Lecture | Subjunctive Aesthetics and the Poetics of Extinction

17 September 2024, 4:00PM – 5:00PM.

Speaker: Professor Carolyn Fornoff (Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University).

Chaired and co-organised by Dr Jamille Pinheiro Dias (ILCS/CLACS) and Dr Gianfranco Selgas (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, UCL).

In the context of environmental crisis, literature and visual art have often been valorized for their evidentiary, mimetic, or didactic force; the ability of representation to make the invisible visible and raise public awareness to the facts. But what else can art do, beyond witnessing and truth telling, in the face of ecocide? In this talk, Carolyn Fornoff explores the “subjunctive turn” in contemporary Mexican cultural production, which embraces art’s capacity to plumb uncertainty and speculate about how the world could be different. She argues that subjunctive aesthetics make a bid for art’s experimental and experiential capacity to generate alternative narratives, values, and grammars of territorial belonging. This talk will explore how the subjunctive turn manifests in recent Mexican poetry about endangered and extinct species.

Part of the Critical Conversations in The Environmental Humanities series from the Environmental Humanities Research Hub(Opens in new window).

This event will be held online.

More informations HERE