Home > Research > Activities > ACLA annual conference
View graph of relations

ACLA annual conference

Activity: Participating in or organising an event typesParticipation in conference -Mixed Audience

2017

Creating the Future: Wicked Problems and their Literary Solutions Can literature solve the ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973) currently troubling global futures in the Anthropocene, or do artistic endeavors, as Franco Berardi suggests, simply ‘postpone the holocaust’ (2011)? This paper examines one aspect of the ‘complex systems’ of world authorship, namely literary blogging. Sustained by multi-modal, generically hybrid and immediate platforms for writing the self, online performances of authorship circumvent the need for the multiple human collaborators involved in the process of bringing a material text to a readership, as well as many of the obstacles set in place by industry gatekeepers. These considerations have resulted in fears for traditional publishing industries, on the one hand, and profound interest in the ways in which digital writing transforms understandings of what authorship is, on the other. Kate Zambreno argues that the amorphous subculture of, often dilettante, literary bloggers and their readers, committed to a politics of social justice linked to the public performance of the private, has given rise to a ‘new subjectivity’ online (2012). Drawing on the online work of Bhanu Kapil and Jackie Wang, amongst others, I test the hypothesis that digital writing constitutes a mode of everyday creative practice that co-creates preferable social futures by both modelling and advocating radical personal engagement with the ‘wicked problems’ threatening global futures.

Event (Conference)

TitleACLA annual conference
Abbreviated titleCreating the Future: Wicked Problems and their Literary Solutions
Date6/07/179/07/17
Website
LocationUniversiteit Utrecht
CityUtrecht
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
Degree of recognitionInternational event