From May 1968 to November 1989: Transformations of the World, Literature, and Theory

The Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies at ZRC SAZU would like to invite you to attend ‘From May 1968 to November 1989’, an international conference that will take place on 7 and 8 November 2019 at the ZRC Atrium.

The global student and labour movement that erupted in May 1968 will be approached at this conference from two largely neglected but key perspectives: the literary and the semi-peripheral. The speakers will address the ways in which critical theory and late modernist, neo-avant-garde literature were related to the protests that, opposing institutional politics of the late sixties and early seventies, struggled for the socioeconomic transformation of both the capitalist world-system and its second-world socialist alternative. They will compare developments in Paris and other capitalist metropoles with cities of the socialist semi-periphery, particularly Ljubljana, which at the time was home to a theory that came to be recognized worldwide (the Ljubljana School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis) and a neo-avant-garde (notably the ludism and conceptualism of the OHO group) that helped revitalize the immunized modernism of the Western core.

How the conjuncture of 1968, whose struggle to transform the world seems to have failed, could led to that of 1989, which transformed the world by announcing the end of the utopia of 1968, will be discussed by Emiliano Alessandroni, Varja Balžalorsky Antić, Lev Centrih, Matteo Colombi, Mererid Puw Davies, Marijan Dović, Aleš Gabrič, Jernej Habjan, Branislav Jakovljevic, Marko Juvan, Zdravko Kobe, Alenka Koron, Lev Kreft, Irena Novak Popov, Darja Pavlič, Božo Repe, Charles Sabatos, Miško Šuvaković, Gáspár Miklós Tamás, Andrej Tomažin, Gašper Troha, Kaitlyn Tucker Sorenson, and Branislava Vičar.