Northwestern Events Calendar

May
11
2015

2014-2015 Hot Off The Press with Prof. Justin Neuman

When: Monday, May 11, 2015
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM CT

Where: 1800 Sherman Avenue, Suite 1-200, Evanston, IL 60201 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Tom Burke   (847) 491-7946

Group: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Category: Academic

Description:

2014-2015 Hot Off The Press

Justin Neuman

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Yale University & author of the forthcoming book Fiction Beyond Secularism (NU Press)

Monday, May 11, 2015

4:30 PM

Kaplan Seminar Room, 1800 Sherman Ave. Suite 1-200

The HOTP series is an exciting opportunity for graduate students to learn about the process of writing and publishing a first book, to network with junior scholars who have recently published their first books, and to meet graduate students from a variety of disciplines at Northwestern. This year's programming features Yale University's Justin Neuman and his recently published monograph, Fiction Beyond Secularism: World Literature Since 1979. Each graduate student of this year's HOTP cohort will receive a copy of Professor Neuman's book, and will attend a workshop in the spring quarter to discuss the book and the publishing process with Professor Neuman himself. HOTP works as both a reading group and as a professionalization series, and will meet once per quarter through a variety of exciting events on campus.

About Fiction Beyond Secularism: Modernist thinkers once presumed a progressive secularity, with the novel replacing religious texts as society’s moral epics. Yet religion—beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, through the collapse of communism, and culminating in the singular rupture of September 11, 2001—has not retreated quietly out of sight. In Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman argues that contemporary novelists who are most commonly identified as antireligious—among them Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Haruki Murakami, and J. M. Coetzee—have defied assumptions and have instead written some of the most trenchant critiques of secular ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies of the religious imagination. As a result, many readers (or nonreaders) on either side of the religious divide neglect the insights of works like The Satanic Verses, Disgrace, and Snow. Fiction Beyond Secularism serves as a timely corrective.

Schedule for 2014-2015:

Fall Quarter: Wine and Cheese Mix and Mingle: Getting to Know the Cohort, November 19th, 2014

Winter Quarter: Lunch conversation with John Alba Cutler (English) and Gianna Mosser of Northwestern University Press, Monday, February 9, 2015, 12:00-2:00 PM in the Kaplan Seminar Room, 1800 Sherman Ave. Suite 1-200.

Spring Quarter: 1-2 book group meetings to discuss Neuman's work; Seminar with Professor Neuman, Monday, May 11, 2015, 4:30 PM in the Kaplan Seminar Room, 1800 Sherman Ave. Suite 1-200

If you are a Northwestern graduate student interested in joining the Hot Off The Press cohort, please contact meaghanfritz2016@u.northwestern.edu to see if there is still space available.

Prof. Justin Neuman: "My research and teaching focus on global Anglophone literature and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I am currently at work on two book projects. Fiction Beyond Secularism: World Literature Since 1979 investigates the rise of religion in the past quarter century through novels that take an idea of the global as a primary theme and ultimate frame of reference. In an era when religions consistently exceed the boundaries policed by secular modernity, global fictions reveal the ongoing processes by which the claims of secularity are contested and reformulated as novelists negotiate ethical life in a pluralist world. My second project, Energy Systems Literature, uses an interdisciplinary approach to corporate archives and literary fictions in order to track the shifting ways writers, companies, and governments have imagined petroleum and the social, political, historical, and environmental transformations wrought by its extraction and consumption."

This event is free and open to the public. Made possible in part by the support of the Harris Fund.

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