IPP KNL | Prof. Dr. Jan Rupp (JLU): "Figurations of World Writing and Environmental Memory in Literatures of the Global South"

This lecture will explore figurations of environmental memory in literatures of the Global South for the particular insights they offer into today's global climate crisis. It will build on the intersection between cultural narratology and postcolonial ecocriticism, highlighted by recent work on the ecological and ethical dimensions of storyworlds, as well as on their potential for cross-cultural understanding. Works from the Global South frequently elaborate on distant spatiotemporal scales, allowing readers to gauge central long-term as well as world-encompassing developments of anthropogenic change. Emerging from climate zones in which the current environmental crisis is most keenly felt, these works retrieve fundamental ecological insights that may sensitize readers everywhere to the planet's precarious present, and thus help work towards ensuring a viable future. Their depiction of wide-ranging environmental memories can be seen to offer a blueprint against lingering amnesia, as issues of environmental justice and the challenge of generating a shared commitment to the world loom large.

// Prof. Dr. Jan Rupp is currently the coordinator of the Research Centre for the Study of Culture (RCSC), Giessen, after having served as an interim professor at the universities of Frankfurt, Giessen, Heidelberg and Wuppertal. He is the author of Genre and Cultural Memory in Black British Literature (2010) and a second monograph on representations of ritual in modernist Pageant Fictions (2016). His research interests include the contemporary novel, cultural memory studies, narrative theory, intermediality, ritual in literature, and (neo-)Victorian studies. He has published widely on diasporic British as well as postcolonial Anglophone writing and theory, including on didactic perspectives of the literature classroom. Among his current work is a project on figurations of world writing and environmental memory in literatures of the Global South.

Please, register here for Prof. Dr. Jan Rupp's Keynote Lecture (in person or online)