Authoritarianism
The Political Novel in Europe and the Challenges of the Digital Era
Caponeu event16.01.2025 - 17.01.2025
Without a doubt, the digital age is having a profound impact on all aspects of the literary process. It opens up a new context that redefines creative processes, reading practices, distribution methods, and critical reception. Especially the interpersonal relationships involved in its production steps (between authors, publishers, agents, critics, readers, etc.) are being turned upside down by digital technologies: the literary gesture is spread across different platforms, the book is detached from its physical medium, the author may disappear in the face of the possibilities offered by automatic generation (artificial intelligence), and editorial hierarchies and mediations are questioned. Digital issues and practices affect fundamental notions of literary studies. But how are these changes reflected in the novel itself? How has this new context redefined relations with the political sphere (if at all)? What kind of political novel is possible in the digital age?
Our workshop aims to explore the literary and political challenges the digital age poses for the genre of the novel. In her essay Digital Modernism. Making It New in New Media (2014), Jessica Pressman defines “modernism” as “a strategy of innovation that employs the media of its time to reform and refashion older literary practices in ways that produce new art.” (4) What she calls “Digital Modernism” transposes this logic to current practices and issues: “Digital Modernism […] allows us to reconsider how and why media is (and always has been) a central aspect of experimental literature and the strategy of making it new.” (5) Our workshop links these formal considerations to more explicitly political issues.
Programme
Thursday, 16 Jan 2025
14.00
Transcultural Perspectives and Geopolitics
Chair: Patrick Eiden-Offe (ZfL)
- Ivana Perica, Aurore Peyroles (ZfL): Welcome & Introduction
- Anna-Lena Eick (Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz): After Digitalisation. Taking Stock from a Transcultural Perspective (online)
Response: Tara Talwar Windsor (University of Cambridge) - Verónica Paula Gómez (Freie Universität Berlin): Beyond the Idea of Nation: The Political Belongings of Electronic Literature in the Interzone
Response: Liam Connell (University of Brighton)
16.15
Digitalisation and the Nation
Chair: Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta)
- Inna Häkkinen (University of Helsinki): ‘The Communist Party Lies as Gutted as Reactor Four’: Collaborative Storytelling of Profiling ‘State Agency’ in Chernobyl Fiction (online)
Response: Rossie Artemis (University of Nicosia)
17.00
- Discussion of Claudia Kozak’s essay “Experimental Electronic Literature from the Souths” (2020)
Friday, 17 Jan 2025
9.30
Facts and Fictions
Chair: Johanna-Charlotte Horst (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
- Anna Murashova (University of Tartu): Digitalisation of Novel: Practices, Hierarchies, Texts. The Russian Case
Response: Isabell Meske (Hannover) - Sophie Salvo (University of Chicago) : Impotent Forms: Crabwalk and the Efficacy of Political Narrative (online)
Response: Elias Kreuzmair (University of Siegen)
11.00
- Discussion of the chapter “Computer-Generated Text” by Annika Elstermann (2023)
