Political moods

This seminar is a hybrid event, available to join in person or online via Zoom. 

Anna Vaninskaya (University of Edinburgh), '"Breaking with the Party": Emotional Dilemmas in the Literature of Left Dissent'

 
Abstract:


For over two centuries, left-wing writers have explored the contradictory emotions that accompany the vicissitudes of the revolutionary process. In memoir, fiction and poetry, they have asked: what do revolutionaries feel when faced with the defeat of their revolution or, worse still, its betrayal? What moods inspire them to carry on the fight or lead them to abandon it to others?  When expectations do not match reality or the demands of individual conscience clash with the exigencies of revolutionary action, what affective forms does the revolutionary’s dilemma take?  Such questions acquired a new urgency in the decades after the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the privilege of determining the meanings of collective struggle was wrested from the old parties and movements by a new global organisation that acknowledged no legitimate forms of collectivity other than itself.  The 1920s to the 1950s – the period of Soviet Communism’s greatest prestige – were also the heyday of the independent Left, and my talk will offer an overview of some key literary attempts to emotionally process the political betrayals of Communism in its first few decades.  The talk will conclude with a brief case study of one such attempt by the American modernist writer John Dos Passos and ask whether it is true that Dos Passos's fiction 'frustrates the reader by minimizing [the] opportunities for affective engagement' (Elvira Godek-Kiryluk). 



Bio:

Anna Vaninskaya is Professor of Literary and Cultural History in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the editor and co-translator of London Through Russian Eyes, 1896–1914: An Anthology of Foreign Correspondence (2022), author of the award-winning Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien (2020) and William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (2010), as well as numerous essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century left-wing literature and politics.






Benjamin Kohlmann (Regensburg): ‘Internationalism and the Work of Revolution: A Radical History of the Bildungsroman’




My talk maps out a global counter-history of the bildungsroman by offering an alternative theorization of bildung as firmly allied to radical, revolutionary, and internationalist political causes. The radical bildungsroman began to evolve alongside the genre’s more familiar (bourgeois) hegemonic forms from the early nineteenth century onwards, but it crucially took inspiration from and actively worked to advance Left political causes: instead of imagining “how revolution can be avoided” (Franco Moretti) by showing that the prodigal individual can be successfully reintegrated into an organic (ethno-national) community, the left-wing genealogy of the bildungsroman imagines the conditions under which a socialist and internationalist dispensation—an alternative to capitalist modernity—might finally emerge. Part of the twentieth-century literary formation that Michael Denning has called the “Novelists’ International”, the radical bildungsroman cuts across many of the conceptual divisions—realism versus modernism, formal experimentation versus mimesis—that have structured our sense of the novel form’s artistic possibilities.


Benjamin Kohlmann teaches English literature at Regensburg University, Germany. In 2024-5, he is a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He is the author of two monographs: Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (Oxford UP, 2014) and British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States (Oxford UP, 2021). He is currently completing a history of the radical bildungsroman for Verso. His articles have been published in ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Novel, PMLA, and other venues. With Janice Ho and Matthew Taunton, he is co-editor of Literature & Politics, a new book series published by Oxford UP.