In this workshop we’ll discuss the latest questions in comparative literature today, with a particular focus on genre, peripheriality and the world-systems approach. The workshop will open with a talk by the guest speaker, following which we’ll have a discussion and a series of short 10-min inputs and case studies from teams working in the projects UTOPIA and AUTOSTORY.
The workshop is open to participation. No registration needed!
Join online via Zoom
For further enquiries contact Dr. Natalya Bekhta
Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989
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PROGRAMME
24 March 2026
10.30-12:00 (Linna 5026)
Talk by Stephen Shapiro: “How to Abolish the ‘novel’: Keywords in World-Cultural Studies”,
followed by Q&A and discussion of workshop materials (see below).
12-13:00
Lunch break
13-15:00 (K104 Väinö Linna -Sali)
Continuation of discussion about genre and literary periphery; short presentations from the projects UTOPIA and AUTOSTORY:
Karolina Bagdonė on “small literatures” and the case of Lithuania
Natalya Bekhta on the novel in Ukraine
Kristina Malmio on the Finnish-Swedish case of Monika Fagerholm’s Diva
Tero Vanhanen & Iida Pöllänen on the genre of romantasy
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Abstract
Stephen Shapiro: “How to Abolish the ‘novel’: Keywords in World-Cultural Studies”
The ongoing world-systems knowledge movement in literary and cultural studies has proposed that we need to decolonize our epistemology and liberate our academic disciplines from the categories that arose through the long dominance of centrist liberalism.
This talk will outline some of the perspectives and keywords of this approach to suggest that we need to refuse the axiom that all long-form fictions are best understood through the conceptual category of “the novel” or that the cultural productions of the (Western) core can register either the historical past or contemporary in advance of the rest of the world (the prejudice of consecrated “modernism”).
What would a study of culture from the non-dominant perspective (what Nietzsche called from “the frog’s perspective”) look like as a response to the contemporary university in crisis?
Stephen Shapiro is Professor of English and Comprative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He has also worked as a member of WReC (Warwick Research Collective), a group interested in moving beyond older models for literary and cultural studies. WReC published its first collective findings in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP 2015). His research interests focus on writing and culture of the United States; Cultural Studies; literary theory; marxism, world-systems analyses; urban and spatial studies, and television studies. Stephen Shapiro is an author and editor of multiple books and critical editions, including How to Read Marx’s Capital (London: Pluto, 2008), The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre (ed. with Liam Kennedy, 2012), anthology Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown (2020), The Cambridge Companion to American Horror (ed. with Mark Storey, 2022) and Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Ecology, World-Culture (eds. Sharae Deckard, Michael Niblett, Stephen Shapiro, 2024). Future publications include a critical edition of the first American long-form fiction to mention male-male sexuality, Charles Brockden Brown’s The Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (Lever Press) and a WIP, The Twist: Capital, Data, and Cultures of the Intersectional Left.
WORKSHOP READING:
In preparation for the discussion, we read Stephen Shapiro’s “Zemiperiphery Matters: Immigration, Culture, and the Capitalist World-System” and an excerpt from Tracking Capital: World-Systems, World-Ecology, World-Culture (2024, eds. Sharae Deckard, Michael Niblett, Stephen Shapiro).
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The event is funded by the Research Council of Finland (grant no. 361957). Organized in collaboration with AUTOSTORY project (grant no: 312136092911), NAME: Narratives at the Margins of Europe, and Narrare.