade and the center of US-owned corporations that built maquiladoras employing thousands of young women of poor, working-class background at the industrial assembly lines. Between 1994 and 2000, more than 300 (some sources speak of as many as a thousand) of them were savagely murdered having been severely tortured before their death. The mutilated bodies were then strewn in the desert to decompose. In the novel, Gaspar de Alba’s queer main protagonist who had grown up on the border ends up searching for her very own—presumably kidnapped—sister while delving deeper both into the horrid situation of the Juarez femi(ni)cides. Read against contemporary theoretical conceptualization of the U.S.-Mexico border with the utilization of scholarly interventions on Juárez contained in Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera (2010) the paper will analyze the intersection of gender, migration, and globalization in Gaspar de Alba’s novel Desert Blood (2005).

Dispositives of silence, injurious attachments and discursive emergence of silencing: towards a critical assessment of gender politics in Czech dissent and exile literature Jan Matonoha, Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Science Following a period of supposedly “clean”, de-contextualized literary research that characterized formalism, new criticism and structuralism of the first half of the 20th century, a radical politically situated research stance occurred in many fields ranging from new Marxism, cultural materialism and new historicism to feminism, gender studies and queer theory or animal studies. In East and Central Europe, the situation has been even more complicated by the fact that a critical (often Marxist) as well as feminist thinking has been dispossessed or expropriated (Hana Havelková) by the official so-called “communist” regime and independent thinking in literary theory was driven underground (in Czech context: Zdeněk Mathauser, Miroslav Červenka, Milan Jankovič, Vladimír Macura – “Medvědáři”), providing an especially fertile ground for the wave of neoliberalism and supposed demise of Marxist thought. My talk, in particular, aims to analyze a subliminal backlash against feminism paradoxically within the very cultural context that founded its legitimacy in discourse of human rights, equality of justice, namely the context of literary activities of the then anti-establishment, dissident activism in former, pre-1989 (Václav Havel, Ludvík Vaculík, Pavel Kohout and Bohumil Hrabal).

Manifesto of the Russian Poet Kirill Medvedev and his Methodological Background “....and Literature will be tested” – Kirill Medvedev politicizing Culture Matthias Meindl, Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures, University of Zurich The poet, publisher and activist Kirill Medvedev is the central figure in Moscow’s scene of engaged literature and has gathered like-minded leftist poets, activists, theorists and historians around the collectively run Free Marxist Publishing House, that he had founded, now more than a decade ago. My talk will briefly introduce Kirill Medvedev and his literary upbringing. It will discuss his beliefs on how literature can be politicized, focusing on the idea of political criticism of cultural production. It will argue that a political reading of literature with Medvedev involves a critical analysis of social modes of production and literary life forms, not just a reading of texts. How do these ideas fare in a (post-)post- communist society? Are they in any way specific to the respective social circumstances?

Citizen, Nation, and History Through the Reception of Vladimir Sorokin Olga Pavlova, Department of Czech Literature and Comparative Literature, Charles University Vladimir Sorokin experienced the Soviet reality of the 1970s and the1980s, the period of Perestroika and the current power policy of Russia. His first novel, The Queue, was published in the early 1980s and provoked sharp discussions in the media. Sorokin has received a media label of “the most controversial contemporary author,” thanks to a combination of political themes and their hyperbolized depiction in fiction. The author himself often claims that he is not and does not want to be a political writer. However, the reaction to his works suggests the opposite. Additionally, a similar apolitical self- presentation can be seen as part of creating the myth of the self. In my paper, I would like to concentrate on transforming the role of the citizen, the nation as a whole, and the historical background, especially in the works of Marina’s Thirtieth Love, Day of the Oprichnik and Telluria principally in period reviews of the novels mentioned above.

The politics and aesthetics of South African anti-apartheid literature Dobrota Pucherová, Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences The presentation will offer a brief overview of protest literature from apartheid South Africa (1948- 1990), a period of totalitarian regime, official racial segregation and state censorship, with a particular focus on the so-called Black Consciousness poetry (also known as Soweto poetry) that has been called “the single most significant socio-literary event of the seventies South Africa” (Chapman 1982: 11). Based on particular examples, I will propose that this poetry’s political force (its protest) is the function of its lyrical, experimental, even modernist aesthetics and that it could never have been written without a belief in the autonomy of literature as art.

Crime and punishment in the 90s: Czech crime fiction as a means of social criticism Stefan Segi, Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Science The paper will focus on the ways Czech detective fiction depicts dealings with the communist past and capitalist present. The writers from world-renowned ones (Josef Škvorecký) to more obscure but nonetheless popular ones (Jan Cimický, Jaroslav Velinský, Eva Kačírková, Pavel Frýbort) used the genre of Crime Fiction to ask important questions regarding the roots of criminality and the ways the society is dealing with the past, that can itself be regarded as criminal. Crime fiction as a part of popular literature thus in many ways represents a counterpoint to the discourse on “high” literature with its struggles to justify the place of political and social criticism within this literary field in the nineties.

Politics as the Real. Trauma, the outside of the text (le dehors du texte) and the limits of apolitical reading of literature Jan Sowa, Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw In my intervention, I will address the process of re-politicization of literature and its reading in relation to anti-postmodernist turn. On the broadest cultural and ideological plane re-politicization of literature is in correlation to the demise of post-structuralism and to the rise of new realism that is replacing it. In the post-2008 world, it is not possible anymore to maintain that “debt will never have to be repaid” as it was claimed by Jean Baudrillard, while the looming ecological disaster forces us to re-examine Derrida’s conviction that the traumatic encounter with the Real can be deferred forever. I will revisit some classical post-structuralist theses and texts and try to show how they have become invalidated by recent social and political developments (mainly the traumatic experience of the failures of neoliberal global capitalism).