Political Novel and Class Distinctions
The workshop explores how the political novel recognizes, narrates, and theorizes class distinctions – from economic and social experience through political subjectivities to mechanisms of exclusion and avenues of mobility. We welcome both canonical approaches and innovative narrative forms that challenge entrenched hierarchies (e.g., labour and precarity, education and inherited capitals, class shame and aspiration, care and welfare, post-1989 transitions, and the aftershocks of economic crises).
Program
Please note: All times are GMT+2!
Thursday, 13 Nov 2025
10.00
Opening
- Tomasz Mizerkiewicz (AMU), Błażej Warkocki (AMU), Magda Potok (AMU): Introduction
10.30
Keynote Lecture, Chair: Błażej Warkocki
- Maciej Gdula (Warsaw University): Does anyone still want to have a class identity?
12.00
From Class Memory to New Imaginaries, Chair: Tomasz Mizerkiewicz
- Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta): A Working-Class Novel in the Moment of the Working Class's (Alleged) Disappearance: On Karin Struck's Bitter Water: Confessions of a Works Committeeman (1988)
- Patrick Eiden-Offe (ZfL): Class: from social background to abolition. Luise Meiers near-future novel Hyphen
- Antonia Tosiek (AMU): The Rural Epic in Episodes: Women's Memoir Writing and the Class Politics of Polish Life Writing (1933–1995)
15.15
Precarity, Exclusion and the Politics of Belonging, Chair: Gerard Ronge
- Katarzyna Czarnota (Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights): Migrants and the Precariat: Intersections of Class and Racial Logics of Exclusion
- Magda Potok (AMU): "The Man with the Fake Necktie": The Emotional Politics of Displacement (Ordesa by Manuel Vilas)
17.00
Book Promotion: Brick-Dust by Craig Jordan-Baker, Chair: Tomasz Mizerkiewicz
Friday, 14 Nov 2025
9.30
Working-Class Wilda: Cultural Walking Tour with Anna Gawrysiak-Knez
11.45
Keynote Lecture, Chair: Błażej Warkocki
- Monika Bobako (AMU): Race, Class and the Semi-Periphery
13.15
Class and the Political Novel in Eastern European Fiction, Chair: Tomasz Mizerkiewicz
- Tetiana Trofymenko (Kharkiv National University): Social Hierarchies and Class Districtions in Contemporary Ukrainian Novels during the Russian-Ukrainian War
- Zvonimir Glavaš (University of Zagreb): "We are all jeans generation / We are now the strongest nation" – The jeans fiction model, politics of literature and the class (in)distinction
16.00
The Politics of Class and Culture, Chair: Magda Potok
- Anna Gawarecka (AMU): Praise of the Aristocracy in the Anti-Noble Times. Austrian Nostalgia in Ladislav Fuks' novel The Duchess and the Cook
- Gerard Ronge (AMU): From Luxury Sweets to Cheap Calories and Cut-Price Thrills: Class Continuities in Dorota Maslowska's Magizczna Rana ('Magical Wound')
- Maria Czarnecka (Association of Cultural Anthropologists "Etnosfera"): Beyond the Middle-Class Bubble: Reading, Resistance, and the Class Politics of Access at Festival Endemity