On Wednesday, 6 March 2013, Associate Professor Maria Koundoura (Emerson College Boston) will give a talk entitled: “Of Dreams & Reality: The Politics of Transnational Aesthetics.”
The talk will take place in Room 308 (School of English Library, New Philosophy Building) at 7:15 pm.
Below you can find the speaker’s short bio and paper abstract.
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“Of Dreams & Reality: The Politics of Transnational Aesthetics”
Abstract
Ever since Aristotle declared that it is impossible for the soul to think without images and that their truth or illusion is unimportant, only their function as a medium for the soul, image-making, ‘φαντασία’ in Aristotle’s words, has played a central role in what Jacques Ranciere calls the ‘partition of the sensible,’ the distribution and re-distribution of times, spaces, places, and identities in the polis.
Using literature and its function in modernity as a place of awakening for the everyday as its example, this talk explores the role of image-making in the distribution of the sensible in our current moment of capital—a moment that encodes a transnationally translatable culture with difference suited to its needs—and offers a definition of transnational literature, which it identifies through its forms, its negotiation of time, and its production of a space that does not nostalgically point either to that of the nation (even as multicultural) or to that of a universal culture devoid of nations.
Short bio
Maria Koundoura is the author of The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities and Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethics of Global Culture Exchange. She has published articles on modernity, nationalism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature. She was editor of the Stanford Humanities Review and of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Stanford University and is Associate Professor of Literature and Theory at Emerson College Boston.
