TLRH | Vampire Nation: Blood & Soil on the European Borders

Tuesday, 30 March 2021, 4 – 5pm A talk by Professor Emeritus
Tomislav Z. Longinović (UW Madison) as part of the School of
Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Research Seminar Series
in association with Trinity Long Room Hub. All webinars take place
at 4pm. Presenters speak for a maximum of 45 minutes, followed by a
Q&A. This lecture examines the cultural mechanisms through
which the Gothic imaginary, constituted during the 19th century in
English-language literature, has been transformed into a discursive
lens for understanding the Balkans and its apparently endless
violent political and military confrontations. The last decade of
the twentieth century added one more collective phantasm visualized
through the lens of the Gothic imaginary: the bloodthirsty specter
of ‘the Serbs’ as the vampires of the post-communist period during
the establishment of the new world order. Tomislav Z. Longinović
(PhD, MFA) is an Emeritus Professor of Slavic, Comparative
Literature and Visual Culture at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison; visiting scholar at Harvard University and CEU.
His books include Borderline Culture (1993), Vampires Like Us
(2005), Red Knight: Serbian Women Songs (co-ed., 1992), with David
Albahari, Words are Something Else (1996). He is also the author of
fiction in Serbian (Sama Amerika, 1995) and Fetiš Nulo (2020) for
which he was awarded the 2021 Jovan Dučić prize for best book of
literary fiction. He also published many short stories in English,
as well as his experimental novel Moment of Silence in 1990. His
book Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary was awarded the
2012 Mihajlo Miša Djordjević prize for best book in South Slavic
studies. His research interests include South Slavic literatures
& cultures; literary theory; Central and East European literary
history; comparative Slavic studies; translation studies; cultural
studies. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The
Secret of Translation, which features a theory of culture based on
relational structures rather than ethnic or national ones. Learn
more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/