Seminar GlobaLS: "The Global Novel and the Tensions of the Material"

Program

One of the distinctive features of globalization is the worldwide movement of material things (including raw materials, components and consumer goods). This globalized trading network knits countries and continents together in increasingly complex and fragile supply chains.

Researchers working in fields such as thing theory and the new materialism have focused particularly on this globalized materiality and how current crises (and especially climate change and socio-economic inequalities) call for a rethink of the status of material "things". This is an inherently vague concept, since "the material" exists on a plane between human and non-human agency, and between a sensorial approach and a resistance to human understanding.

This seminar will deal with the three aspects making up the global novel's engagement with the tensions of the material: (1) the object-oriented plot, (2) the treatment of transcorporeality and (3) the use of multimodal devices.

Caracciolo will provide an example of each of these strategies and note how the tensions around the material are developed at a formal, a conceptual and an ethical level. In essence, the professor's argument is that the global novel is, at one and the same time, both a physical object embedded within a series of material processes and a means for finding and negotiating the many meanings of the material.

The discussion will be based on the following texts:

- Caracciolo, Marco. Emplotment beyond the Human Scale: On Deep Time and Narrative Nonlinearity. Poetics Today, 42 (3), 2021, pp. 341-359.

- Woods, Derek. Scale Critique for the Anthropocene. The Minnesota Review, 83, 2014, pp. 133-142.

Marco Caracciolo

Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at UGent, where he coordinates the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh” (NARMESH).

He received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Bologna in 2012. Before coming to Ghent, Marco has held fellowships in Hamburg, Groningen, and Freiburg, and he has been a “Project Narrative” visiting scholar at Ohio State University.

He has published in journals such as Narrative, Poetics Today, Modern Fiction Studies, and New Literary History. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (De Gruyter, 2014; honorable mention for the Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters (University of Nebraska Press, 2016); and A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt; Ohio State University Press, 2016).

To register for the seminar, please contact Cristina Sánchez, head of GlobaLS communication, at csanchezsanchez3@uoc.edu.