>> In Memoriam: Shantala Hummler (1987–2024)
(accessed on April 15, 2024 at https://www.buchjahr.uzh.ch)
This event is part of the series CRITICAL FRIDAYS. Here, we move beyond the outdated separation of body, mind, and soul and instead explore embodied cognition and the cognitive powers of the somatic. The focus is on the body as a medium for artistic and ritual practices. We foster dialogues with experts from the fields of science, art, and care work. Performances, workshops, readings, and film screenings serve as our starting point for collective reflections, in which we bridge the gap between closeness and distance, between personal experiences and avant-garde cultural theories.
The history of modern pornography has always been a genuinely literary one, beginning with texts about the lives of prostitutes and autobiographies. During the event, we will read historical and contemporary pornographic texts in order to arrive at a diagnosis of the present through collective discussion and to explore the relevance and traditional lines of literary representations of the pornographic. In this sense, we can explore not only styles of writing, narrative forms, and figurations, but also the political dimension of the pornographic in literature. On the other hand, by reading the texts aloud and speaking them, we aim to make a particular form of the embodiment of pornography tangible. In this way, we can challenge the primacy of the visual in pornography and, in contrast, bring the textual constitution of reality (once again) to the forefront.
The event therefore addresses, first, questions of poetic technique: How metaphorical may literary pornography be, and how explicit must it be? What means and conventions does it employ to be suggestive and to affect the reader? What “effects of reality” does it employ? Second, we must consider the gender roles and conceptions of the body that are portrayed in literary pornography. In their sometimes unreal, sometimes all-too-real phantasms, do these take on a normative or subversive, consolidating or emancipatory character? And how should a—literary, analytical, theoretical—examination of the texts relate to their constitutive and performative power? Third, the aesthetic alliances of the pornographic must be taken into account, for instance with the obscene or the drastic. To what extent, then, do the very limits of what can be said and depicted become thematic within the medium of literature? To what extent do the texts test both the acceptable and the imposition by aiming at the transgression of conventions and excess? Does the pornographic allow for mastery at all?
>> In Memoriam: Shantala Hummler (1987–2024)
(accessed on April 15, 2024 at https://www.buchjahr.uzh.ch)
>> More about Thomas Traupmann
>> Download: Reader “Passionate Fiction”
SCHEDULE
Fri, 02 Dec 22 - 7pm-10pm
LANGUAGES
German
PRICE PER PERSON:
CHF 20.00
Low(er) Income Tickets
CHF 10.00
Supporter Tickets: CHF 30.00
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CRITICAL FRIDAYS is a project by iridescent matters in collaboration with Carla Peca, presented by luhmen d’arc.
With the kind support of
