The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia: Intersectional, Feminist and Non-Binary Approach to Speculative Literature, Film and Art in the 21st Century. Eds. Katarzyna Ostalska and Tomasz Fiziak. Routledge; pp. 61-77, 2021
21st century fiction has taken a prominent and widely visible speculative turn, often within a dy... more 21st century fiction has taken a prominent and widely visible speculative turn, often within a dystopian cultural imaginary, with a prominent ecocritical approach, engaging with postanthropocentric relationalities and thus, I argue, distinct hope. The chapter explores intersections between notions of a transgressive utopianism (Lucy Sargisson) and recent critical perceptions that destabilise a persistent binary logic and value difference, multiple belongings, and fuzzy boundaries. New Materialisms, Posthumanisms, and Anthropocene Studies problematise the relationalities between human, nonhuman, inhuman, machines and other life forms and remove humankind from the exclusive narrative centre, emphasising interrelations between all materialities. As a point of departure, the chapter first turns to art, the Polish artist Pawel Althamer’s exceptional multi-material sculpture Monika and Pawel (2002), and then to 21st century speculative novels, namely Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Tiger Flu (2018), Margaret Atwood’s The MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013), Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach (2014) trilogy and Borne (2017), as examples of a broadening of the imaginative space by ambiguating the human status and interrogating the potentialities of transfusion, symbiosis, blending, webbing, and cooperation between species, lifeforms, cultures, and genders. The novels use transgression, slippage, realigned relationalities to highlight entanglements, undermining the very notion of singularity. Beyond the dystopian narrative mode, the texts invite readers to reassess fixity, categorizations, separateness, and provide empowerment through “critical hope” (Ojala 2017), a hope inspired not only by “social dreaming” in a broad disciplinary sense yet restricted to “groups of people” (Sargent 3), but by a kind of proleptic speculative and fantastic realism that extends to a planetary dreaming.
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Events by Dunja M Mohr
'Artpolitical': Margaret Atwood's Aesthetics
This is a free online kick-off symposium for the first ever all-Atwood conference, the international conference “ARTPOLITICAL - MARGARET ATWOOD'S AESTHETICS” (Göttingen) that had to be postponed to October 14-16, 2021. The conference as well as the preliminary event seek to address the interaction between politics and aesthetics in Atwood's oeuvre as well as the various transmedial adaptations of her works.
Keynote speakers (kick-off):
PROF. CRISPIN SARTWELL (Dickinson College)
PROF. WENDY ROY (University of Saskatchewan)
DR. FIONA TOLAN (Liverpool John Moores University)
Convenors:
Dr. Dunja M. Mohr (Erfurt University)
PD Dr. Kirsten Sandrock (Göttingen and Leipzig University)
(sponsored by the Hans-Böckler-Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany)
in collaboration with the Research Group "Text.Zeichen.Medien.", University of Erfurt, Germany, and the "Literature–Technology–Media“ Research Group, Cambridge University, UK.
Convenors Dunja M. Mohr and Kai Merten
Starting from the origins of the term ”technology“ (Greek
τέχνη (technē): ”art“ und λόγος (lógos): ”word, a plea“) the
workshop reflects aesthetic representations of the historically
changing intersections of text and techniques/technologies.
The workshop addresses the following questions: How do texts and
material technologies influence one another? What kind of
terminological changes have taken place and what technologies
have instigated this? How is materialism represented and
how does TextTechnology influence material? How does the
represented materialism (TextTechnology) interact with the
material of the industrial technologies, but also in relation to
our environmental materiality? Can we differentiate between
'natural' materiality and culturally represented materiality?
_ Vera Knolle, It´s time to become part of all things. Butoh als posthumane Körperpraxis
_ Oliver Lerone Schultz, Dunkle Körper. Alienation und die Utopie der Dystopie
_ Serjoscha Wiemer, Maschine, Soma, Interface – Paradigmen und Fluchtlinien von Körperbildern im Science Fiction Film der 1980er und 1990er Jahre
_ Dunja Mohr, Hybride Kunstkörper: Utopisches und dystopisches Potential posthumaner Körperbilder
Sektionsleitung: Oliver Lerone Schultz
Papers by Dunja M Mohr
For the Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien’s special section on the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada, Larissa Lai and Saleema Nawaz--both had recently published a pandemic dystopia--generously agreed to conduct an online interview
over the months following the Literary Café. Because of its realist mode, its coincidental choice of a future deadly Coronavirus driven pandemic (called ARAMIS) originating in China, and its setting in 2020, Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World (2020) comes surrealistically close to the globally shared actual experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, affecting nations and individuals very differently. Songs traces a whole panoply of characters and how they are affected by the spreading pandemic, but focuses on the activation of coping strategies, acceptance of the necessity to change, and conscious choices of solidarity, community, and responsibility. The dystopian future in Lai’s Tiger Flu (2018) is further removed in time. The world is split into various societiesliving in separate, gender-polarized quarantine rings—including an exiled feminist separatist utopia of genetically engineered clones—and the de-extinction of the Caspian tiger and the conversion of its bones into wine which causes a deadly flu that ironically threatens humans (men in particular) with extinction. Hope for survival emanates here from cross-materialities and cross-species collaboration.
in contemporary Canadian literature by women writers who depict pandemics or postpandemic worlds that offer what Christof Mauch has termed “slow hope.” Saleema Nawaz’s 2020 novel Songs for the End of the World anticipates the Covid-19 pandemic; Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2015) imagines a post-pandemic world in which only 1% of humanity has survived a deadly virus. In doing so, Mandel, like Catherine Mavrikakis in her 2016 novel Oscar de Profundis, incorporates memories of the past into the imagination of a post-disaster future. What all three literary examples have in commonis that they not only create disaster scenarios, but also remind us of the values of the present and focus on humanity as well as humanity’s will to survive in the midst of catastrophe.
Im Gegensatz zum Begriff des Transkulturalismus, der zu Recht den des Multikulturalis-mus weitgehend ersetzt hat, erfasst 'Transdifferenz' nicht nur Erfahrungen einer kulturellen Differenz, sondern macht vielfältige Differenzen beschreibbar. Als Beschreibungskategorie für Phänomene im Spannungsfeld der mehrfachen Durchkreuzung von Binarismen bezeichnet Transdifferenz etwas Drittes, das zwar auf Differenzmarkierung zurückgreift, diese aber zugleich temporär unterminiert, ohne dabei eine Synthese anzustreben. Solche Erfahrungen der Transdifferenz spiegeln sich gerade in Werken kanadischer AutorInnen wieder, die die vielfachen Differenzerfahrungen der kanadischen Gesellschaft als Zeichen von Komplexität und Heterogenität thematisieren und sich der Klassifizierung einer 'hyphenated Canadian literature' verschiedenster kultureller Gruppierungen widersetzen. Am Beispiel ausgewählter Romane kanadischer Autorinnen (Joy Kogawas Obasan und Margaret Atwoods The Handmaid's Tale) zeigt sich, dass Erfahrungen von Mehrfachzugehörigkeiten und temporären Verschiebungen gesetzter Differenzmarkierungen narratologisch so vermittelt werden, dass diese mit binärer Logik nicht mehr erfassbar sind.
Résumé
A l'opposé de la notion de transculturalisme qui a largement remplacé celle de multi-culturalisme, le terme "transdifférence" permet non seulement de saisir les expériences d'une différence culturelle mais également de décrire toutes sortes de différences. La catégorie de "transdifférence", en tenant compte des phénomènes qui se situent aux multiples croisements de binarismes, renvoie à un troisième élément qui, à la fois, dépend des marques de différence et les mine temporairement sans aspirer à une quelconque synthèse. De telles expériences de "transdifférence" caractérisent notamment les oeuvres de nombreuses écrivaines canadiennes qui mettent en scène l'expérience de différences multiples au sein même de la société canadienne comme étant des signes de sa complexité et de son hétérogénéité. Le refus de la classification en termes d'une "hyphenated Canadian literature" de différents groupes culturels semble investir leur écriture. A partir d'exemples de romans d'auteures canadiennes (Joy Kogawa Obasan, Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale) on peut démontrer que l'expérience de l'appartenance multiple ainsi que, sur un plan narratologique, les déplacements temporaires d'un certain nombre de marques de différence sont communi-qués de sorte que la logique binaire soit incapable de les saisir.
Contributors: Vera Alexander, David La Breche, Haike Frank, Martin Genetsch, Jörg Heinke, Sissy Helff, Susan N. Kiguli, Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, Natividad Martínez Marín, Danilo Victorino Manarpaac, Raihanah M. M., Mala Pandurang, Dunja M. Mohr, Judith Dell Panny, Sandhya Patel, Jochen Petzold, Ginny Ratsoy, Dipli Saikia, Henning Schäfer, Edwin Thumboo, Virginia Richter, Laurenz Volkmann, Russell West--Pavlov.
My introduction provides a reading of Mahasweta Devi's 'Draupadi' and a short overview of xenophobia in anglophone literature.
'Artpolitical': Margaret Atwood's Aesthetics
This is a free online kick-off symposium for the first ever all-Atwood conference, the international conference “ARTPOLITICAL - MARGARET ATWOOD'S AESTHETICS” (Göttingen) that had to be postponed to October 14-16, 2021. The conference as well as the preliminary event seek to address the interaction between politics and aesthetics in Atwood's oeuvre as well as the various transmedial adaptations of her works.
Keynote speakers (kick-off):
PROF. CRISPIN SARTWELL (Dickinson College)
PROF. WENDY ROY (University of Saskatchewan)
DR. FIONA TOLAN (Liverpool John Moores University)
Convenors:
Dr. Dunja M. Mohr (Erfurt University)
PD Dr. Kirsten Sandrock (Göttingen and Leipzig University)
(sponsored by the Hans-Böckler-Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany)
in collaboration with the Research Group "Text.Zeichen.Medien.", University of Erfurt, Germany, and the "Literature–Technology–Media“ Research Group, Cambridge University, UK.
Convenors Dunja M. Mohr and Kai Merten
Starting from the origins of the term ”technology“ (Greek
τέχνη (technē): ”art“ und λόγος (lógos): ”word, a plea“) the
workshop reflects aesthetic representations of the historically
changing intersections of text and techniques/technologies.
The workshop addresses the following questions: How do texts and
material technologies influence one another? What kind of
terminological changes have taken place and what technologies
have instigated this? How is materialism represented and
how does TextTechnology influence material? How does the
represented materialism (TextTechnology) interact with the
material of the industrial technologies, but also in relation to
our environmental materiality? Can we differentiate between
'natural' materiality and culturally represented materiality?
_ Vera Knolle, It´s time to become part of all things. Butoh als posthumane Körperpraxis
_ Oliver Lerone Schultz, Dunkle Körper. Alienation und die Utopie der Dystopie
_ Serjoscha Wiemer, Maschine, Soma, Interface – Paradigmen und Fluchtlinien von Körperbildern im Science Fiction Film der 1980er und 1990er Jahre
_ Dunja Mohr, Hybride Kunstkörper: Utopisches und dystopisches Potential posthumaner Körperbilder
Sektionsleitung: Oliver Lerone Schultz
For the Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien’s special section on the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada, Larissa Lai and Saleema Nawaz--both had recently published a pandemic dystopia--generously agreed to conduct an online interview
over the months following the Literary Café. Because of its realist mode, its coincidental choice of a future deadly Coronavirus driven pandemic (called ARAMIS) originating in China, and its setting in 2020, Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World (2020) comes surrealistically close to the globally shared actual experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, affecting nations and individuals very differently. Songs traces a whole panoply of characters and how they are affected by the spreading pandemic, but focuses on the activation of coping strategies, acceptance of the necessity to change, and conscious choices of solidarity, community, and responsibility. The dystopian future in Lai’s Tiger Flu (2018) is further removed in time. The world is split into various societiesliving in separate, gender-polarized quarantine rings—including an exiled feminist separatist utopia of genetically engineered clones—and the de-extinction of the Caspian tiger and the conversion of its bones into wine which causes a deadly flu that ironically threatens humans (men in particular) with extinction. Hope for survival emanates here from cross-materialities and cross-species collaboration.
in contemporary Canadian literature by women writers who depict pandemics or postpandemic worlds that offer what Christof Mauch has termed “slow hope.” Saleema Nawaz’s 2020 novel Songs for the End of the World anticipates the Covid-19 pandemic; Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2015) imagines a post-pandemic world in which only 1% of humanity has survived a deadly virus. In doing so, Mandel, like Catherine Mavrikakis in her 2016 novel Oscar de Profundis, incorporates memories of the past into the imagination of a post-disaster future. What all three literary examples have in commonis that they not only create disaster scenarios, but also remind us of the values of the present and focus on humanity as well as humanity’s will to survive in the midst of catastrophe.
Im Gegensatz zum Begriff des Transkulturalismus, der zu Recht den des Multikulturalis-mus weitgehend ersetzt hat, erfasst 'Transdifferenz' nicht nur Erfahrungen einer kulturellen Differenz, sondern macht vielfältige Differenzen beschreibbar. Als Beschreibungskategorie für Phänomene im Spannungsfeld der mehrfachen Durchkreuzung von Binarismen bezeichnet Transdifferenz etwas Drittes, das zwar auf Differenzmarkierung zurückgreift, diese aber zugleich temporär unterminiert, ohne dabei eine Synthese anzustreben. Solche Erfahrungen der Transdifferenz spiegeln sich gerade in Werken kanadischer AutorInnen wieder, die die vielfachen Differenzerfahrungen der kanadischen Gesellschaft als Zeichen von Komplexität und Heterogenität thematisieren und sich der Klassifizierung einer 'hyphenated Canadian literature' verschiedenster kultureller Gruppierungen widersetzen. Am Beispiel ausgewählter Romane kanadischer Autorinnen (Joy Kogawas Obasan und Margaret Atwoods The Handmaid's Tale) zeigt sich, dass Erfahrungen von Mehrfachzugehörigkeiten und temporären Verschiebungen gesetzter Differenzmarkierungen narratologisch so vermittelt werden, dass diese mit binärer Logik nicht mehr erfassbar sind.
Résumé
A l'opposé de la notion de transculturalisme qui a largement remplacé celle de multi-culturalisme, le terme "transdifférence" permet non seulement de saisir les expériences d'une différence culturelle mais également de décrire toutes sortes de différences. La catégorie de "transdifférence", en tenant compte des phénomènes qui se situent aux multiples croisements de binarismes, renvoie à un troisième élément qui, à la fois, dépend des marques de différence et les mine temporairement sans aspirer à une quelconque synthèse. De telles expériences de "transdifférence" caractérisent notamment les oeuvres de nombreuses écrivaines canadiennes qui mettent en scène l'expérience de différences multiples au sein même de la société canadienne comme étant des signes de sa complexité et de son hétérogénéité. Le refus de la classification en termes d'une "hyphenated Canadian literature" de différents groupes culturels semble investir leur écriture. A partir d'exemples de romans d'auteures canadiennes (Joy Kogawa Obasan, Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale) on peut démontrer que l'expérience de l'appartenance multiple ainsi que, sur un plan narratologique, les déplacements temporaires d'un certain nombre de marques de différence sont communi-qués de sorte que la logique binaire soit incapable de les saisir.
Contributors: Vera Alexander, David La Breche, Haike Frank, Martin Genetsch, Jörg Heinke, Sissy Helff, Susan N. Kiguli, Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, Natividad Martínez Marín, Danilo Victorino Manarpaac, Raihanah M. M., Mala Pandurang, Dunja M. Mohr, Judith Dell Panny, Sandhya Patel, Jochen Petzold, Ginny Ratsoy, Dipli Saikia, Henning Schäfer, Edwin Thumboo, Virginia Richter, Laurenz Volkmann, Russell West--Pavlov.
My introduction provides a reading of Mahasweta Devi's 'Draupadi' and a short overview of xenophobia in anglophone literature.
at the centre of speculation in utopian, dystopian, and science fiction from the beginning.
Starting from a Judaeo-Christian background, early utopias speculated about the
retrieval of the imaginary and idealized protolanguage, envisioning a perfect language
everyone can understand. In contrast, modern science fiction (sf) novels foreground
alien languages or modes of non-verbal communication and the inherent problems of
translation. Novels using linguistics as a major plot device draw heavily on either the
weak or the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its premise that speaking a
different language precludes seeing another culture’s reality. Examples dealt with in
this essay are Jack Vance’s dystopia The Languages of Pao (1958), Samuel R. Delany’s
sf novel Babel-17 (1966), Ian Watson’s sf novel The Embedding (1973), and
especially Suzette Haden Elgin’s transgressive utopian dystopian Native Tongue series
(1984-1994).
Eds. Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Däwes
Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity explores the intersections between narrative disruption and continuity in post-9/11
narratives from an interdisciplinary transnational perspective, foregrounding the transatlantic cultural memory of 9/11. Contesting the earlier notion of a cataclysm that has changed ‘everything,’ and critically reflecting on American exceptionalism, the collection offers an inquiry into what has gone unchanged in terms of pre-9/11, post-9/11, and postpost-9/11 issues and what silences persist. How do literature and performative and visual arts negotiate this precarious balance of a pervasive discourse of change and emerging patterns of political, ideological, and cultural continuity?
keywords:
post-9/11; English and American Studies; trauma studies; historical fiction; narrative theory; Film Studies; Cultural Studies; History; Politics; contemporary literature; art history; visual culture; critical theory.
Contributors: David Holloway, Charles Lewis, Katharina Rennhak, Dunja M. Mohr, Dagmar Dreyer, Anna Thiemann, Till Werkmeister, Sarah Christine Giese, Anna Flügge, Devin P. Zuber.
For more information see https://www.brill.com/cos
The essays collected in this special issue of ZAA respond to the overall picture of literary and cultural studies criticism on post-9/11 texts provided here in two ways. Two essays address genres and media – American poetry and American popular music – that have not yet received the comprehensive critical attention they deserve; the
other essays target a key issue of post-9/11 novelistic representation, the complex issue of the effects and meanings of visualizations of 9/11.
(341 pages)
In the wake of addressing multiculturalism, transculturalism, racism, and ethnicity, the issue of xenophobia and xenophilia has been somewhat marginalized. From a variety of angles, the present collection seeks to investigate the relations between Self and Other in the New Literatures in English. How do we register differences and what does an embrace signify for both Self and Other? The contributors deal with a variety of topics, ranging from theoretical reflections on xenophobia, its exploration in terms of intertextuality and New Zealand/Maori historiography, to analyses of migrant and border narratives, and issues of transitionality, authenticity, and racism in Canada and South Africa. Others negotiate identity and alterity in Nigerian, Malaysian, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and Caribbean texts, or reflect on diaspora and orientalism in Australian--Asian and West Indian contexts.
Contributors
Vera Alexander, David La Breche, Haike Frank, Martin Genetsch, Jörg Heinke, Sissy Helff, Susan N. Kiguli, Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, Natividad Martínez Marín, Danilo Victorino Manarpaac, Raihanah M. M., Mala Pandurang, Judith Dell Panny, Sandhya Patel, Jochen Petzold, Ginny Ratsoy, Dipli Saikia, Henning Schäfer, Edwin Thumboo, Virginia Richter, Laurenz Volkmann, Russell West--Pavlov
Part One provides a brief delineation of the generic developments and postmodern genre mergings, a concise overview of definitions and classifications of each subgenre, and details the theoretical background of the study. Using Lucy Sargisson's take on transgressive utopianism, the study views transgression as a description for fluid moments of suspended binary logic, when distinctions between either/or are nullified. Without dissolving binary order, transgression contests the notions of unambiguity and authenticity. Exactly these transgressive moves beyond dualisms can be found in the feminist dystopias examined.
Drawing on postmodern, postcolonial, feminist as well as on linguistic theories and paying particular attention to the intersection of the categories of gender, race, and class, this book offers the first full-length study of both Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy and of Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast tetralogy. In the last part the study reads Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale not as a classical dystopia, but as a 'transgressive utopian dystopia', contesting standard readings of this well-canonized text.
Featuring an interview with Suzy McKee Charnas.
Winner of the Margaret Atwood Society Award 2005.