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Estrangement on a Strange Planet| title | Estrangement on a Strange Planet |
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| start_date | 2026/06/08 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle de réunion de l'Institut Nicod |
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| summary | In this lecture, I will explore the ways in which the Anthropocene affects one of the key functions of narrative art : the production of estrangement. Elaborating on Eva Horn’s work (2020), I show that, on a climate-changed planet, latency (“slow violence”), then entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds, and a clash of spatial and temporal scales pose new formal challenges to the repertoire of literature (and other artforms). These challenges are instructive beyond literary studies insofar as they also concern the emancipatory impact that experiences of estrangement are supposed to exert on readers and spectators, allowing them to see their ordinary habits from unexpected angles and thereby enabling them to transform their lifeworlds. Since, as Svetlana Boym reminds us (2019), defamiliarization has both an aesthetic and a political dimension, what role should it play on a planet that is already so strange that we are now not only facing various problems of collective action, but also a veritable crisis of imagination ? My argument will be that, if estrangement devices are to occupy a central role in the aesthetics and politics of the Anthropocene, they need to become attuned to its specific nature. And that is, unsurprisingly, a difficult endeavour, which partly explains why it is so hard to undo the currently dominant social imaginaries : business as usual, solutionist techno-fixes and apocalyptic fatalism. |
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| responsibles | Dokic, Arcangeli |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2026/06/04 09:23 UTC |
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