“Dynamics of Memory and Dystopia in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark”
Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (2008) is a novel in which traumatic memories of the narrator’s family are given narrative space alongside dystopian projections about escalating tensions in the U.S. political arena. In my lecture, I will examine how these elements are articulated through intermedial devices, drawing on perspectives from both memory studies and cinema studies.
“A Double Minstrel Show: Percival Everett’s Erasure and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled as Signifying Texts”
Percival Everett’s novel and Spike Lee’s movie share a mutual desire to show how cultural and racial stereotypes are still deeply rooted in the representation of African American subjects. Everett turns his unsuccessful, experimental character into a ghetto novelist with a runaway bestseller, whereas Lee has his television writer win back a massive audience for a struggling network with a revival of minstrel shows. My analysis will draw on ‘signifying’ theories of literature and television criticism.
Bio: Vincenzo Maggitti is an associate professor of Anglo-American Literature at Roma Tre University. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature. His research is focused on the relationship between literature and other media. His works include Lo schermo fra le righe. Cinema e letteratura del Novecento (Napoli: Liguori, 2007), The Great Report: incursioni tra letteratura e giornalismo (Milano: Mimesis, 2018), and several articles on Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck, E. L. Doctorow, and Robert Lepage. His latest essays are “Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions: A Narrative Case of Archival Exclusion” and “John Lanchester’s The Wall: A Case Study for Dystopian Variations on the Literary Theme of Utopia.”
“Remembering the American Revolution in Trump’s America”
250 years after the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. seems to be divided as hardly ever before. The commemoration of the American Revolution’s semiquincentennial takes place in a socio-morally and politically polarized society that cannot agree on the reality it is living in. It is, therefore, very likely that this year's celebrations, instead of pacifying U.S. society, will be a site of culture war over the meaning of the American Revolution, the meaning of U.S. history, and the meaning of America as such. The paper will present a set of case-studies from recent years to highlight the uses that are being made of the revolutionary past to legitimate political and socio-moral agendas in the present.
“Harriet Tubman and the Politics of Biography”
The paper analyzes the strategic uses Harriet Tubman herself and others made of Tubman’s biography to achieve certain goals, push certain political agendas, or support a certain way of looking at the world. Born a slave in 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, escaping to freedom in 1849, and serving as a conductor on the Underground Railroad during the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, already in her lifetime, became an icon and celebrity among the slave community and the abolitionist circles. The talk will investigate how Tubman’s biography was turned into political, cultural, and also economic capital by herself and her abolitionist friends in Antebellum America and beyond.
Bio: Volker Depkat is a trained historian and professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg. His main fields of research are U.S. history from its colonial beginnings to the present in continental, hemispheric and transatlantic perspective, the history of European-American cultural relations, auto/biography studies, visual culture studies, and comparative federalism studies. His recent publications include American Exceptionalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021); A New American Confederation: How German Federalism inspired the US-Constitution (Böhlau, 2024; co-authors Johannes Burkhardt and Jürgen Overhoff); Representations and Uses of the American Revolution in Past and Present (Winter, 2025; co-editors Karsten Fitz and Susanne Lachenicht); Die Amerikanische Revolution (Beck, 2026).
For detailed information, please see the attached document.