Nomadologie, encore un effort? Citizenship, World Literature, and Patrick Modiano
Time: Nov. 1, 2018, 3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Location: 347 Katzer Collaboratory, Hinds Hall
Irving Goh (National University of Singapore)
Goh's work encourages learning through World Literature to dismantle our fixation with the ‘citizen figure.'
In contrast to scholarship on World Literature that assumes the cultivation of a cosmopolitan citizen as its teleology, Goh argues that World Literature teaches us, instead, to be beyond citizenship. We should heed that lesson seriously today, in order for us to: 1) critique the biopolitical hold the State has on us via the notion of citizenship, 2) weaken the ideological claims of global terrorism, which, according to Badiou, takes the neoliberal citizen to be complicit in negations of others who do not acquiesce to the capitalist system, and 3) reclaim the essence of the city, which is all about crossings and encounters, and which we are losing to that same global terrorism that target cities and citizens today. World Literature encourages us to rethink what Deleuze and Guattari have called “nomadology,” and this time, without citizenship, Goh considers that to subtend the works of Patrick Modiano.
Biography: Irving Goh is currently Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale. He is also President’s Assistant Professor of Literature at the National University of Singapore. His first book, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP), won the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the Best Book in French and Francophone Studies. His next monograph (in French), L’existence prépositionnelle, will appear with Galilée in Feb 2019. He is currently completing the manuscript Touching Literature, which will be published by Cornell UP.
Additional supporters:
- Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics
- Albert George Memorial Lecture Fund
- Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition
Tej Bhatia, Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics