Dartmouth Events

Working with "The Real":

Weird Textualities (Philosophy, Poetry, Psychoanalysis, Literary Theory)

“Working with ‘the Real’” brings together two of the most preeminent figures in literary and critical theory in comparative literature today, Prf. Heather Yeung and Prf. Frank Ruda (the University of Dundee) for an intersectional discussion on the problem, aporias and undecidabilities, the inexplicable meanings and impossible possibilities of the “Real”. Speakers will engage with realism as a successful failing-to-account for history in a short story by Balzac that points towards historicity as contingency (Prf. Robert St.Clair, FRIT, Dartmouth College) ; with the Real as an irreducibly resistant kernel of grief in Paul Celan (Prf. Heather Yeung); and the Real as a place-holder for political desire in psychoanalytic and revolutionary thought that might yet make it possible to insist on courage, audacity and beginning again, to failing more and better, encore et toujours (Prf. Frank Ruda).