Dates: Friday 1/11, 8/11, 15/11, 29/11, 6/12 from 1-4 pm. On Friday 13/12 there is an obligatory day-long excursion to the House of European History in Brussels. For this, a small individual financial contribution will be requested.
Venue: University of Amsterdam, room see below. On 13/12 we meet “on location” in Brussels.
Open to: PhD Candidates and RMA students; OSL members have first access. In case places are available, interested MA students are welcome to participate, but are not able to receive official credits for the course.
Format: Three-hour seminars, active discussion and participation
Credits: 5 EC
Registration will open on September 2

Organization
OSL – The Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL@rug.nl)
Prof. Dr. Margriet van der Waal (m.c.van.der.waal@rug.nl)
Dr. Astrid Van Weyenberg (a.l.b.van.weyenberg@hum.leidenuniv.nl)
For questions regarding content, please contact either Margriet or Astrid. For questions regarding practical matters, please contact the OSL office.

Content
As Delanty (1995) reminds us, Europe is more than a geo-political reality, it is also an idea
that is continuously reinvented as collective identities transform. In essence, ‘Europe’ is a signifier that different actors fill with competing narratives and meanings. But although the way in which Europe is given meaning has never been stable or unifold, in the contemporary political climate the debate about what and where ‘Europe’ is, and who Europeans are or should be, seems increasingly heated. In this debate two types of narratives about ‘Europe’ can be discerned, with some referring to Europe as a culture and as a civilization, and others primarily understanding Europe as a polity, de facto using it as a synonym for the EU. That these types of narratives can clash violently is clear, for example, from the populist rhetoric of politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or Victor Orban in Hungary.

In this seminar we will explore different narratives of/on/about Europe. For this, we will depart from a number of questions. Firstly, how are ideas about the past utilized, for example by constructing Europe as a teleological narrative with clear historical origins, or by rewriting history in order to serve a contemporary political agenda? Secondly, how do narratives of Europe function as a space of in- and exclusion, by formulating an ‘us’ in opposition to a range of specific and less specific ‘others’? Thirdly, what do narratives of Europe tell us about the way in which Europeans are perceived, either as a homogeneous group, or diversely as a social constitution of different identities that overlap or conflict? We will approach these questions by focusing on a number of concepts that are central to how Europe is narrated: heritage, citizenship, crisis, migration, and (trans)nationalism. In our discussions, we will engage with a selection of topical theoretical texts and we will close read different cultural objects that reflect, talk back, deconstruct and challenge specific narratives of Europe.

Study material and costs
See programme. All other reading material will be made freely available via OSL.

Assignments
1) Individual presentation (20%): students give a 15-minute presentation in which they connect the theoretical texts of that session to a cultural object of their own choice. This cultural object is made available to the other participants in advance.
2) Group presentation (20%): during our excursion to the HoEH in Brussels, students will be given a group assignment, resulting in a presentation at the end of that same day. Further instructions will be given during the first meeting.
3) Short paper of 2000 words (60%): in this paper students engage with at least one of the sessions (theoretical readings and discussion) and use this to close-read one cultural object of their choice (to be consulted with the lecturers). They are also required to further develop their own theoretical framework with additional theoretical sources. The paper needs to contain a well-formulated research question/problem statement, as well as a convincing motivation of the relevance of the research. It needs to be situated within a broader framework of existing scholarship and to present a relevant analysis and interpretation of primary material. The paper needs to be written in English and it needs to follow in all respects the current MLA guidelines (re. footnotes, bibliography, citation, format). Papers will be checked for plagiarism. In order to receive the credits for this seminar, students need a minimum grade of 5,5 for the paper.

Deadline paper (20/12 midnight): submit as word.doc file via e-mail to Margriet and Astrid, with a CC to the OSL office.

Preliminary programme
Session 1 (1/11): Introduction (Margriet van der Waal, Astrid Van Weyenberg)
Session 2 (8/11): Migration (Florian Lippert, University of Groningen)
Session 3 (15/11): Nationalism (Sabine Volk, Jagiellonian University, Kraków)
Session 4 (29/11): Crisis (Liesbeth Minnaard, Leiden University)
Session 5 (6/12): Citizenship (Margriet van der Waal, University of Groningen/University of Amsterdam)
Session 6 (13/12): Heritage (Astrid Van Weyenberg, Leiden University): Excursion to the House of European History in Brussels

Rooms
1/11 – University Library | Belle van Zuylenzaal
8/11 – University Library | Potgieterzaal
15/11 – REC-B |  BK.02
29/11 – University Library | Potgieterzaal
6/12 – University Library | Potgieterzaal
13/12 – House of European History in Brussels

Dates: 17-18 October 2019 | Time: Oct 17 9.00 – 18.00 – Oct 18 10.00 – 17.00 | Venue: University of Amsterdam, exact location see below | Open to: PhD Candidates and RMa Students, OSL members will have first access | ECTS: 1, more details, see below | Registration 

Please note that you can only register for the first day of the workshop via OSL (see below, Registration and Credits).

Organizers

Maria Boletsi (Leiden University and University of Amsterdam), Natashe Lemos-Dekker (University of Amsterdam), Kasia Mika (University of Amsterdam), Ksenia Robbe (currently: Leiden University; from August 2019: University of Groningen)

Theme description

This 2-day workshop will probe contemporary crisis-scapes in order to explore the ways ‘crisis narratives’ structure experiences and representations of time and space, i.e., the ways ‘crisis’ as a framework, concept, rhetoric, affective or discursive structure forms or taps into specific chronotopes.

Historically, the term ‘crisis’ has denoted choice, decision, judgment or critique; it can signal a turning point but also a perpetual state without prospect of resolution. Discursive uses and experiences of ‘crisis’ may involve a sense of disconnection and disorientation, collapsing linear temporality. Crisis can also function as an immobilizing framework for regions deemed to be in chronic crisis. ‘Crisis’ in Europe and elsewhere today often becomes an instrument of rule in neoliberal governmentality, legitimizing ‘states of emergency’ that limit people’s rights and access to public space. Crisis-scapes, however, can also trigger a heightened awareness of the present and foster critical or creative practices that question received notions of the past, initiate different conceptions of history and futurity or form alternative communities and infrastructures.

By approaching crises as chronotopes—what Mikhail Bakhtin termed the enmeshing of temporal and spatial experience into a common condition of a given era—we seek to explore questions of crisis, time and space, as experienced, imagined and represented across a range of contexts, and particularly in Europe and its margins. Chronotopes of crisis partake in complex constellations of meanings, discourses, and affective structures that call for interdisciplinary engagement. The workshop will thus combine perspectives from literary and cultural studies with sociology, cultural anthropology, memory studies, migration studies, post- and decolonial studies, and the energy and environmental humanities, to consider how recent and contemporary crises—economic, environmental, social, political, humanitarian—trigger memories of earlier historical narratives, traumas or practices of resistance, and how they foster or foreclose specific visions of the future.

We are also interested in the ways alternative narratives—what Janet Roitman has called “noncrisis” narratives (2013)—that sidestep ‘crisis rhetoric’ may form alternative chronotopes in the present. Through exploring crises as chronotopes, the workshop also aims to revisit the relation of “crisis” with its cognate, critique, in order to ask which narratives or practices could effectively address problematic mobilizations of ‘crisis’ today and shape other, more inclusive, chronotopic structures. To that end, emphasis will be laid on literary narrativizations of ‘crisis’ as a means of disrupting or reconfiguring the chronotopic structures involved in contemporary crisis-scapes.

The workshop will thus ‘think through’ how the study of crises as chronotopes can take shape across diverse disciplinary contexts and critical debates (e.g., in the context of debt and economic crises; in rethinking infrastructures and repair; in (re)tracing and conceptualizing memory-scapes emerging in crisis-situations); and how crisis figures or disfigures the ongoing question mark about the fate of critique in a postcritical world.

The talks, discussion, and writing that will take place during the workshop will be organized around the following thematic streams:

• Crisis Rhetoric and Alternative Grammars: Dominant representations of subjects of/in crisis (e.g. the tropes of the “victim” or “threatening agent” in the ‘migrant crisis’) often fall short of accounting for dispossessed individuals and their experiences. Which ‘grammars’ can help articulate alternative subjectivities and accounts of agency? Which expressive forms, narrative structures, and reading practices can articulate alternatives to the “slow cancellation of the future” (Berardi, Fisher) and disrupt restrictive or violent chronotopes of crisis?
• Crisis and Memory: How are the periods of revolution and eventful socio-political transformation remembered in current times? This stream will address the ways in which 20^th-century global historical junctures are recollected in political rhetoric, projects of memorialization, critical discourses, and artistic productions. It will explore the temporalities and cultural sensibilities shaped through these interpretations of turning points. How can past crises be imagined beyond narratives of traumatization which have spread globally, producing subject positions of victimhood and moral superiority? Which critical approaches to remembering crises could foster ‘redistribution of the sensible’?
• Critique Under Duress: What is the role of critique and radical critical theory in times of crisis? Rather than decrying an ‘’end of theory’’, the theme aims to rigorously engage with the Frankfurt School, opening it up to the concerns of postcolonial, decolonial (Allen 2016), and environmental theory and its theorizations of the present in crisis. If critique aims to historicize the present, which periodizing schemes have helped bring the contemporary into relief, such as Ernst Mandel’s “late capitalism,” Elizabeth Povinelli’s “late liberalism,” or Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen’s “the Anthropocene”? And which no longer bring descriptive or diagnostic weight to the structures of feeling folding in on the changing climate of crises (and crisis of climate) today? In this context, we will take up the task of trying to ‘think otherwise’ and challenge, in Ann Stoler’s gloss, some of the “ready-made concepts on which we rely and [the] work we call on them to do.” As such, the theme, among others, aims to work across meanings of duress (Stoler 2016)—as “a relation to a condition, a pressure exerted, a troubled condition borne in the body, a force exercised on muscles and mind”—and conceptualize what can critique be and do across shared, yet asynchronous, crises.
• Chronic Crisis: This theme addresses instances where crisis becomes chronic. It asks how the duration and integration of the disruptive and the normal reorient our engagement with past, present, and future as it affects modes of anticipation, waiting, and endurance. Crisis and uncertainty can produce what Rebecca Bryant (2016) has termed the ‘uncanny present’, disrupting the possibility of imagining and acting upon the future. When and how do crises, including illness and economic and environmental crises, fade into chronicity and normality, and what futures does this enable or foreclose? How do we continue living in the face of chronic disruption and finitude?

Workshop format

The format for this event aims to facilitate collaboratively generated output. Instead of sharing finalized research in a traditional conference format, our primary aim is to establish key concepts, questions, and frames for interdisciplinary research on crisis across the humanities and social sciences. This will unfold across the following structures during the 2 days of the workshop:

Day One (October 17)

Plenary Talks and discussion; the program of Day 1 is open to a wide academic public. Confirmed Plenary Speakers: Rebecca Bryant (Utrecht University); Nick Nesbitt (Princeton University); Dimitris Papanikolaou (University of Oxford); Oxana Timofeeva (European University in St. Petersburg).

Day Two (October 18)

This part of the workshop will involve the plenary speakers as well as a group of invited scholars that will form reading and writing groups. The main objective will be to start co-writing a prospectus on the present and future of crisis research, to be submitted to an open access journal. Format:

1. Parallel reading & discussion groups on the 4 thematic streams
2. Collaborative writing in break-off groups on the 4 thematic streams
3. Reconvening: Conclusions and Next Steps

The reading groups on Day 2 will discuss selected pre-circulated articles and set the ground for moving to the writing groups with a shared sense of the major positions, debates, and findings brought together under each thematic heading.

In the second part of the day, the groups will engage in collaborative writing: each group will be asked to compose a document on each thematic stream. Each group will receive a set of common questions in advance to facilitate the writing and ensure the coherent structure of the final output (prospectus).

This workshop is sponsored by OSL and ASCA. It is organized by members of the following networks: the ASCA Cities project and its “Repairing Infrastructures” seminar, the ASCA research group “Crisis, Critique and Futurity,” the “Memory and Identity” reading group at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), and the “Anthropology of Health, Care and the Body” program group of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the UvA.

Registration and credits

The lectures on the first day of the workshop are open to anyone who wishes to attend. Research Ma students and Phd candidates who wish to earn 1 EC by participating in this workshop should register through OSL. Those who wish to attend the lectures without earning EC credits are welcome to do so and do not have to register through OSL. OSL members will have first access. NB: It is not possible to register for the second day of the workshop, which will only involve a smaller group of invited scholars. OSL RMA and PhD students can acquire 1 EC by:

a) Attending the first day of the workshop and participating actively in discussions;
b) reading the assigned texts for one of the thematic streams (Crisis Rhetoric and Alternative Grammars; Crisis and Memory; Critique Under Duress; Chronic Crisis)
c) writing a response of 600-800 words to one or more of the questions or topics of the thematic stream of their choice by engaging with (some of) the assigned texts.

This will be a pass / fail assignment (not graded). The deadline for submitting the assignment is October 22, 2019.

Programme: (Un)Timely Crises – workshop description and full program

Day 1: October 17

Venues: Oudemanhuispoort 4-6, Amsterdam
9:30 – 12:00: D0.08 (Oudemanhuispoort)
12:00 – 17:10: D1.08 (Oudemanhuispoort)

9:30 – 10:00: Registration  and Coffee

10:00 – 10:20: Welcome by OSL director and introduction by organizers

10:20 – 11:30: Lecture by Rebecca Bryant & discussion (location: D0.08) | Chair: Natashe Lemos Dekker

11:30 – 12:00: Coffee break

12:00 – 13:10: Dimitris Papanikolaou, “Past Continuous, Archival Present, Queer Future: Rethinking Our Critical Grammars” (location: D1.08) | Chair: Maria Boletsi

13:10 – 14:10: Lunch (at the hall of Oudemanhuispoort)

14:10 – 15:20: Nick Nesbitt, “Crisis and Critique” (location: D1.08) | Chair: Kasia Mika

15:20 – 15: 40: Coffee break

15: 40 – 16:50: Oxana Timofeeva, “The Time of Catastrophe” (location: D1.08) | Chair: Ksenia Robbe

16: 50 – 17:10: Closing remarks

Day 2: October 18

(NB: Day 2 is only open for a small number of invited participants; it is not open to the public or to those registered through OSL)

The parallel group meetings will take place in the University Library, in the following rooms:

• Belle van Zuylenzaal
• Vondelzaal
• Potgieterzaal

Theme groups

10:00 – 12:00: Theme group meetings I: Discussion of readings

12:00 – 13:30: Lunch break (at Belle van Zuylenzaal)

13:30 -15:30: Theme group meetings II: Collaborative writing

16:00-17:00: Final discussion & next steps

Additional Information

Google Directions

Day 1:-from Amsterdam Centraal Station to Oudemanhuispoort (15min walk): https://goo.gl/maps/MAUb3FTZy5oBRHGY6

Day 2:-from Amsterdam Centraal Station to the University Library (20 min walk): https://goo.gl/maps/vKvHTckb55NGj4qX6

Download a poster of the event here.

De tijd hangt uit zijn naad, Hamlet en de psychoanalyse

5 oktober  2019
Leiden, Cleveringaplaats 1 (LIPSIUSGEBOUW),  zaal 005

Entreeprijs  40 euro (studenten op vertoon van collegekaart 25 euro) all-in.
OSL Promovendi en RMa studenten hoeven geen entree te betalen | OSL Promovendi en RMa studenten kunnen zich aanmelden via osl@rug.nl

Meer informatie over de registratie, zie onderaan dit bericht.

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PROGRAMMA
dagvoorzitter : Sjef Houppermans

10.00-10.30  Inloop met koffie/thee (koffiebar UB)

10.30 – 11.15  Bart Vieveen: De ‘Hamlet-constellatie’

11.15 – 12.00  Marc de Kesel: To be or not to be the phallus: over Lacans Hamlet-interpretatie

12.00 – 12.30 Annelies van Hees: De Scandinavische ‘wortels’ van Hamlet

12.30 – 13.00  Vragen / discussie

13.00-14.30  LUNCH (ter plaatse, inbegrepen)

14.30 – 15.15 Yasco Horsman: De Hamlet-figuur in diverse genres

15.15- 16.15  Tom Lanoye: Vraaggesprek met Peter Verstraten

16.15-16.45   Discussie met publiek

16.45- 17.30  BORREL

18.00- 20.00  Diner voor genodigden (sprekers en bestuur)

Over de sprekers en hun bijdrage

Tom Lanoye

De carrière van de in Sint-Niklaas geboren Tom Lanoye omspant zo’n veertig jaar. Hij schrijft poëzie, romans, columns, kritieken, essays en toneelstukken. Zijn werk is veelvuldig bekroond, en met name de roman Sprakeloos was een publieksfavoriet. Behalve oorspronkelijke theaterstukken maakt hij ook toneelbewerkingen van o.a. Tsjechov, Marlowe, Shakespeare. Zijn Ten oorlog (1997) werd verkozen tot meest belangwekkende stuk uit de Nederlandstalige theaterliteratuur. Hamlet versus Hamlet (2014) zal centraal staan in een gesprek met Peter Verstraten, opleidingsvoorzitter van Film- en Literatuurwetenschap aan de Universiteit Leiden.

Annelies van Hees

Hamlet was er al voor Shakespeare

Lang voor Shakespeare was er al een Hamlet (of Amleth) in Scandinavië, allereerst in de IJslandse Hrolf Saga, in de proza Edda van Snorri en later, in de 12e eeuw in het werk van de Deense historicus Saxo, de Gesta Danorum. Er wordt gekeken naar hoe verschillend of gelijk deze Amleth is aan de latere van Shakespeare.

Annelies van Hees was gedurende haar werkzame leven Hoofddocent Scandinavische Letterkunde aan de UvA, waar zij met psychoanalytische blik naar de literatuur keek. Zij maakt deel uit van het bestuur van de Stichting Psychoanalyse en Cultuur. Tegenwoordig houdt zij zich vooral bezig met vertalen van de Deense klassieken.

Bart Vieveen

Van oedipuscomplex naar hamletconstellatie: de teloorgang van de vaderrol.

In de toneeltekst Hamlet versus Hamlet, van Tom Lanoye spreekt Hamlet de volgende woorden:

De tijd hangt uit zijn naad. Vervloekte kwelling,
Dat jij degeen bent die hem moet herstellen!

Lanoye geeft Shakespeares quote ‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!’ niet alleen een volwaardig Nederlands equivalent, hij geeft Hamlet ook een ander perspectief. Hamlets subjectpositie is bij Lanoye een andere dan bij Shakespeare door een wezenlijke verandering van de vaderrol in de betekenisconstructie. Die verandering duidt Bart Vieveen aan de hand van de ‘hamletconstellatie’.

Bart Vieveen verdedigde in mei 2019 in Leiden met succes zijn proefschrift Kortsluiting in het symbolische: Hamlet, Katadreuffe en Van Egters verkennen de grenzen van het bedreigde Vader-land. Hij studeerde Nederlands en Theaterwetenschap en werkte onder meer bij het Ro-theater. Momenteel is hij rector/bestuurder bij het Stedelijk Gymnasium in Leiden.

Marc De Kesel

To be or not to be the phallus: over Lacans Hamlet-interpretatie.

In zijn zesde seminarie, Le désir et son interprétation (1958-1959) voltooit Lacan voor een eerste keer zijn psychoanalytische theorie van het subject. Daarin spendeert hij acht lessen aan een close-reading van Shakespeares Hamlet. Dit commentaar is cruciaal in de vorming van zijn theorie. Marc De Kesel doet een poging dit commentaar helder uit te leggen en het belang ervan voor de psychoanalytische praktijk aan te tonen.

Marc De Kesel publiceerde over religie- en mystiektheorie, holocaustreceptie, lacaniaanse theorie en kunst- & cultuurkritiek. Recent verscheen van hem Het Münchhausenparadigma. Waarom Freud en Lacan ertoe doen (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2019). Website: https://marcdekesel.weebly.com/.

Yasco Horsman

Strips, Crypts, Spoken (Hamlet, Haddock, Vladek)

Met ‘The Phantom of Hamlet: or the Sixth Act’ (1975) schreef psychoanalyticus Nicolas Abraham een act die volgens hem zou moeten worden toegevoegd aan het stuk van Shakespeare, waarin het familiegeheim onthuld wordt dat de Deense prins bespookt. Deze apocriefe act en Abrahams notie van het ‘familiegeheim’ zijn het startpunt voor een analyse van spookvaders in drie strips: het tweeluik Kuifje en het Geheim van de Eenhoorn en De Schat van Scharlaken Rackham (Herge, 1943, 1944), waar Haddock geconfronteerd wordt met een voorouder, en de autobiografische grafische romans Maus (Spiegelman, 1989), Kraut (Pontiac, 2000) en Fun Home (Bechdel 2006) waarin telkens een onverteerbare erfenis van een vader centraal staat.

Yasco Horsman, Universitair Docent Film- en Literatuurwetenschap publiceerde over trauma, recht en psychoanalyse (Theaters of Justice: Staging, Judging and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht and Delbo (Stanford University Press 2010), over literatuur (Coetzee, Kafka, Brecht), Cinema (Resnais, Eisenstein), Strips (Spiegelman, Ware) en animatie (Disney).

Dr. Sjef Houppermans is emeritus universitair hoofddocent Moderne Franse Literatuur aan de Universiteit Leiden en voorzitter van de Stichting Psychoanalyse en Cultuur

—

Voor informatie over de stichting zie : www.stichtingpsychoanalyseencultuur.eu

Entreeprijs  40 euro (studenten op vertoon van collegekaart 25 euro) all-in.
OSL Promovendi en RMa studenten hoeven geen entree te betalen.

Men dient zich op te geven vóór 20 september bij dr. Daan Rutten (penningmeester)
Via het adres ruttendr@gmail.com
OSL Promovendi en RMa studenten kunnen zich aanmelden via osl@rug.nl

De inschrijving is definitief na het ontvangen van de entreeprijs, over te maken op

rekeningnummer IBAN NL77INGB0007583937   BIC  INGBNL2A
op naam van Stichting Psychoanalyse en Cultuur

Tijdens de studiedag zijn onze publicaties te koop waarvan nieuw:

WONEN OP DRIFT

Psychoanalyse en architectuur –  uitgeverij GARANT

Red. Trees Traversier, Sjef Houppermans, Marc De Kesel  (nr. 11)

Als ook Bart Vieveen, De hamletconstellatie  (nr. 12)

Eerder verschenen in de reeks Psychoanalyse en Cultuur bij Garant

Nr. 1: P. Verstraten, M. De Kesel & S. Houppermans (Red.) Spreken, zwijgen, … schrijven. Psychoanalyse en taal

Nr. 2: M. Kinet, M. De Kesel & S. Houppermans (Red.) Het nieuwe onbehagen in de cultuur

Nr. 3: S. Houppermans, M. Kinet & M. De Kesel (Red.) De bedrieger bedrogen. Dromen in psychoanalyse en cultuur

Nr. 4: M. Kinet, M. De Kesel & S. Houppermans (Red.) For your pleasure? Psychoanalyse over esthetisch genot

Nr. 5: S. Houppermans, J. de Kroon & P. Verstraten (Red.) Psychose en de kunsten

Nr. 6: M. Kinet, K. Vuylsteke Vanfleteren & S. Houppermans (Red.) Als het lichaam spreekt

Nr. 7: P. Verstraten & S. Houppermans (Red.) Oedipus heerst!?

Nr. 8: M. Kinet, T. Traversier & S. Houppermans (Red.) Dwingende vrijheid

Nr. 9: P. Verstraten & S. Houppermans (Red.) Oog om oog. Psychoanalyse en tv-series

Nr. 10: M. Groen & P. Kuijpers (Red.) Woorden breken. Het demografisch tekort

Dates: 23-25 January 2020
Venue: Leiden University
Open to:PhD Candidates and RMa Students, OSL members will have first access
Credits: 5 EC
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Frans Willem Korsten (Leiden University), Dr Ted Laros (Open University), Mariëlle Matthee (Leiden University)

Registration will open Fall 2019

Wars come in many forms: in the archaic form of the battlefield confrontation between opposing armies, in civil wars, in wars between the state and revolutionary factions, but also, more recently, in the metaphorically indicated but still very real forms of the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on terror’. We are surrounded daily by newsreports on cyberwarfare and ecological warfare. War may be one of the worst horrors human beings can go through, yet they also keep on faring it, which must imply that they somehow, perversely, also desire it.

In this OSL winter school we aim to focus on current and historical instances of warfare, from the contemporary to the distant past, and on a wide range of violent conflicts such as the ones named above. All of them has been thematised in literature – and ‘literature’ is also a synecdoche here for all forms of art, like cinema, comics, paintings, songs, plays, and so forth. This holds, then, from Tolstoj’s epic War and Peace to Keiji Nakazawa’s manga Barefoot Gen, from Isabel Allende’s historical novel Portrait in Sepia to Tupac’s song Changes, or from Chibundu Onuzo’s novel Welcome to Lagos to Matthew Heineman’s documentary City of Ghosts. As most works of art testify, wars are always fought in close proximity to law, as all acts of war form a provocation to the operation of law, either because ‘normal life’ and the rule of law have been disrupted or because martial law only covers certain forms of warfare. Or because the laws on war crimes are considered, ironically, as ‘soft law’. At the same time it needs to be acknowledged that many forms of war have been legally underpinned, or made possible by law.

Literature has been the instrument that helped people sustain war (as Primo Levi testified) or that was a major vehicle for the call for justice (as in the work of Antjie Krog). At the same time there is much art that promotes war (Marinetti’s horrifying manifest), or motivates it (Kipling’s “White man’s burden”). Law may be the last stronghold people hold on to in times of violence (as happens wherever people keep on registering what happened with an eye to future justice), or may instead itself be the instrument of violence (as perhaps too many examples illustrate). Our aim in this winter school is to investigate the forcefields and dynamics that exist between the two fields, literature and law, as they intersect in making sense of, or in their trying to govern the phenomenon of war.

We invite ResMa students and PhD students to participate in this winter school by means of a focused paper and active participation during the three day gatherings. We invite historical studies as well as conceptual reflections, we invite scholars coming from the legal side and those coming from the humanities. Our aim is to make the different disciplines talk to one another and to have a broad scope of reflections on the dynamics described above.

The first day of our meeting will consist in theoretical explorations of the concepts at stake and in focusing on the papers produced by the participants. The papers will be central in the next two mornings as well. In the two
afternoons we will have four speakers giving two key note lectures per day.

Our first confirmed speaker is:

Prof. dr. Richard H. Weisberg
Richard H. Weisberg is the Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law.
He was an Obama appointee to the Commission on the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. Professor Weisberg has helped litigate successfully in American federal courts on behalf of Holocaust survivors and their heirs, providing a measure of justice for World War II victims of anti-Semitism. President Nicholas Sarkozy of France awarded him the Legion of Honor in 2008. The founding director at Cardozo of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Program and the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy, he writes widely in those areas, including his book Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France and essays on First Amendment developments in the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a pioneer in the growing law and literature movement worldwide, and his books
The Failure of the Word and Poethics have been widely translated. In 2014, he published In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility (Oxford University Press).

A complete programme will be available soon.

Dates: 12-13 December 2019
Venue: Amsterdam, NIAS
Open to: PhD Candidates and RMa Students, OSL members will have first access
Credits: 1-2 EC (depending on attending 1 or 2 days)
Organizers: Dr Nilgun Bayraktar (California College of the Arts; NIAS) and Dr Alberto Godioli (University of Groningen)
Registration will open October 2019
Please specify which day(s) you want to attend when you register.

The notion of defamiliarization is strikingly undertheorized; in order to find a systematic reflection on the topic, we need to go back to the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s work on ostranenie in literature in the early 20th century or to German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theorization of Verfremdungseffekt in the 1930s to describe theatrical devices that break audiences’ passive absorption in theatrical illusion.

Defamiliarizing practices today play a key role in contemporary artworks engaging with highly topical issues, such as migration, climate change or the rise of right-wing populist discourses. Whether we are dealing with retro-futuristic dystopias, films breaking the fourth wall, or darkly humorous cartoons, defamiliarization can be an effective tool for political activation – one based on formal innovation, rather than on content or on superficial emotional engagement.

But how exactly can we distinguish between different forms of defamiliarization? How can we investigate its effects on the reader/viewer? How does defamiliarization relate to neighboring notions such as the weird, the eerie, or the uncanny? During this two-day conference, 12 scholars working on defamiliarization across media will tackle these questions. The conference will also feature a panel with 2 artists whose work addresses these issues.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Prof. Caroline Levine (Cornell University; Skype lecture and debate) and Prof. Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi (Utrecht University).

More details and a complete programme will follow soon