All faculty and students and members of the wider public are cordially invited to attend the dissertation defense of Sherif Ismail, candidate for the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. This event will be held on Zoom.
Date: Tuesday July 12th
Time: 2:00-3:00 pm Public portion: Sherif will present a brief
overview of his project, to be followed by an open Q&A period.
3:00-4:00 pm Closed meeting with committee members only.
4:00-4:15 pm Virtual Toast and celebration
Time is Many: The Anthropocene, Literary Form, and the
New Contemporary
In this dissertation, the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene is read as a re-temporalization of the present, eclipsing the historical notions of period and era. The project considers how contemporary Anglophone novels give shape to, and creatively engage with, this new temporal order. The study focuses on recent Scottish, Canadian, English, and American prose and graphic novels that are neither only historical nor entirely speculative, but time-travelling, dual-narrative, multi-period, or post-era works of fiction. Collectively, they wed the present to historical, prehistorical, cosmic, and speculative temporalities. In these novels, time is many.
Dissertation Committee: Jim English, Josephine Park, Liliane Weissberg
Zoom Link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/92012930242
Meeting ID: 920 1293 0242