Conveners
'Contemporary' literature
- Noémie Nelis (Universite de Namur)
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Sławomir Kozioł (University of Rzeszów, Poland)12/12/25, 1:30 PM
Michael Crummey’s Sweetland (2014) is frequently examined as a novel about resettlement, outport decline, and ecological loss, but it can also be read as a meditation on the human lifespan and its embedding within communal life. This paper proposes to interpret Sweetland through the lens of Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology, which emphasizes the intersubjective constitution of meaning,...
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Nils Van den Keybus12/12/25, 2:00 PM
In Western thinking, especially since evolutionary theory and classification, branching patterns are firmly established as a dominant way of understanding the world ontologically and epistemologically. Outward branching—the splitting apart of different branches—has been mobilized to justify hierarchy, privileging the human petiole of the evolutionary tree. The Overstory reverses this...
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Àngels Llurda (University of Lleida)12/12/25, 2:30 PM
Age studies scholarship has increasingly interrogated the intersection of care for older adults and neoliberal market ideologies. This presentation explores how popular culture, specifically the cozy mystery genre, negotiates the language and optics of care for older adults in terms of costs and accessibility. Taken as a whole, the stories with ageing detectives offer invigorating alternatives...
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Katarzyna Wywial (Ghent University)12/12/25, 3:00 PM
David Joel Shapiro (1947-2024) was an American poet, critic and scholar who authored several books of poetry published between 1967 and 2017. Between the dates, one can observe an interesting and perhaps counterintuitive evolution of the poetic language that departs from Symbolism going through the stage of complex Ashberyan assemblages to noble lucidity of relatively simple “farewell poems”...
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