Recorded April 25, 2023.

An in-person seminar by Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow Prof Dariusz Komorowski (University of Wroclaw) as part of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Seminar Series.

After decades of being trapped in discourse, where signs referred to other signs rather than reality, sentences were quotations or paraphrases of other sentences, and texts built on other texts, permanently questioning their own meaning and truth, a need for stability beyond discourse emerged in the 1990s. One turned to matter, which was reawakened from its slumber to join man as a reliable partner. Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law played a special role in this context. They wanted to abolish the traditional dichotomy of world perception with the opposition of nature and culture or subject and object and to establish a symmetry in its place. In the symmetrical conception of the world, human and nonhuman actors have agancy that no longer needs to be intentional and rationally motivated.

In this talk, Komorowski will first examine the role things play in Matthias Zschokke's work and how the Swiss author perceives them. On this basis, the question of whether and how things contribute as effective actors to the creation of communities will be explored. In this respect, Komorowski links to the question of the representation of ideas about communities in time, when modernity becomes liquid (Bauman) and the lost metanarratives can no longer give support to individual stories (Lyotard). Here we draw on actor-network theory, which, originally developed as a sociological method, rather quickly found application in other disciplines of humanities. Whether and possibly to what extent and with what insight potential ANT can be applied in literary analysis is one of the aims of his investigation.

Dariusz Komorowski is a Professor of German Philology at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. Since 2005 he has been the Head of the Research Centre for German-Swiss Literature and since 2017 the co-originator and editor-in-chief of the online magazine “CH-Studien. Zeitschrift zu Literatur und Kultur aus der Schweiz” which he leads in cooperation with Anna Fattori (Rome) and Jan Jambor (Prešov). From 2012 to 2018 he was the Head of the postgraduate studies in “Cultural Management in the Cooperation of Regions of the European Union" at the University of Wroclaw. Dariusz Komorowski has conducted seminars and given lectures at the universities in Göttingen, Zurich and Maribor and organised several international seminars for master students in cooperation with those universities.

Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/