Hypermediated Deathworlds: New Wars, the World Novel and Exorbitant Witnessing

3 Oct 2012 - 16:00 / 3 Oct 2012 - 18:00

Jackman Humanities Institute
170 St. George Street, Toronto
University of Toronto

The Centre for Comparative Literature & The Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies

present a public lecture by

Professor Debjani Ganguly
Director of Humanities Research Centre
Australian National University

Hypermediated Deathworlds: New Wars, the World Novel and Exorbitant Witnessing

Date: Wednesday October 3rd, 2012
Time:  4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Location:  Room JH – 100A
Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto
170 St. George Street, Toronto

The modern novel’s link to distant suffering, technologies of mediation, and moral responsibility has a long history, going back to eighteenth‐century Abolitionism and the rise of the sentimental novel. The crux of these debates is the argument that technological advancement amplifies the humanitarian sensibility. The more technology covers distance, the more attuned we become to the reality of human suffering elsewhere. Since the first Gulf War and more so, in the rhetoric presaging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, proliferating para‐novelistic genres such as blogs, electronic epistles and docu‐visual digital narratives by human rights organisations have critically transformed the morphology and moral purchase of the contemporary novel. This talk will examine the transitive affectivity of neovisual media in the transformation of novelistic genres in our era.

Debjani Ganguly is Director of the Humanities Research Centre and Associate Professor of Literature at the Australian National University She works in the areas of postcolonial literary studies, comparative literature, and world literature in the era of globalization. Her books include Caste, Colonialism and Countermodernity (Routledge, 2005). She is currently completing a monograph for Duke University Press entitled The World Novel After 1989.