MESH Master Class
June 27, 2024 | 17:45 – 19:15 | Auerbach Library, MESH
Master Class by Dr Mariagrazia Portera
In 1955, the philosopher John Austin delivered a series of lectures at Harvard that would later be transcribed into book form, becoming one of his masterpieces and arguably the work for which he is best known: How to Do Things WithWords. In this work, Austin demonstrates how every speech act has a locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary component, defining the latter as that specific aspect of speech by which it can act transformatively upon the world. My contribution seeks to address, from a contemporary perspective and building on but decisively extending beyond Austin, the specific issue of the transformative or potentially transformative role of speech, particularly literary speech.Specifically, I aim to explore the following questions: What is the transformative and performative role of literary language today, in an era of socio-ecological crisis? What role can we assign to the literary arts in the individual and collective effort to tackle the major challenges posed by our contemporary Anthropocene crisis? Should literature primarily serve as an effective mirror of the present, enabling us to finally grasp the characteristics of the ongoing crisis—characteristics that transcend our usual perceptual modes and conventional categories of space and time—or, setting aside any mimetic intent, should it first and foremost provide us with the tools to confront the crisis, acting not as a mirror but as a toolkit? Do we need literature that represents the Anthropocene, or literature for the Anthropocene, one that trains us to mitigate (if any) the impact of the ongoing socio-ecological collapse?