Graduate-Student Papers on Cultural Politics
Date and Time
Location
"Approaching the Non-Event: On the Limits of Fiction”
Speaker:
Rachael Lee, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Contact:
Heather Conrad
hconrad@wcfia.harvard.edu
Chair:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Abstract:
Against the saturation of contemporary violence and political theory’s scramble to differentiate modes of violence, this paper proposes a reconsideration of the limits of fiction. I want to challenge sentiments that literature is unable to capture extreme violence, expanding upon concepts of the event and of the everyday to suggest that innate to fiction’s form is the impossibility of capturing not extreme violence, but rather the kaleidoscope of chronological registers necessary to describe everyday violence. The texts discussed in detail, all of which are in dialogue with distinct historical violence, are J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Aleksander Tišma’s The Book of Blam, and Richard Wright’s Native Son.