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RA2 Guest Lecture “ Anthropofugal Fictions” by Dr Simona Bartolotta

When

Dec 01, 2025 from 10:00 to 12:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC100)

Where

Room 109 GCSC, Otto-Behaghel Str.12, Gießen and online

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This talk will attempt to sketch a model of what I call “the anthropofugal,” which relates to how the literary narrative text negotiates between anthropocentric and anti-anthropocentric impulses. On the one hand, the contemporary flourishing of fiction that is attentive to the nonhuman world in its disparate varieties, together with the attendant theoretical currency of frameworks from posthumanism to material ecocriticism, from object-oriented philosophies to animal and plant studies, leave little doubt that nonhumanity, broadly defined, and the decentering of the human perspective have long been culturally determinant in Western modernity. On the other hand, however, it hardly needs stressing that a total displacement of the human as measure of the production and reception of nonhuman-oriented fiction (or any other art form) is impossible, and would be self-defeating if successful. In this sense, anthropofugal fictions always call into question the possibility of their own interpretation, and often exhibit a certain intractability with respect to even the most intuitive and well-tested norms of literary and cultural readings. Thus, I propose the anthropofugal as a framework that is caught in this bind and aware of it, making the most out of this tension. Its scope is what we may call fictions of epistemic hunger: works that explore the modes, limits, and possibilities of knowledge in the context of the encounter between the mind and the mind-independent world.   

The talk will cover the historical and methodological positioning of the anthropofugal. It will also offer examples of the anthropofugal at work through textual examples, in particular Stanisław’s Lem’s His Master’s Voice (1968).

 
The preparatory reading can be found on the RA 2 Padlet: https://padlet.com/caesystuck/ra2-black-board-p5nh2t500k0asc4v