#  Graduate-Student Papers on Cultural Politics 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **March 8, 2016** 

 06:00PM - 08:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge Street, Bowie-Vernon Room (K262)**  



 

 



 

## "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*.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ 2015–2016 ](/academic-year/2015-2016)
- [ Graduate-Student Papers on Cultural Politics ](/seminars/cultural_politics_graduate_student_papers/schedule)
- [ Student Programs ](/event-categories/student-programs)
 
 

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