Event date: Thursday 13 October 2011, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room

“Trauma vs. Re-Enchantment of the Past and the Future” given by Dr. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (Aarhus University)

“The disenchantment of the world has become a staple in the description of the modern world since Max Weber, yet sources of enchantment are still sought for. The grand political narratives that peaked in the 1970s contained elements of this, just as the response of postmodern incredulity towards such visions was accompanied by other kinds of seeing the world as enchanted through both history and science. In the present memory boom traumatic pasts are of central interest, but even traumatic periods can have potential for enchantment and nostalgia, as is evident, for example, with Ostalgie. Conversely, there are also evidently limits to such entanglements between two very different sentiments. In this talk the relations between trauma and enchantment will be discussed with regard to both the kind of grand narrative trauma offers and the manner in which visions of the future to a certain degree have become pre-traumatized.”

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (PhD 2002) is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the director of the Danish Network for Cultural Memory Studies (since 2008), the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (Continuum 2008, pb. 2010), and a co-editor of the forthcoming World Literature: A Routledge Reader. Currently he is writing a book, to be published with Continuum, entitled The New Human in Literature: Visions of Changes in Body, Mind, and Society since 1900, and co-editing the proceedings of the conference The Posthuman Condition, held in 2010.