La prochaine séance du séminaire « Living Matters » se tiendra le jeudi 14 décembre à 17h30 à la bibliothèque de l’UFR. Nous aurons le plaisir d’entendre Greta Olson (University of Giessen) nous une intervention sur “Law and Literature and the Material Turn”.
Nous espérons vous y retrouver nombreux.

Résumé: This talk relates the large-scale move to matter in critical theory to critical legal scholarship and to interdisciplinary work on law and aesthetics. This move entails a turning away from what Karen Barad calls “representationalism [that is, the making of an] ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent” (“Posthumanist Performativity,” 2008). Taking matter seriously also means thinking about law differently, for instance, how courtrooms and files determine the shape that legal processes take. Further, the turn to materiality has profound consequences for law in that it highlights the need to develop legal tools to advocate for the non-human Rights of Nature. Finally, the material turn’s ‘making matter matter to us’ alters how interdisciplinary projects like Law and Literature relate to their objects of study.

Greta Olson (University of Giessen) is Professor of English and American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen and was Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” in Bonn (2014, 2016). She is a general editor of the European Journal of English Studies (EJES), and the co-founder of the European Network for Law and Literature. She is the author, among other publications, of From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect Oxford: Oxford UP, 2022.