CAPONEU - Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe aims to assess the political novel as an important element of European political, social and cultural heritage. It sets out to examine how people in different national and cultural contexts engage with contemporary political issues and thereby have their share in shaping European societies and politics.

more about the project

UPCOMING ...

Public event:
What’s novel about a novel? Storytelling and travelling knowledge

Date: 26 March 2024 (7.30pm GMT)

Venue: Frankopan Hall, West Court, Jesus College, Cambridge CB5 8BL United Kingdom & online via Zoom

Contact: if-events@jesus.cam.ac.uk

Join prize-winning novelist Shida Bazyar in conversation with Miriam Schwarz and Tara Talwar Windsor to discuss how novels take their characters and their readers on journeys across cultural contexts, and how this can make both characters and readers re-assess the things they think they know. How sound are our belief systems, viewed from another perspective? How easy or difficult is it to let the new knowledge gained from reading novels travel into everyday life?
Shida Bazyar’s novel Sisters in Arms (translated by Ruth Martin) has been called “an explosive feminist and anti-racist novel about the importance of friendship”. It tells the story of three young women who are simultaneously at the forefront of the novel and on the margins of the society they live in. As women of Colour living in low-income families, they fully understand the demands of a white and consumer-oriented culture while standing with one foot in it – so to speak – and one foot out. Readers of the novel necessarily engage with their view of the world, even though mainstream society tends not to.
The event is being cohosted with the Cambridge German Section, the Cambridge Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics and the Intellectual Forum, Jesus College.
Please register here.

Workshop:
European Centers and Peripheries in the Political Novel

Date: 06 – 07 Jun 2024

Venue: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Pariser Str. 1, 10719 Berlin

Contact: caponeu@zfl-berlin.org

The workshop examines how asymmetries between European centers and peripheries are articulated in explicitly political terms by the political novel. It investigates the question of what formal and textual features are common of literary centers on the one hand and peripheries on the other, as well as the question of how literary centers and peripheries respond to political novels. The workshop is organized by Kyung-Ho Cha, Patrick Eiden-Offe, Ivana Perica (all ZfL), Johanna-Charlotte Horst (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta). More information

Book club Politics and Literature: Novels for the New Century

Date: Oct 2023 – June 2024

Venue: Literaturhaus Berlin, Fasanenstraße 23, 10719 Berlin

Contact: caponeu@zfl-berlin.de or visit facebook group

The book club is a cooperation of our ZfL team (Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research) with the Literaturhaus Berlin. It is organised over a nine-month period (Oct. 2023-June 2024), with one meeting per month. More information (in German).