Workshop
29 Jan 2026 – 30 Jan 2026
Literary Politics and Geopolitics
Venue: online
Contact: caponeu@zfl-berlin.org
Research project(s): The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe
Today’s global political situation is characterised by wars, increasingly overt imperialist ambitions and rivalries, power struggles, and hegemonic conflicts over new spheres of influence. Colonial dependencies have also been revived, often manifesting as access to raw materials and licences for their unhindered extraction. The idea of a “new world order” based on globalisation, which was promoted until recently, has given way to a new combination of isolationism and imperialism.
This brings us to the inevitable, and perhaps somewhat naïve, question: What role can literature play in this situation, which is admittedly painted in somewhat dystopian terms? Can it (still) serve as a register, a medium for recording and processing global conditions and interactions? Or do these ultimately transcend the scope of literature? Is it possible to record conditions in such a way that they can be perceived as changeable? Can the achievements of political novels be simply scaled up to a global framework? To put it bluntly: In our project, we assume that there is such a thing as contemporary political literature—but is there also such a thing as geopolitical literature?
Program
Thursday, 29 Jan 2026
12.00
- Zrinka Božić (University of Zagreb): Literary Cartography and Critical Geopolitics
- Mark Devenney (University of Brighton): Novel (Without) Borders: A Response to Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth
13.30
- Korbinian Lindel (University of Koblenz): Geopolitics as an Aesthetic Principle – and as a Philological Approach?
- Lisa Katharina Schmitz (Johns Hopkins University): Unlearning Geopolitics: The Language of Global Order and the Potentialities of Literature
15.00
- Charlotte Woodford (University of Cambridge): Mapping German Modernities in Women’s Writings at the Start of the 20th Century
- Benjamin Kohlmann (University of Regensburg): The Novelists’ International vs Geopolitics? A Radical History of the Bildungsroman
16.30
- Natalya Bekhta (Tampere University): The Role of Literature in Absurd Times
- Louis Aubry (New York University: Writing and Unmaking the Geopolitical in Jean Genet’s A Captive In Love (Un captif amoureux)
17.30
Digital Get-together
Friday, 30 Jan 2026
12.00
- Sarah Colvin (University of Cambridge): Literary Geopolitics: Formal Resistance to Political Oppression in 21st-Century Novels of Systemic Injustice
- Nenad Ivić (University of Zagreb): Globalatinization: A Probe into Contemporary Cultural Style
13.30
- Ekaterina Vassilieva (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): Political Fictionality and the Authorship of Power: Vladislav Surkov between Literature and Geopolitics
- Marina Sivak (Freie Universität Berlin): Mapping the Sublime: Travel Writing and the Geopolitics of the Soviet Pamirs
15.00
- Eliza Rose (Columbia University): John Berger’s Red Sketchbook: East-West Dialogism in A Painter of Our Time
- Fanny Wehner (ZfL): Mike Phillips’ A Shadow of Myself – Reading a Post-Cold War Thriller through an Afropean Lens
16.30
- Max Roehl (University of Tübingen): The Power of the Weak. Imperialism and Resistance in Anna Seghers’ Der Führer
- Anna Björk Einarsdóttir (Norwegian University of Science and Technology): Alejo Carpentier’s Novels of Revolution
17.30
Finale (Digital)