Dr. phil. habil. Heike Hartung (University of Potsdam/University of Graz)
Literary Narratives of Loss and Grief
Narrative is a crucial concept for the study of literature and culture. The ‘narrative turn’ in the late twentieth century affected the ways in which critical knowledge is being constituted in many disciplines in the humanities. In this sequence of 3 seminar sessions, we explore different aspects of narrative by focusing on the complex emotion of grief and how it is expressed in literary texts. In order to engage with a range of literary forms and their cultural meanings, we will look at different contexts of loss. After an introduction into concepts of narrative and grief, we will examine perceptions of multiple loss in literary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the first session. In the second session we turn to two writers who have transformed their experience of the loss of a loved person into literary memoirs, Joan Didion and Julian Barnes, highlighting the temporal and spatial dislocations of grief. In the third session we will address a specific site of dislocating loss, the Indian partition. In this concluding session we read a personal narrative by the feminist writer Urvashi Butalia to analyse what it may mean to lose one’s home and family.
The required texts will be made available.
Session 1 on 22 October 2024 from 10.00-11.30 at CIAS
Introduction: Narratives of Multiple Loss in Literary Responses to COVID-19
Session 2 on 23 October 2024 from 10.00-11.30 at CIAS
The Literary Grief Memoir: Joan Didion and Julian Barnes
Session 3 on 24 Oktober 2024 from 10.00-11.30 at CIAS
Partition Stories: The Indian Partition and Landscapes of Loss
For further information, download the flyer here or contact centeramericas(at)uni-graz.at
