Raymond Williams Society Lecture
Professor Benjamin Kohlmann (Regensburg/Oxford), "World Literature and the Work of Revolution: A Radical History of the Bildungsroman, 1820-2020"
Weds 12th March, 5pm
Venue: A7, Samuel Alexander Building
This talk maps out a global counter-history of the bildungsroman, offering an alternative theorization of bildung as firmly allied to radical, revolutionary, and internationalist political causes. Developing alongside new Marxist models of subject formation, the radical bildungsroman was in dialogue with the genre's more familiar hegemonic forms from the early nineteenth century onwards. But crucially, this alternative history took inspiration from (and actively worked to advance) a set of Left politics: instead of imagining "how revolution might be avoided" (Franco Moretti), the radical genealogy of the bildungsroman seeks to imagine the conditions under which a socialist and internationalist dispensation might finally emerge.
Benjamin Kohlmann is Professor of British Literature at Regensburg University. He is the author of three monographs: Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (Oxford UP, 2014), British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States (Oxford UP, 2021), and World Literature and the Work of Revolution: A Radical History of the Bildungsroman, 1820-2020 (Verso, forthcoming). His essays have been published in PMLA, ELH, Novel, Modern Fiction Studies, and other venues. With Janice Ho and Matthew Taunton, he co-edits a new book series of dialogic interventions (Literature & Politics) for Oxford UP.
The Raymond Williams Society AGM will be held before the lecture, between 3 and 4, in Samuel Alexander S1.25. All members welcome.
Event hosted by English, American Studies and Creative Writing’s Radical Formations / Cultural Materialism Research Group, and organised by Ben Harker. Any queries, ben.harker@manchester.ac.uk
