AATSEEL Wisconsin Conference

The AATSEEL Wisconsin Conference Keynote Address:

"Displaced Tyrannies: Allegories of Repression in East Central European Literature"

Jonathan Bolton, Harvard University

When: Friday, October 9, 2015, 4:00 PM

Where: Room 209, Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street

Sponsors: The Department of Slavic Languages and Literature and the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, with support from the University Lectures Committee

Professor Jonathan Bolton of Harvard University is a leading scholars of modern Central European literature and history. Author of a prize-winning book on Czech Dissent under Communism, Worlds of Dissent, his recent work investigates the relationship between literature and political power in the Warsaw Pact countries and beyond. His lecture will explore the allegorical and Aesopian literary modes exploited by a range of writers (Brecht, Havel, Kis, Kapuscinski and others) in their engagement with tyrannical regimes. Such writers would often illuminate contemporary concerns by depicting other regimes distant in time and/or place (or indeed imagined). This topic should be of interest to all who believe in the power of literature to be a rival source of authority and value, especially at a time when in Europe and elsewhere some of the features of the totalitarian past seem to be reviving.

AATSEEL-Wisconsin Conference:

When: Saturday, October 10, 9:00AM - 4:40PM (coffee served at 8:30 AM; panels begin at 9:00 AM)

Where: Room 209, The Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street

Many presentations on Slavic languages, literature, and culture by scholars from UW-Madison and other campuses.