The 'Ordinary Magic’ of Resilience in Anglophone Literatures: Past, Present, Futures

You are warmly invited to attend the forthcoming two-day literary workshop “The ‘Ordinary Magic’ of Resilience in Anglophone Literatures: Past, Present, Futures”, to be held by the Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Stuttgart from 22-23 February 2024. This interdisciplinary symposium will feature the panel “Technologies of Resilience,” which will include a discussion of the depiction of intelligent systems in literature.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Thursday, 22 February (Literaturhaus Stuttgart, Breitscheidstraße 4)

Friday, 23 February (KII, Keplerstr. 17, Room 17.92)

PANELS

Panel 1: Legacies of Resilience.

Chair: Curtis Runstedler

Sophie Franklin (LMU München), “‘The Jago’s got you’: Resilience’s Grip in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago”

Burak Sezer (University of Cologne), “Roped Resilience: The Poetics of Bonding in Disaster Narratives”

Michael Thomas Smith (American University of Armenia), “Colonized Resilience: Wide Sargasso Sea and the Problem of Being Resilient”

Panel 2: Form, Genre, and Resilience.

Chair: Selina Scholz

Bhawna Singh & Vishal Sharma (Chaudhary Charan Singh University Meerut and Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University, Kanpur), “‘I don’t want camouflage’: Reading Resilience in the Select Works of Mahesh Dattani in South Asian Anglophone Landscape”

Karoline Huber (University of Stuttgart), “Children’s Resilience in Cli-Fi: The Bildungsroman in Times of Climate Crises”

Andrea Szabó (University of Pannonia), “The Extraordinariness of ‘Ordinary Magic’ in Two Short Stories by Alice Munro”

Panel 3: Technologies of Resilience.

Chair: Andrea Talmann

Curtis Runstedler (University of Stuttgart), “Resilience Beyond Time: AI and Resilience in Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous”

Ruvindra Sathsarani (University of Tübingen), “Everyman is Watching You: Isolated Resilience against Terrors of Surveillance”

Nicole Brandstetter (Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences), “Resilience between Adaptability and Ignorance as Reaction to the Climate Crisis and Digitalisation in John Lanchester’s The Wall and T.C. Boyle’s Blue Skies”

Cora Övermann (Bremen University), “Women Who Stay in STEM: Narratives of Resilience in Contemporary American Science Novels”

Panel 4: Beyond Resilience.

Chair: Sophie Franklin

Nina Engelhardt (University of Stuttgart), “Jolly Suffering and the Limits of Resilience in Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes”

Geoff Rodoreda (University of Stuttgart), “Not Resilience but Resurgence: A Reading of Contemporary Indigenous Thinking”

Carmen Zamorano (Dalarna University), “Resilience in (Post)imperial Vulnerable Times in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives”