Seminar: Signe Leth Gammelgaard: Producing stasis – Production and development in three interwar dystopias

This text is part of my current project on the interwar dystopias cross-read with changes in economic thinking during the period. The project examines texts from the UK, Sweden and early Soviet Russia and targets how they portray the organization of society in producing and reproducing a population that will fit the state’s requirements. The basic idea is that the period’s economic thinking and the increased use of statistics affected the view of the citizen quite as much as concrete political ideologies, and that this is part of what the literary dystopias respond to and critique. Against the idea of a well-conditioned economic agent, the literary works posit ideas of love, creativity, and emotional choices or even conversion experiences. This project examines such discrepancies in views on the human being and discusses them in relation to the economic context.

Signe is a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Art History and Visual Studies at Lund University.

This seminar is organised by the Aesthetics Studies Research Node. The language will be English. 

If you wish to receive Signe's draft text before the seminar, please contact philip.dodds@kultur.lu.se