Read, Listen, Create. Writing Classes with Johns Hopkins University

The USA-based Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing program brings together aspiring fiction and nonfiction writers with working authors to study the craft of writing in classes held online and around the world. Meeting this year in Kraków, a UNESCO City of Literature, the students and faculty study literature from Poland and Central Europe to explore how authors confront autocratic governments via novels, poems, plays, and memoir. Johns Hopkins University is known worldwide for academic rigor, innovation, and a culture that encourages risk-taking.

Events in English.

Sponsored by: Johns Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Master of Arts in Writing, Master of Arts in Science Writing, KBF: Kraków Miasto Literatury UNESCO, Potocki Palace, Jagiellonian University: Institute of English Studies, Department of the History of American Literature and Culture

Program:

Tuesday, June 24

15.00-17.00

Title: “The Tigers of Wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”: Dark ecology in the literary imagination of Olga Tokarczuk

Speaker: dr. hab Monika Świerkosz, associate professor of literary studies, Jagiellonian University; editor of the journal The Polylogue

Description: The meeting will propose an ecocritical reading of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead to include questions about the gender, or more broadly ethical, consequences of using female anger and sadness as tools to criticise a cultural order in which the objectification of animals is the norm.

Dr. hab. Świerkosz will also draw attention to the role of poet William Blake as an inspiration for the tradition of radical romanticism and contemporary dark ecology (T. Morton).

Why did Tokarczuk call her novel a “moral thriller” and should we feel uncomfortable about its unconventional ending? What does this dark tale of revenge have to do with Tokarczuk’s much-discussed concept of the “tender narrator”?