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Political Reading of Contemporary Literature

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Political Reading of Contemporary Literature 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 Prague organized by Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures, University of Zurich, Department of Czech Literature and Comparative Literature and Department of Political Science of Charles University (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 Czechoslovakia (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.
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