Wykład mistrzowski prof. Hansa Rindisbachera pt. „Vincent O. Carter at One Hundred: A Black American Voice in Swiss Literature”
Zakład Literatury i Kultury Amerykańskiej Instytutu Filologii Angielskiej zaprasza na wykład prof. Hansa Rindisbachera pt. „Vincent O. Carter at One Hundred: A Black American Voice in Swiss Literature”. Wykład odbędzie się w środę 6 listopada o godz. 16:00 w sali 11 w Instytucie Filologii Angielskiej (ul. Kuźnicza 21-22).
Wykład odbędzie się w języku angielskim
Streszczenie w języku angielskim: In 2021, Limmat Verlag, Zürich, published the German translation of the Black American writer Vincent O. Carter’s The Bern Book, an autobiographical account of his first few years of living in Bern. The book covers the time from 1953-1957 and had appeared in its English original in 1970. This narrative is vastly undercategorized by the label “autobiography.” It is equally a travelogue, a cultural anthropology or ethnography, a historical portrait of a city and its inhabitants, a social psychology, a cultural critique of Switzerland, and, as the author himself calls it, “a record of a voyage of the mind.” However, the book was largely forgotten over the past half century but has recently received much attention since its re-publishing in English in 2020 and now for the first time in German in 2021. The presentation is an introduction for Polish Americanists of an American writer’s experience in the Europe of the mid-20th century and his current reception, when his writings are emerging in German translation in a more open literary-cultural context. Carter’s work is becoming an important outside link for (German-language) Swiss literature to the American expat writers in Paris in the 1950s, the Swiss mid-century discourse on “cultural narrowness,” and to the recent and present discourses on migratory and ethnic literature, with their focus on racism, gender, and decolonization. Carter’s work speaks to all these topics, while his second novel Such Sweet Thunder (finished 1963, published 2003) adds a powerful Black voice in the US literary context of the 1920s.
Notka bio: Hans J. Rindisbacher is a Professor of German Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, USA. His research focuses on the intersection of perception, notably the sense of smell, and its textual encodings; and on the representation and communication of sensory experience/embodiment in general. He published The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992), a pathbreaking study of literary olfactory representations. More recently, Rindisbacher has co-edited, with Peter C. Meilaender, Writing Switzerland: Culture, History, and Politics in the Work of Peter von Matt (Peter Lang, 2019); and the Black American author Vincent O. Carter has become an object of Rindisbacher’s research and publication.
Organizacja wykładu: dr hab. Mateusz Świetlicki, Instytut Filologii Angielskiej
