The Political Novel in Europe and the Challenges of the Digital Era
This workshop will explore the literary and political challenges posed by the digital age to the genre of the novel. In her essay Digital Modernism. Making It New in New Media (2014), Jessica Pressman defines “modernism” as “a strategy of innovation that employs the media of its time to reform and refashion older literary practices in ways that produce new art.” (4) What she calls “Digital Modernism” transposes this logic to current practices and issues: “Digital Modernism […] allows us to reconsider how and why media is (and always has been) a central aspect of experimental literature and the strategy of making it new.” (5) Our workshop aims to link these formal considerations with more directly political issues.
The admission is free, no registration required.
Programm
Thursday, 16 Jan 2025
13.30
Transcultural Perspectives and Geopolitics
- Welcome & Introduction
- Anna-Lena Eick (Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz): After Digitisation. Taking Stock from a Transcultural Perspective (online)
Response: Tara Talwar Windsor (University of Cambridge) - Franzisca Wu Fu (Freie Universität Berlin): Digital platforms and the geopolitics of English in Mithu Sanyal’s novel Identitti
Response: Pola Groß (ZfL)
15.45
Digitalisation and the Nation
- Verónica Paula Gómez (Freie Universität Berlin): Beyond the Idea of Nation: The Political Belongings of Electronic Literature in the Interzone
Response: Liam Connell (University of Brighton) - Inna Häkkinen (University of Helsinki): ‘The Communist Party Lies as Gutted as Reactor Four’: Collaborative Storytelling of Profiling ‘State Agency’ in Chernobyl Fiction (online)
Response: Rossie Artemis (University of Nicosia)
17.45
- Discussion of text excerpts
Friday, 17 Jan 2025
9.30
Publishing
- Anna Murashova (Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam): Digitalisation of novel: practices, hierarchies, texts. The Russian case
Response: Isabell Meske (Hannover) - Joana Pesquer (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven): Funding the Publisher or the Discourse?
Response: Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta)
11.30
Facts and Fictions
- Sophie Salvo (University of Chicago) : Impotent Forms: Crabwalk and the Efficacy of Political Narrative (online)
Response: Elias Kreuzmair (University of Siegen) - Discussion of text excerpts