WMA Graduate Research Seminar, 2023/2024
In preparation for MindGrad we will dedicate the first 3 sessions to 3 papers by Matt Soteriou and the following 3 session to background reading for Lea Salje's talk.
Week 4: Matt Soteriou, ‘Determining the Future’ [pdf]
Week 5: Matt Soteriou, ‘The past made present: Mental time travel in episodic recollection’ [pdf]
Week 6: Matt Soteriou, ‘Waking Up and Being Conscious' [link]
Week 7: Eli Alshanetsky, Articulating a Thought, Introduction [link] and Chapter 2 'A Puzzle' [link]
Week 8: TBA
Week 9: Alex Byrne, TBA
CRPLA Event - Helmut Schmitz: ‘How To Have One's Cake And Eat It: Navid Kermani's Große Liebe, Sufi Mysticism, And Paradoxical Cultural Identities’
Navid Kermani’s novel Große Liebe (2014, Love Writ Large) charts the development of a young teenager’s infatuation with an A-level student in the early 1980s in Germany. The love story is refracted through the adult narrator’s reflections and through readings from Sufi mysticism and Nizami’s 12th ct. epic poem Lailï and Majnûn. This creates a narrative framework in which (Iranian and Muslim) cultural sources and (West German) cultural memory subtly comment on one another, allowing Kermani to ironically undermine both contemporary masculinity and his narrator’s former self as lover while simultaneously reflecting on the cultural and religious traditions of his own background and their relations to a Western tradition of love. The paper examines Kermani’s ironic narrative construction in the context of his construction of a paradoxical cultural identity.