Seminarium Szkoła Mistrzów 14.06.2023 g.15:00
W środę 14 czerwca 2023 o godz. 15:00 odbędzie się kolejne spotkanie w ramach seminarium Szkoła Mistrzów.
Gościć będziemy profesor Raffaellę Baccolini.
Raffaella Baccolini teaches English and American literature and Gender Studies in the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, Forlì Campus. Her research areas are contemporary and twentieth-century American and English Literature as well as gender studies. She has published on women’s literature; feminist criticism; utopia, dystopia, and science fiction; modernism; memory and nostalgia; trauma studies; young adults’ literature, cinema. She has edited several volumes, among which are Dark Horizons: Science Fic1on and the Dystopian Imagination (with Tom Moylan, 2003), Utopia, Method, Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming (also with Tom Moylan, 2007), and Transgressive Utopianism: Essays in Honor of Lucy Sargisson (with Lyman Tower Sargent, 2021). She is a member of MeTRa (Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Mediation and Translation by and for Children and Young Adults); she is co-editor of the “Ralahine Utopian Studies” series (Peter Lang) and of the online journal mediAzioni.
Topic “Meaning of Humanities Today: Finding Hope in the Critical Dystopia”
ABSTRACT: As an Italian woman who did her graduate work in the United States, and who specialized in American “high” modernist poetry, my approach to utopian studies has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography. It is therefore a hybrid approach that combines these geographical, cultural, and historical circumstances with other issues like desire and interest. In particular, my interest in feminist theory and in writings by women has intersected with my belief that the function of good literature is to disturb and unsettle readers. I believe that a feeling of being out of place, not at home in the world is a necessary condition of utopia and of the desire to contribute to the transformation of society. It is an approach that has foregrounded from the very beginning issues of genre writing as they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. Such an approach, however, has and must also come to terms with the political and cultural circumstances that characterize an historical period. For this reason, I will offer a reflection on the genre of dystopia, how it has changed, its constituent elements and their transformations, with a look at its gender dimension and the issue of women’s reproductive rights in some recent critical dystopias. In my work, in fact, I have proposed a critical interpretation of dystopian literature in its formal and thematic features, while trying to look for other modes of articulating horizons of hope. Together with many others, I have come to believe that contemporary dystopian production, which I have called critical dystopia, in its themes and in its formal aspects, is an example of an oppositional and resisting form of writing, one that maintains hope and a utopian horizon within the pages of dystopia in these very dark times. Critical dystopias provide the tools and the incentive that we need to critically interpret and transform our present, thus exemplifying the importance and meaning of humanities today.