Poetics and Politics of Place: Literature, Hegemony, and Resistance
Organizers: J. Engel Szwaja Franken and Samuel Jaffee
To submit an abstract, please follow the instructions at acla.org
This seminar will begin by proposing that literature has been instrumental both in the construction and maintenance of national hegemonies, and in projects of resistance to them. As we consider literature’s contributions to the poetics of place and places, we will remain close to this dialectic. That is, we will focus on the productive tension of this contradictory interdependence and its effects both in literature and in the wider politics of region and place. We will examine both how national hegemony marks the space of literature and how literature places a certain tension on the space of the nation.