Essexi Ülikooli professor Sanja Bahuni avatud loeng juba 20. veebruaril

Juba sel reedel, 20. veebruaril kell 12:15 peab Essexi Ülikooli kirjanduse ja filmi professor Sanja Bahun Von Bocki maja ruumis 115 väga huvitava loengu teemal “Modernism and Home, with Notes on Kafka”.

Loengu teesid:
“Modernism and Home, with Notes on Kafka”
Professor Sanja Bahun

In my talk I will discuss home and modernism - the research theme of my most recent book. As a concept, an experience, a discourse, an emotion, and a (real or imagined) physical site, home shapes who we are as individuals and collectives. It is a fulcrum around which our major mental activities such as belonging, memory-work, emplacement and displacement, revolve. Yet home is also a specific place, localizable or pictured as a body, or a part thereof, and a community of peoples, sites, sounds, smells, gestures, layers of geology, and vagaries of history; a space one can have or not have, and a space one can imagine having or not having. While the address to home remains one of the most frequent types of literary and artistic expression globally, the category of home had particular discursive vitality in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Sometimes coupled with wider ontological anxieties, the investigation of home was spurred by early globalisation and the rise of conflicting emotional postures such as cosmopolitanism and nationalism; the context in which vast numbers of people found themselves displaced, voluntarily or involuntarily, or facing the demand to leave home in the name of home; when the unprecedented rise in global population and its specific crowding in the cities necessitated making physical home uniform, yet the everyday experience across the globe suggested that homes differ in their material and mental manifestations. Modernist artists and thinkers reacted to this prominence by probing the conceptual and physical boundaries of home. They found the precincts of home trembling, morphing, or even non-existent; and they came to regard “thinking home” as an activity that is both necessary and uncomfortable–just as we do today. These recalibrations of the experiences of home, boundary, and environment found expression in a striking variety of artistic representations of home. This talk will survey these across modernist literature and art and then zoom in on one specific literary practice – Franz Kafka’s early writing.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Sanja Bahun is Professor of Literature and Film and the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Essex, United Kingdom. She is the author or editor of Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning (2014), The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism (2006), Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (2008, 2015), From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women's Aesthetic Production (2009), Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras (2011), Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions (2012), Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013), Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917-1989: Re-Visions (2014), and Thinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2018, 2020), alongside numerous articles and essays in the area of international modernism, intellectual history, literature, cinema, visual art and avant-garde.