My new book on In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Narratives of Invisibility will be out on 28 October, 2025. Find out more on the book here: https://link.springer.com/book/9783032026385
Blog
Venia legendi in English Literature
BlogLast week my postdoctoral dissertation, the Habilitationsschrift, was accepted by the Faculty of Languages and Literatures at LMU Munich and I was awarded the degree of Dr. phil. habil.! This qualifies me to teach English Literature as an associate or full professor in German-language academia (the so-called venia legendi, or right to teach).
The manuscript deals with In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Modern Narratives of Invisibility, ranging from the eighteenth-century novel through Romantic poetry, Victorian Gothic fiction, and the modernist text to contemporary literary responses to surveillance capitalism. I am now working on turning the manuscript into a book and will next present some of its eighteenth-century readings at an invited lecture at the University of Siegen on 8 July, 2024.
Contemporary Literature and Social Invisibility: Special Issue of ZAA out now
BlogTwo years after I organised a workshop on The Literature of Invisibility at the Center for Advanced Studies of LMU Munich, a selection of contributions on the state of invisibility studies and its particular relevance for contemporary literature has come out as a special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Many thanks to all the contributors and editors! https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/zaa/html#latestIssue
Follow this DOI for my introduction: https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2039
Esther Peeren’s „Afterword: Running with the Metaphor of Social Invisibility“ is available open source: https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2045
Contents:
“Contemporary Literature and Social Invisibility: Introduction” (Gero Guttzeit)
“Thresholds of In/Visibility and the Scopic Power of Literature” (Françoise Král)
“The Poetics of (Un)Mournability: Emma Donoghue’s Hood (1995) as an Elegy in Invisible Ink” (Héloïse Lecomte)
“Experience(s) of Decorporation: The Invisibilisation of Care in John Lanchester’s Capital (2012)” (Alice Borrego)
“Becoming (In)Visible: Self-Assertion and Disappearance of the Self in Contemporary Surveillance Narratives” (Betiel Wasihun)
“‘Perced to the roote’: Refugee Tales and the Poetics of In/Visibility” (Sibylle Baumbach)
“Afterword: Running with the Metaphor of Social Invisibility” (Esther Peeren)
Habilitationsschrift submitted
BlogThis week I submitted my manuscript In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Modern Narratives of Invisibility to LMU’s Faculty of Languages and Literatures as my Habilitationsschrift. The manuscript offers readings of authors from eighteenth-century novelists and poets Eliza Haywood, Susanna Rowson, and Anna Letitia Barbauld to nineteenth-century writers John Keats, James Forbes Dalton, Fitz-James O’Brien, and H.G. Wells, to twentieth-century and twenty-first-century authors G.K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, China Miéville, and Jennifer Egan. In German-language academia, the Habilitationsschrift is the major requirement of qualifying for the postdoctoral degree of Dr. habil., which is, in turn, the requirement for applying to the positions of associate and full professor in Germany.
Artikel über unsichtbare literarische Figuren erschienen
BlogMit dem Verhältnis von Literatur, Philosophie und Rhetorik im Zeichen der Unsichtbarkeit setzt sich ein neuer Aufsatz auseinander: “Compound Invisible Objects”: Moralischer Charakter, literarische Figur und die Gyges-Problematik bei Adam Smith und Eliza Haywood. Herausgegeben ist er von Wolfgang G. Müller und Rainer Thiel als Teil von Band 5 (2022) der Internationalen Zeitschrift Kulturkomparatistik mit dem Themenschwerpunkt „Literatur – Philosophie – Ästhetik“. Der Volltext ist verfügbar unter: https://izfk.uni-trier.de/index.php/izfk/article/view/IZFK-5-08-Compound-Invisible-Objects/66
New book chapter on Poe
BlogThe chapter is on Poe’s “The Devil in the Belfry” and “William Wilson” in particular, and it’s part of a great handbook of The American Short Story, edited by Erik Redling and Oliver Scheiding: please click here for the abstract
New article on Surveillance
BlogThis article by Isabel Kalous and me on the visualisation of surveillance on scholarly book covers has just come out with On_Culture: https://www.on-culture.org/journal/perspectives/covering-surveillance/
Paper on „The Invisible Author, Then and Now“ this Thursday
BlogAs part of the international lecture series on „Invisible Lives, Silent Voices“, I’m very happy to be speaking about „The Invisible Author, Then and Now“ in the session on „Invisible Writers“ this Thursday on 9 December, 6pm. In the same session, Christine Reynier will be speaking about „Invisible Novels of the Interwar Period: The Case of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926)“. For access to the Zoom meeting, please contact the organizers at invisibilitysilence@gmail.com or drop me a line.
The international seminar „Invisible Lives, Silent Voices“ is organised by Alice Borrego, Guillaume Le Blanc, and Héloïse Lecomte. You can find out about the other sessions here: https://invisibilitysilence.wordpress.com/programme/
Visiting Scholarship at UC Berkeley in 2022
BlogGreat news: I have been granted LMUexcellent funding to go to UC Berkeley as a Visiting Scholar as part of the LMU-UCB exchange programme, thanks to the fantastic support of Professor Dorothy Hale. Covid-permitting, I’ll be spending one month at UCB in the fall semester 2022 to present and continue my work on invisible characters and the novel.
Looking for proposals for „The Agency of Invisibility“ at ESSE 2022
BlogAlice Borrego, Héloïse Lecomte and I are looking for proposals for a seminar on „The Agency of Invisibility in Contemporary Fiction and Theory“. The deadline for proposals of 250 words plus short CV is 31 January, 2022. Please see the description of the panel and a link to the general Call for Papers below. ESSE 2022 will take place in Mainz from 29 August to 2 September 2022.
„The Agency of Invisibility in Contemporary Fiction and Theory“
Alice Borrego (Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3, France, alice.borrego@univ-montp3.fr)
Gero Guttzeit (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, gero.guttzeit@lmu.de)
Héloïse Lecomte (ENS de Lyon, France, heloise.lecomte@ens-lyon.fr)
Invisibility is a prominent conceptual metaphor of social marginalisation, encompassing ideas of death, reification, and disregard (Le Blanc, L’invisibilité sociale, 2009). Yet, Esther Peeren argues, there is also an empowering “agency of invisibility” (2014), which becomes apparent in the contemporary figure of the living ghost. In order to contribute to the emerging field of invisibility studies from the perspective of literary studies, our seminar asks the following questions: To what extent does (the agency of) invisibility inform contemporary novels and short stories? What is the significance of literary narratives for aesthetic, social, political, and ethical concepts of invisibility? What uses can we make of concepts and metaphors of invisibility in our critical readings?