Open Seminars

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Session 8: 23/02/2023 - 10:00 am CEST [Link here]

Attention​

Texts to be discussed:

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• Bennett, Alice. Contemporary Fictions of Attention. Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-Fist Century. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.

• Epstein, Andrew. Attention Equals Life. The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

 

For this session, Dr. Miriam Fernández Santiago has chosen two texts developing the way that the contemporary economy of attention affects literary composition in the 21st century. After our discussion of Byung-Chul Han’s The Transparency Society and Johannessen’s The Workplace of the Future during last year’s seminars, when we explode the ethical political and sociological effects of the fourth industrial revolution in contemporary society, Dr. Fernández Santiago became acquainted with Yves Citton’s study on The Ecology of Attention (2016) where he argues the contemporary world economics is based on the trade of attention rather than the production of material goods. This is very much in line with Han’s last book Non-Things (2022) and framing the fourth industrial revolution is the historical moment where the digital information industries have gained undeniable prominence in global economy nowadays. But the two texts that Dr. Fernández Santiago has chosen for this session are more focused on literary studies and she thinks they could be of much help in our analysis of 21st century literary production. Their connection with the topic of vulnerability is very much in line with the Vulnerability Scale that Dr. Cristina Gámez and Dr. Miriam Fernández developed for the introduction of their co-edition of Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature (2022), where they argue that there is a correlation between the topic of vulnerability and certain literary strategies and genres.​

 

Session 7: 18/01/2023 - 10:00 am CEST [Link here]

Socio-ecological vulnerability and resistance in the Capitalocene

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Texts to be discussed:

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• Hartley, Daniel.2016.“Anthropocene,Capitaloceneand the Problem of Culture”Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed.byJason W. Moore. PM Press: 154-166.

• Valencia,SayakT. 2010. “Introducción”/”Conclusiones”Capitalismo Gore.Melusina:15-21; 191-200.

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This session will address two articles regarding Capitalism as a world ecology (Hartley)and a deathscape (Valencia) that rely on the idea of an appropriable human and non-human nature. Daniel Hartley warns about the dangers of separating Science and Culture or Capital and Nature, because it is in the assumption of these Cartesian dualitiesthat we tend to obviate sexism or racism, which might apparently not be related toecology but are internal conditions of the capitalist civilizationexpanding socio-ecologicalvulnerability. Moving from the Capitalocene into the more nuanced andsinister Necrocene, Sayak Valencia argues, from a transfeminist and decolonialperspective,that violence itself has become a product within hyper-consumeristneoliberal capitalism, andthat the exploited bodies of sexualized and racialized subjectshave become profitable commodities in certain necropolitical regimes, such as theMexico-US border.

 

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-2022-

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Session 6: 06/05/2022 – 10:00 am CEST [Link here]

Slow Violence and Vulnerability: Exploring Connections in Literary Analysis

 

Texts to be discussed:

• Cole, Alyson. 2016. “All of Us Are Vulnerable, But Some Are More Vulnerable than Others: The Political Ambiguity of Vulnerability Studies, an Ambivalent Critique.”Critical Horizons 17, no. 2: 260-277.

• Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. USA: Harvard UP.

In this session, Susana Nicolás Román (University of Almería) will comment a summary of two key theoretical texts for 20-25 minutes and then a debate with participants will follow to discuss these ideas. The two texts under scrutiny are Alyson Cole’s “All of Us Are Vulnerable, But Some Are More Vulnerable than Others: The Political Ambiguity of Vulnerability Studies, an Ambivalent Critique” (2016) and Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). This online seminar aims to enquire the very concept of vulnerability and slow violence and their exploratory connections in Literary Criticism due to their common questioning of social structures in the neoliberal era.

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Session 5: 20/04/2022 – 10:30 am CEST [Link here]

Beyond Mortalist Humanism: Death, Mourning and Citizenship

 

Texts to be discussed:

• Mbembe, Achille, 2003. “Necropolitics”. Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 11-40.

• Honig, Bonnie, 2011. “The other is dead: mourning, justice, and the politics of burial”. Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation.

For this session Carolina Sánchez-Palencia (University of Seville) has chosen two texts that illuminate the operations of power aimed at both exposing individuals to death and conditioning their affective memorialization. In “Necropolitics” (2003) Achille Mbembe expands Foucault’s notion of biopolitics so as to account for the contemporary ways in which the political (in its different expressions) makes the murder of its enemy its primary goal. Bonnie Honig argues in “The other is dead: mourning, justice, and the politics of burial” (2011), that after-death circumstances are also shaped by necropower in the form of differential and hierarchical rights to mourn, grieve or memorialize the dead.

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