Wykład otwarty w ramach programu IDUB: Gaston Franssen, University of Amsterdam
Pracownia Studiów Kulturowych Katedry Filologii Niderlandzkiej Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego i Ex-Centrum Olgi Tokarczuk zapraszają na wykład zorganizowany w ramach programu IDUB.
Wykład pt. From a Damsel in Distress to a Radio-Active Medusa: An Ecocritical Reading of the Figure of Mother Nature in Dutch literature wygłosi w języku angielskim prof. Gaston Franssen (University of Amsterdam)
Wykład odbędzie się 13 maja 2024 o godz. 17.00 w Katedrze Filologii Niderlandzkiej,ul.Kuźnicza 21-22, 50-138 Wrocław sala 307 (trzecie piętro)
Abstract: The increasing awareness of the urgency of climate change, often associated with ‘hard’ sciences, has had a major influence on humanities research, too: the disastrous impact of the Anthropocene on the planetary ecology, after all, calls for a probing reassessment – and a fundamental re-imagination – of the relation between the human and the non-human. Within the humanities, ecocritical scholars argue that literary texts have an import role to play in this process: literature, often characterized by narrative, affective and imaginative experiments, invites readers to reflect on conventional representations of nature and offers a space to experiment with novel ideas about humanity’s relation to landscapes, animals and the planet at large. In this lecture, I will focus on one key trope in the imagination of the Anthropocene: the image of ‘Mother Nature’. Literary texts about Mother Nature, I will argue, often reveal deep-seated, highly gendered assumptions about nature as an all-giving, forever-forgiving nurturing figure, always at humanity’s disposal. At the same time, more experimental literary texts re-imagine Mother Nature in less re-assuring, more disturbing ways: they evoke an indifferent, ruthless, or even vengeful mother, and urge readers to reassess their assumptions about – and attitude towards – nature. Focusing on selected Dutch literary representations of Mother Nature, and interpreting them in the context of ecofeminism, I demonstrate how the trope of Mother Nature can legitimate ecological destruction, but can also urge readers to accept a profoundly inconvenient truth about the role and importance of humanity in the context of ecological developments.
Notka biograficzna: Gaston Franssen is full professor of Dutch Literary Studies and Intermediality at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include authorship, celebrity, narrativity, intermediality, and health humanities. In 2008, he defended his PhD thesis gerrit kouwenaar en de politiek van het lezen (Nijmegen: Vantilt). In 2016 and 2017, he edited the academic volumes Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan) and Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to Present(Amsterdam University Press). He has published on literary celebrity (Journal of Dutch Literature), on literary fan culture (Spiegel der Letteren), on celebrity health narratives (European Journal of Cultural Studies), on celebrity politics (Celebrity Studies), and on narratives of health and illness (Nederlandse letterkunde, Frontiers in Psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology). Franssen is main editor of Nederlandse letterkunde, section editor of Celebrity Studies, and affiliated researcher at the Verhalenbank Psychiatrie.
