Dystopian Narratives and Stories about Illness

Please note: All times are GMT+2!

Thursday, 3 Apr 2025

9.30

• Rossie Artemis on behalf of the University of Nicosia team in the CAPONEU project
• Klimis Mastoridis, Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nicosia

10.00
Literature and/as Illness

• Nenad Ivić: Between Uncertainty and Metaphor: Illness, Novel and Language
• Andrea Milanko and Ana Tomljenović: Misplaced Individuals and Displaced Remedies: Modernity and the Novel

11.30
COVID-19 – Reminders/Remainders

• Merve Altin (online): Biopolitics and the Value of Life: Analysing P. D. James’ The Children of Men in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Aurore Peyroles (online): Camus’ The Plague in the Time of Covid or the Depoliticisation of a Political Novel?

14.30
Pathologizing Power

• Magda Potok: Writing from Precarity: Illness and Politics in Two Spanish Women’s Novels
• Chalo ũa Waya: Renegotiating Elite Spaces: Afropolitanism as Epistemic Self-assertion in Natasha Brown’s Assembly
• Alexandra Irimia (online): Archive Fever and Other Symptoms of Bureaucratic Malaise: Pathologies of Public Office in 20th and 21st Century Dystopian Novels

16.30
Social and Political Dis-ease

• Karlo Držaić: The Socialist Disease and Fin de Siècle Literature in Croatia
• Marina Protrka Štimec: The Diseases of Politics and the Pharmakon of Literature

Friday, 4 Apr 2025

9.30
Gender and Dystopia

• Błażej Warkocki: Witold Gombrowicz and Male Homosocial Dystopia
• Almudena Machado-Jiménez (online): Upcycling Waste: About the Pathologisation, Stigmatisation and Strategic Empowerment of Women in Post-transition Patriarchal Utopias

11.00
The Virus Which Asks Questions

• Irena Boyarkina (online): Virus and Diseases in the Works by Olaf Stapledon
• Zrinka Božić: Rethinking the Political in Metafiction: Rereading Borislav Pekić’s Rabies

14.00
Reading Illness and Literature, Reading Society

• Eric Berman: A Methodology for Reading ‘Inaccessible’ Texts in World Literature (Case Study: Illness in Miroslav Krleža’s On the Edge of Reason)
• Ante Andabarak: Literature as Illness
• Closing remarks