As part of the fruitful scientific and educational cooperation with the world's leading universities, the series of guest lectures "Contemporary Contexts and Debates: 21st Century Literatures and Cultures in English" has begun on the basis of the Faculty of Philology, Psychology and Pedagogy of the National University "Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic". Every Wednesday, scientists, teachers and writers from the USA, Canada, Germany and Switzerland talk about the history, culture and literature of their countries in a modern context.
The first lecture – "More than Rust: Narrating Post-Industrial America" by lecturer Dr. Julia Sattler from the Technical University of Dortmund, took place on September 20, 2023.
The second lecture – "US Myths and Politics on the 21st-Century Stage: Hamilton: An American Musical" – was delivered by Hannah Schoch, researcher from the University of Zurich.
The third lecture entitled "Is It Alright if I Don't Sing Tonight? Romance, Romanticism, and Climate Grief in Contemporary Popular Music" will be held on Wednesday, October 4 at 1:30 p.m. in the room 318 of the Poltava Polytechnic in a mixed format. Andrin Albrecht, a researcher from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, a member of the DfG "Modell Romantik" research study group, research area: American literature, will share his own work.
All interested students and academic staff of Poltava Polytechnic are invited both offline and remotely (to get a link to Zoom, contact the Department of Germanic Philology and Translation, room 310C).
For reference: Andrin Albrecht is a writer, composer and literary critic currently living in Jena, Germany. His PhD dissertation, "Romantic Authorities and the Genius of the White Man after Moby-Dick", focuses on the relationship between the concept of genius and notions of masculinity, institutional exceptionalism and race in the works of Herman Melville, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon and Mark Z. Danielewski.
In addition to poetry and short fiction in English and German, Andrin Albrecht has written essays and book chapters on a variety of topics, such as "white" in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", isolation and urban space in the work of progressive rock musician Steven Wilson, and the Polish series of video games "The Witcher". Of particular interest to Andrin Albrecht are the interesting nodal points between aesthetic experience, society and politics, as well as questions of multimedia, narratology and the legacy of romanticism in the present.
Brief summary of the content of the lecture:
Is it alright if I don't sing today? Romance, Romanticism, and Climate Grief in Contemporary Popular Music
How can art speak, let alone matter, in the face of the climate crisis, an event that often seems hopeless and whose scale is beyond human comprehension? In his lecture, Andrin Albrecht examines two contemporary popular music albums, Weyes Blood's "Titanic Rising" (2019) and The Weather Station's "Ignorance" (2021), which use the love song form to solve this conundrum. Using a vocabulary so close in the context of romance, but re-contextualizing it to address one's own misunderstanding of impending disaster, these albums mitgate trauma through art and, as Anahid Nersessian puts it in her monograph "The Shape of Catastrophe" (2020), "represent the experience of not understanding the present."
Recently, philologists celebrated the International Translator's Day.
It should be recalled that OPEN SPACE auditoriums were opened in the revitalized university park, and the Polytechnic will take part in the "Brave Hryvnia" charity event of the National Bank of Ukraine for the second time.
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