“Security, Liberalism, and the Uncertain Worlds of Fiction”

Date
Thu January 16th 2014, 6:00 - 8:00pm
Event Sponsor
Program in Modern Thought & Literature and the Stanford Humanities Center
Location
Stanford Humanities Center, Boardroom
“Security, Liberalism, and the Uncertain Worlds of Fiction”

Johannes Voelz (Associate Professor of American Studies, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany; Humboldt Foundation Fellow, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University)

Part of a monograph project provisionally entitled Fictions of Security: American Literature and the Uses of Uncertainty, Johannes Voelz’s introductory chapter draft argues that the modern cultural and political force of security calls for an analysis of its appeal. Relating to a future that is seen as open to rational planning, yet also as intractably contingent, the logic of security creates scenarios that are expediently fictional. Because of this fictional dimension, Voelz argues, literary critics are ideally positioned to contribute to a better understanding of security. Since fictionality is bound up with narrativity, and plot-narratives negotiate between order and transgression, the analysis of literature can provide a tool for isolating and illuminating those elements of the logic of security that generate its cultural power.

Johannes Voelz is the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge (UP New England, 2010) and co-editor of several books, most recently The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies After the Transnational Turn (with Ramón Saldívar and Laura Bieger, UP New England, 2013). He is currently editing special issues for the journals Telos (“Security and Liberalism”) and Amerikastudien/American Studies (“Security, Risk, and Speculation: Uses of Uncertainty in American Fiction”).

Respondent: Morgan Weiland (PhD. Candidate, Department of Communication; J.D. Candidate, Stanford Law School)