Literary Acts of Agency

Contemporary society has been shaped and sometimes vexed by the notion of the Rechtsstaat (the state of law, or just/ified state) – a culturally key word in which the state, justice and the law meet. There are inevitable tensions in that meeting. To date, those have been addressed by political theorists, but far less by scholars of literature and culture. At a time when just government, the security of the state and the rights of individuals are at issue, we explore literary and cultural production as co-constitutive of the state of law/justice.

This conference is part of the strategic partnership “Literature and the Rule of Law” (2020-2023) between the University of Cambridge and the LMU. Since 2020, this group of scholars has continuously attended to theoretical conversations about the political articulacy of literature and explored how literature is harnessed to social and political purposes. As the final event of the partnership, the conference Literary Acts of Agency focuses on the roles and tasks that aesthetic phenomena take on in relation to social movements and their interaction with the legal system, especially with the idea and practise of the rule of law.

The conference will take place at Seidlvilla, Nikolaiplatz 1 b, 80802 Munich; the programme is available here:

“Literary Acts of Agency”

Strategic Partnership “Literature and the Rule of Law” (Univ. of Cambridge – LMU)

International Conference
18 – 19 July 2022

Monday

First panel

10.00–10.45      

Johanna-Charlotte Horst (LMU): Mittelmaß in Middlemarch. Zur Erzählbarkeit sittlicher Latenzen bei George Eliot

10.45–11.30      

Charlotte Woodford (Cambridge): Poetic (in)justice: Taking the law into her own hands

12.00–14.00      | Lunch

Second panel

14.00–14.45     

Stephanie Galasso (Cambridge): Bertolt Brecht’s Leben des Galilei

14.45–15.30      

Philipp Wegmann (LMU): Zur Kritik der Gewalt, the Force of Law, and Legal Power

Tuesday

First panel

9.00–9.45          

Banu Karaca (ICI Berlin) and Başak Ertür (Univ. of London): “A Violence that cannot be our own”: Aesthetic Refractions of the National Socialist Underground

9.45–10.30        

Catriona Corke (Cambridge): Subverting legal form: The radical left “Schlusswort” in 1970s West German trials

10.30–11.00       | Coffee Break

11.00–11.45      

Ivana Perica (Univ. of Vienna): From the ‘Imperative to Right’ to the Literature of Human Rights: Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

11.45–12.15      

Discussion about the edited volume

12.30–14.30      | Lunch

*The organizers ask for prior registration by email (johanna-charlotte.horst@lrz.uni-muenchen.de, ivana.perica@univie.ac.at).*