Event overview
020 7896 2404
Magdalena Zolkos, Humboldt Research Fellow, Goethe University Frankfurt
The story of the composition and animation of a humanoid creature by an irreverent scientist in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been often interpreted as a literary figuration of human imagination in that Victor Frankenstein envisions it as an act that exceeds, and in fact contradicts, what is in existence. In a recent reworking of that story in the context of post-conflict Iraq, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), Ahmed Saadawi moves away from the scientific motifs of bioelectricity and neurology of Shelley’s book in order to emphasize a different element of that story: the creature’s fragmentary existence. His basis material are bodily fragments of a nameless and unburied victim of sectarian violence. Found in a rubbish-pit, the corpse is stitched together by an old junk-dealer, Hadi, in a gesture of reparation and dignification. For Hadi the repairing of the corpse into a complete whole is closely related to the ethical task of reclaiming the body’s ethics status as a person, rather than a thing. However, reanimated by a wandering soul, the creature escapes his repairer’s intended burial, and sets off on a mission of just vengeance. In my talk I focus on the Frankenstein story as a figuration of human imagination and as a repository of the idioms of fragmentation, collection, and incompletion, and I ask about the restitutive imaginary of post-conflict literature, and about its insight into the ethical task of reparation.
Magdalena Zolkos is a political theorist and literary scholar working in the field of post-conflict memory studies. She is currently the Humboldt Research Fellow at the Memory Studies Platform at Goethe University Frankfurt, where she is working on a project on postcolonial restitution of cultural heritage. She recently co-edited a volume on the moral philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch (Lexington Press, 2019), and her book Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Jan 2020 | 5:30pm - 8:00pm |
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