Xiaohongshu
Join the UCL SELCS Society for our fourth talk of the year from the amazing Professor Stephanie Bird!
Professor Dr Bird will be talking about the ethical anxieties around the way in which literature gives perpetrators a voice and also invite us to empathise with perpetrators. Literary texts have long solicited ways of reading that challenge or unsettle readers, precisely by inviting them to assume perspectives that they would find emotionally or morally objectionable, or repellent, outside the boundaries of fiction. There are many different aesthetic strategies for drawing the reader into a moral position she would normally condemn, not least through the use of voice and mode of address, seduction, eliciting identification and intense emotions. These strategies help undermine attempts by the reader to maintain a disinterested moral stance that would position her outside of the complex entanglements, and naturalization of discourse, about which she is reading. Indeed, they may also confront the reader with the question of her own enjoyment or her own complicity, for what does it mean if we find ourselves empathizing with a perpetrator and admiring murderers? She will refer to various European and non-European texts as examples.
Please do not hesitate to contact me (Danilo, President of SELCS Society) if you have any questions at all or if there is any way that the event can be more accessible and enjoyable to you!