Things and Ideas of Community in the Literary Works of Matthias Zschokke.

Recorded April 25, 2023. An in-person seminar by Trinity Long Room
Hub Visiting Research Fellow Prof Dariusz Komorowski (University of
Wroclaw) as part of the School of Languages, Literatures and
Cultural Studies Seminar Series. After decades of being trapped in
discourse, where signs referred to other signs rather than reality,
sentences were quotations or paraphrases of other sentences, and
texts built on other texts, permanently questioning their own
meaning and truth, a need for stability beyond discourse emerged in
the 1990s. One turned to matter, which was reawakened from its
slumber to join man as a reliable partner. Bruno Latour, Michel
Callon and John Law played a special role in this context. They
wanted to abolish the traditional dichotomy of world perception
with the opposition of nature and culture or subject and object and
to establish a symmetry in its place. In the symmetrical conception
of the world, human and nonhuman actors have agancy that no longer
needs to be intentional and rationally motivated. In this talk,
Komorowski will first examine the role things play in Matthias
Zschokke's work and how the Swiss author perceives them. On this
basis, the question of whether and how things contribute as
effective actors to the creation of communities will be explored.
In this respect, Komorowski links to the question of the
representation of ideas about communities in time, when modernity
becomes liquid (Bauman) and the lost metanarratives can no longer
give support to individual stories (Lyotard). Here we draw on
actor-network theory, which, originally developed as a sociological
method, rather quickly found application in other disciplines of
humanities. Whether and possibly to what extent and with what
insight potential ANT can be applied in literary analysis is one of
the aims of his investigation. Dariusz Komorowski is a Professor of
German Philology at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. Since 2005
he has been the Head of the Research Centre for German-Swiss
Literature and since 2017 the co-originator and editor-in-chief of
the online magazine “CH-Studien. Zeitschrift zu Literatur und
Kultur aus der Schweiz” which he leads in cooperation with Anna
Fattori (Rome) and Jan Jambor (Prešov). From 2012 to 2018 he was
the Head of the postgraduate studies in “Cultural Management in the
Cooperation of Regions of the European Union" at the University of
Wroclaw. Dariusz Komorowski has conducted seminars and given
lectures at the universities in Göttingen, Zurich and Maribor and
organised several international seminars for master students in
cooperation with those universities. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/