Podcast: Der politische Roman by Ivana Perica

Ivana Perica was a fellow of the Cultural Analysis Working Group in Vienna in May 2025. In a lecture given at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, she pointed out that the ongoing popularity of ‘politics in literature’ today comes at the expense of the conceptual precision of this buzzword. While in various genres and settings of 20th-century political literature it was reasonably clear, depending on the viewer's point of view, what “political literature” actually meant and encompassed, today's promotion of a politics of literature seems to blur the transparency of the term. In order to bring a certain precision to the field, the lecture examined the valences of the political-theoretical and aesthetic distinction between “politics” and “the political” in order to then interweave them with the history of the political novel.

In addition, Ivana Perica led a workshop on Nanni Balestrini's 1971 novel Vogliamo tutto (We Want Everything) as a guest lecturer in a cultural studies seminar at the University of Vienna's Institute of Romance Studies (seminar leader Ingo Pohn-Lauggas). The story about the struggles of Italian mass workers in Turin, which were largely carried out by rebellious workers from the south, is a milestone in the history of the political novel in Europe.

A summary of the aka event at the University of Applied Arts can be heard on the aka podcast.