08/09/2020
British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) ONLINE PANEL AND ROUND TABLE: RANDOMNESS AND CULTURE IN THE AGE OF QUARANTINE on Wednesday 16 September 2020, 9.30 - 13.30.
Comparatists from around the world are warmly invited to the British Comparative Literature Association Online Seminar and Round Table, which features a series of talks by the keynote speakers Professor Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Professor Kylie Crane, Professor Maghiel Von Crevel and Professor Peter Arnds. The seminar will be chaired by the BCLA President, Professor Susan Bassnett, and followed by a round table discussion led by the BCLA Hon. Secretary, Professor Ben Hutchinson, with questions open to all participants. The event is free to attend: full information may be found here: https://bcla.org/events/triennial-international-conference/. and participants may register here: https://bcla.org/events/triennial-international-conference/round-table-autumn-2020-sign-up/
All welcome!
Chance encounters with people or texts, unforeseen opportunities, and impulsive decisions play a bigger role in our life and work than we wish to acknowledge – we wrote in our initial blurb, and then the events and unpredictability of the Covid-19 epidemic overtook us. It is only retrospectively – we continued – in shifting scale from the individual to social or perspective from reading to interpreting, that randomness becomes regularity and can get explained away as purpose and design. In launching the project Culture and Quarantine, we then asked: how can culture help us come to terms with this unprecedented situation? What does it mean to cogitate in gated communities, to think and to write in enforced isolation? These questions are particularly pertinent for the discipline of Comparative Literature, predicated as it is upon breaking down borders between languages and cultures. In an age in which borders have been re-erected almost overnight, how do we retain intellectual freedom of movement? In an era in which we have all been weaponized against each other, how do we avoid simply retreating to our castles and closing the drawbridge? How, in short, do we not become ever more self-centred? How do we think about our future and the future of our discipline together?
Online Panel and Round Table Autumn 2020 Randomness & Culture in the Age of Quarantine Registration Please register below and we’ll send you the Zoom link and password, as well as a calendar link and event reminder. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.First Name *Last Na...
