Congist'26: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crisis

Session

Session 3.7 (Day 3)

D3-S3-K1

15 May 2026, 13:15

Kurul Odası (Istanbul University Faculty of Letters)

Conveners

Session 3.7 (Day 3): Edebiyat Bilimi / Literary Studies

• László V. Szabó (University of Pannonia)

The Multivocality of Crisis: Aesthetic and Discursive Responses to 9/11 in American Poetry (D3-S3-K1)

Kristina Kočan (University of Maribor)

15/05/2026, 13:15

Oral Presentation

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 generated an extraordinary wave of poetic responses that reveal the personal and intimate dimensions of crisis. In the immediate aftermath, poets were confronted not only with overwhelming loss and collective trauma, but also with the question of how language might bear witness to an event that seemed to exceed expression. The variety of responses is...

From Deconstruction to Presence: Experiencing the Crisis of Meaning in Art and Poetry (D3-S3-K1)

Thomas Dalle (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon et Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris))

15/05/2026, 13:35

Oral Presentation

This paper addresses the “crisis of meaning” not as a slogan, but as a hermeneutic trial in which our ways of reading and evaluating art are decided. Two diagnoses, both lucid about the crisis, will be brought into dialogue: Georges Steiner, who advances a “sacred wager” on the real presence of meaning in the work (Language and Silence, 1967; Real Presences, 1989), and Jacques Derrida, who...

The Waning of Historicity and Affect in Movement Poetry: Early Signs of a Postmodern Crisis (D3-S3-K1)

Elif Demir (Sivas Cumhuriyet University)

15/05/2026, 13:55

Oral Presentation

This study examines Donald Davie’s “Remembering the Thirties” and Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” as early poetic articulations of a postmodern crisis characterised by the waning of historicity and affect under late capitalism, which is a condition Fredric Jameson theorised in his seminal work Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). In the aftermath of the Second World...