Lecture with Prof. Babette B. Tischleder (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen): “Toward a Critical New Materialism: Nonhuman Agency, Narrative, and the Anthropocene (William Faulkner and Bruno Latour)”

Prof. Babette B. Tischleder (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

“Toward a Critical New Materialism: Nonhuman Agency, Narrative, and the Anthropocene (William Faulkner and Bruno Latour)”

2 February 2017
6 p.m. – 8 p.m. (18-20 c.t.)
P 6, Philosophicum

The talk will take up questions raised in current debates on materiality, the agency of objects, and concepts of the nonhuman in the Anthropocene. I critically engage with claims made in the context of object-oriented ontology and Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory, arguing that our theoretical understanding of nonhuman agency can benefit from attending to imaginary rather than just ontological or speculative modes of thinking. Exploring narrative forms of world building in Twain and Faulkner and theorizing imaginary practices of writing and reading, I mean to show that these creative registers allow us to push the imaginative boundaries of theory beyond current philosophical prohibitions.

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Lecture with Frau Clara Reiring, M.A. on 24 January 2017: “Convergences of Postmodernism and Buddhist Thought: Rereading Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express

Clara Reiring, M.A. (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

“Convergences of Postmodernism and Buddhist Thought: Rereading Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express

24 January 2017
6 p.m. – 8 p.m. (18-20 c.t.)
P 103, Philosophicum

Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) is an exemplary work of postmodern fiction. Surprisingly, though, it is rarely discussed in seminars or secondary literature. This presentation aims at putting this work (back) into academic focus, rereading it with a perspective on the almost unmissable, yet nearly unexamined Buddhist thought present in the book. Resulting from this fruitful convergence of postmodernism and Buddhist thought, the presentation also tries to find new answers to the question of the book’s form, as The Tokyo-Montana Express seems to elude standard genre classification.

 

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