Amy J. Elias (English, University of Tennessee) and Christian Moraru (American Literature and Critical Theory, University of North Carolina) are authors of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the twenty-First Century (Northwestern, 2015). In the opening session, they will introduce the core concepts of the book, and in the following sessions each will present a major lecture on their current research.
Session 1: The Planetary Turn
1:00-2:00pm
The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century grew out of its editors' sense that, during the past two decades or so, we have been witnessing a sea-change across a wide range of geopolitical, aesthetic, economic, and theoretical-philosophical areas and practices. Focusing primarily on the contemporary arts and their interpretation, the collection attends to the incremental onset of the "planetary" as the defining discursive matrix and analytic framework for this very palpable and epoch-making transformation.
Session 2: Amy J. Elias: "The Temporality of Dialogue"
2:15-3:15pm
What time does it take to interact meaningfully with another? In what time zone does empathy take place? How do the arts address these questions? In this paper I discuss dialogue as a temporal register. Predicated not on "understanding" the other nor on an easy and shallow sympathy, dialogue oscillates between communication and blockage, contestation and commiseration, but it nonetheless "moves us forward."
Amy J. Elias teaches and writes about arts and aesthetics of the post-1945 period, time and history studies, narrative theory, globalization/planetarity studies, and contemporary fiction. She was the principal founder of A.S.A.P.:The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Her book Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (2002) won the George and Barbara Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and she is currently completing a book "Dialogue at the End of the World: Art and the Commons," about dialogue as an ethical and artistic practice across the arts after 1950.
Session 3: Christian Moraru: Coevalness and Critical Chronography
3:30-4:30pm
Focusing on post-Cold War American literature and culture, Moraru will ask what makes them "contemporary" and what it takes to do justice to this contemporaneity critically. Participating in what has been called the "spatial turn" in literary and cultural studies, his latest books have raised primarily issues of space: what time is it now in American culture? In answering, he points to the worrisome expansion of "monotemporality," of "mean time" across U. S. discourses and cultural practices, as well as to writers' attempts to break up this chronocultural monolith into contiguous, intersecting, discrepant yet rich temporalities, timelines, and histories.
Christian Moraru specializes in contemporary American fiction, critical theory, as well as comparative literature with emphasis on history of ideas, postmodernism, and the relations between globalism and culture. His recent publications include Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imagination (Columbia, 2009) and The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern, 2015, with Amy J. Elias) and the monographs Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (Michigan, 2011) and Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (Michigan, 2015).
Panel discussion moderated by Terry Smith
4:30-5:00pm
Reception
5:00pm