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Invitation: Lecture by Jason Groves (U Washington) “Mineral Imaginaries: Literature for the Anthropocene”

You are cordially invited to join the first talk in UBC’s Ziegler lecture series for this year, which will be given by Dr. Jason Groves (University of Washington). The event will take place online, October 20, 3pm PST, and is based on Jason’s brand-new book.

In response to the widespread arguments that the literary arts are inapt to convey or otherwise contend with the spatial and temporal scales of the Anthropocene, this talk embraces their humiliation as a way of figuring the intimate relationship between what pertains to literature and what pertains to the earth in a time of mutual dilapidation. To think through this relationship, I turn to two poems, by Bertolt Brecht and Paul Celan, whose lapidary commemoration of the violence and dispossession associated with the Holocaust also implicates that history and that literature in the broader colonial and imperial histories accounted for in recent articulations of the Anthropocene.

Jason Groves is Assistant Professor of Germanics at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research and teaching focus on ecocritical approaches to German literature of the 19th and 20th century. Most recently, his book, The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary (2020), appeared with Fordham University Press.

All attendees are required to register using the zoom registration form listed below.

Register here via Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5wscu-qqDopHdBjYnlauEBte62a9taL8Zf-

Please be advised that this event will be recorded. Attendees will be muted and have video automatically turned off. If you ask a question or otherwise participate in the session, be aware that your name may be visible on the recording. The telephone dial-in option is not available for this webinar. However, the recording will be made available on www.cenes.ubc.ca and circle.ubc.ca after the live presentation.

Questions?
Dr. Ervin Malakaj 
ervin.malakaj@ubc.ca

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