“Fictive States and the State of Fiction in the Decolonizing World”

26 Nov 2011 - 10:00 / 26 Nov 2011 - 12:00

NF205 (Northrop Frye Hall) Victoria College
73 Queen’s Park Circle
U of T

TORONTO SEMIOTIC CIRCLE

Please join us on
Saturday, November 26th, 2011

Victoria College, 73 Queen’s Park Circle, Toronto
NF205 (Northrop Frye Hall)
10am – 12noon

For

“Fictive States and the State of Fiction in the Decolonizing World”

Prof. Dr. Neil ten Kortenaar
Director for the Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto

Abstract:

Pseudonymous settings are common in realist novels. Indeed, fictional streets, schools, businesses, and even cities are more likely to have invented names than they are to correspond to places on maps outside the novel. But this does not indicate these settings are different from other places: the fictive name often indicates that there is something generic about a street or town. At what level does the setting of a novel become fictive—the house, the street, the town?—and what does that indicate about the relation of the setting to an extratextual world? When does the nation-state itself become fictive?  The rules about fictive settings (what can be fictive and even what must be fictive) seem to be different for Europe and North America and different again for Latin America or Africa.  What do those differences indicate about how place and belonging are imagined?
Neil ten Kortenaar teaches postcolonial literature at the University of Toronto at Scarborough and is the director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (2004) and of Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy (2011).
REFRESHMENTS TO BE SERVED

—
Dr. Christopher M. Drohan, MA, PhD

Assistant Professor
Faculty of Liberal Arts and Access
Sheridan Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning
1430 Trafalgar Road, Oakville, ON L6H 2L1
Tel. 416.551.6254
Fax. 905.815.4072

Assistant Director, Canadian Group
The European Graduate School (EGS)
Saas-Fee, Switzerland
http://egs.edu/main/administration.html