Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun

Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the University of Białystok. She is co-editor of two collections of essays – Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction: Narrating the Future (2021) and Fantasy and Realism (2019) – and an author of numerous articles related to various aspects of the fantastic. In April – July 2022 she was a Visiting Fellow at The Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University. Her research interests related to the literature of fantastic are two-fold, going back to the past and extending into the future. On the one hand, she focuses on the intersections of cultural memory, medievalism and fantasy literature. On the other hand, she is interested in the literary representations of the Anthropocene in contemporary speculative fiction.

Broken Earth, Broken People: Non-Western Responses to the Anthropocene in North American Speculative Fiction

What does it mean to live in the Anthropocene—the epoch in which a human species has become a significant geological force and changed the Earth and climate forever? What is the “crisis of imagination” related to the Anthropocene? And how can literature help overcome this crisis? In this talk I will address these issues, providing a brief overview of how the problems of the Anthropocene are represented in contemporary North American speculative fiction and focusing in particular on Black and Indigenous responses exemplified by N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves.

Wydarzenie można zaliczyć w ramach programu OSA:

• Opiekun: dr Justyna Budzik
• Liczba godzin OSA: 2 godziny
• Forma zaliczenia: sporządzenie krótkiej notatki w języku angielskim lub polskim (max. 500-600 znaków), dotyczącej tematyki poruszanej podczas wykładu i przesłanie jej dr Justynie Budzik do 6.06.24.Notatki wysłane po tym terminie nie będą przyjmowane. Podpisy na Kartach będą składane wyłącznie w czasie dyżurów dr Justyny Budzik.