Lecture: "Imaginative Literature and Social Trust: Liberalism, Capitalism, Communism"
- Date: 27 October 2023, 10:15–12:00
- Location: English Park, Room 2-0024 and via Zoom
- Type: Lecture
- Lecturer: Dr Adam Kelly & Dr Katerina Pavlidi (University College Dublin)
- Organiser: LILAe
- Contact person: David Watson
Deriving from a four-year project funded by the Irish Research Council, this joint presentation will address the question of what literature and literary studies can contribute to longstanding interdisciplinary debates on the nature and value of trust, particularly trust in modern social, political, and economic systems.
The presentation will take a transnational approach to this question, with a particular focus on the literary and political cultures of the US and Russia. While reaching back centuries in its historical framing, the presentation is grounded in the analysis of two contemporary texts, the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin’s play Trust (1989) and the Argentinean-American author Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust (2022).
ADAM KELLY is Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin, having previously taught at the University of York and Harvard University. He is the author of American Fiction in Transition: Observer-Hero Narrative, the 1990s, and Postmodernism (Bloomsbury 2013) and has recently completed a book about the aesthetics and politics of sincerity in American fiction during the period 1989-2008. His articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Literature Studies, Post45, Studies in the Novel, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He is Principal Investigator on “Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025” (TRUST), a four-year project funded by the Irish Research Council for the period 2022-2026.
KATERINA PAVLIDI is a postdoctoral fellow on the IRC-funded TRUST project at University College Dublin. She completed her PhD at the Slavonic Studies section at the University of Cambridge in 2022, where she wrote a dissertation on the relationship between language and the body in the works of the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin. In the context of the TRUST project, Katerina examines the legacy of the practices of artistic and literary production, circulation and consumption which sustained the underground art worlds of late socialism for thinking about social trust in the transition from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation. Parallel to her work on trust, she deals with late Soviet temporalities, entheogenic mushrooms in Russian postmodernist fiction, and the religious turn in the late Soviet underground.
Zoom link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/67056438452
Passcode: 269656