A light lunch will be served.
Pre-register here to join via Zoom.
In her blog-novel Ich in Gelb (“Me in Yellow,” 2015), Olga Flor depicts an odd couple that becomes a hybrid creature, at once worm and woman. How, the novel prompts the reader to ask, might a new understanding of parasitic life-forms and their relation to human bodies help to further planetary wellbeing, particularly in an age of anthrogenic mass extinction? This gripping posthuman text, Nicole Sütterlin will argue, presents a world of radical makeovers in which bioscience, fashion, and the fantastic commingle to create new designs for living in an ever-surprising state of multispecies becoming.
Nicole Sütterlin is associate professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of Poetik der Wunde: Zur Entdeckung des Traumas in der Literatur der Romantik (“Poetics of the Wound: The Discovery of Trauma in German Romantic Literature,” 2019). Her current book project, titled Bodies of the Posthuman Age, investigates how contemporary German literature reconfigures what it means to be human in the 21st-century, at a time when the integrity of bodies, selves, and ecosystems is increasingly threatened by social, environmental, and algorithmic injustices.