Event date: Tuesday 1 December 2015, 5.30 – 7 p.m. ***Note change of date!***
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room (first floor, right above the main entrance)

“The Contemporary Novel, Reality Hunger, and the Memory Boom”; given by Prof. Bryan Cheyette (University of Reading)

Abstract

My talk will explore what I have begun to consider to be the structural question of supersessionist thinking in three main critical contexts: firstly with regard to the construction of contemporary literature, from post-war to postmodern and, finally, to post-postmodern so to speak; secondly in relation to the disciplinary formation of memory studies, from historical studies to memory studies and, finally, critical memory studies; and, last but not least, I want to end by looking at examples of supersessionist thinking in a variety of contemporary fictions with particular regard to the Holocaust and decolonization (under the sign of the post-1990s “memory boom”).

Bio

Bryan Cheyette is Chair in Modern Literature at the University of Reading. He is the editor or author of nine books most recently Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish/Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (Yale University Press, 2013) and volume seven of The Oxford History of the Novel in English (on the British and Irish novel, 1940-present), which Oxford University Press will publish in 2016. His research interests include racial representations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature, postcolonial literature and theory, diasporic literature, Holocaust testimony and British-Jewish literature. He has reviewed contemporary fiction for the TLS, the Independent and the Guardian. His current project is a biography of Israel Zangwill for Yale University Press.

All are welcome. Admission is free, and registration is not required. For more information, please contact Stef Craps.