Abstract: Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, known for his early attachment to aestheticism and modernist poetics and for his apparent late turn to more socially committed poetry, occupies a unique place in the debates about aesthetics and politics in postcolonial Africa. Contrary to frequent attempts to portray Okigbo’s development in terms of conversion from an aesthete into a political poet, I demonstrate that even at his most political Okigbo continued to rely on poetic techniques derived from T.S. Eliot and on the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy in order to safeguard his work from the encroachments of Afrocentrism and cultural nationalism.   Biography: Aleksandar Stević is assistant professor of English at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Primarily a historian and theorist of […]

Abstract: This lecture will investigate the historical development and conceptual instability of the fantastic in literary studies, particularly within Anglophone tradition. Circumventing the definitional disputes that have long polarized criticism, the lecture will foreground a historical approach. It will show that a distinct, self-aware literary genre known as the fantastic, or rather le fantastique, did in fact emerge in France in the 1830s, catalyzed by the reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s works. Through historiographic reconstruction, the lecture will reveal how the fantastic was shaped by a coherent oversimplification of Hoffmann’s poetics, as well as by market forces, and national intellectual traditions. French critics and writers such as J.-J. Ampère, P. Duvergier de Hauranne, T. Gautier, and Ch.-Au. de Sainte-Beuve codified this […]