Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU invites you to a public lecture at the Literature in context doctoral module by Aina Vidal-Pérez:

 

Global Mediterranean: Representations of the Coast in Crisis in the Contemporary Novel (1990–2020).

 

The lecture in English language will be on Thursday, 26th of May 2022, at 2.30 P.M. at Mala Dvorana ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd floor, Ljubljana.

 

Despite the scarcity of critical studies on the matter, the Mediterranean Sea as a globalized and as such environmentally vulnerable space has gained significant attention in the field of the novel over the last three decades. Starting from a conception of the global novel as a critical framework, the talk will approach representations of the Mediterranean Sea as a space traversed by accelerated and overlapped crises. The sea will be addressed as a complex narrative environment concerned with multi-scale issues such as extractivism, deterritorialization, neocolonialism, cosmopolitanism, migration, mass tourism, state and global violence, and, in particular, the environmental crisis and the Anthropocene. Focusing on novels by Donna Leon, Rafael Chirbes, Zena el Khalil, and Ahmed Khaled Tawfik among others, the talk will carry out an analysis that considers, on the one hand, the narrative strategies arising from such tensions, and, on the other, the circulation of these narratives at different scales by considering both the Mediterranean and the novel as objects as well as agents of globalization.

 

Aina Vidal-Pérez is a PhD Candidate in the Humanities and Communication Doctoral Programme at the Open University of Catalunya. She holds a PhD Fellowship (FI 2019) of the Government of Catalonia, co-funded by the European Social Fund, and is a member of the Global Literary Studies Research Lab (GlobaLS-UOC); she is also on the team of the research project “The Novel as Global Form. Poetic Challenges and Cross-border Literary Circulation,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Her PhD project is dedicated to narrative representations of the Mediterranean shore from a global perspective. In relation to this topic, her contribution to The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction and Ecology is forthcoming in 2023.

 

Kindly invited!