Dear Colleagues and Students,
The Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas cordially invites you to the next session of its colloquium series, in which CCI Assistant Professor Mihaela Harper explores renowned Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s most recent volume of poetry, “There, Where We are Not.” Dr. Harper’s talk will take place in the Bilkent Main Campus Library Art Gallery from 12:40-14:00 on April 20, 2017. Sandwiches and refreshments will be on offer. We hope to see you there.
A more detailed description of Dr. Harper’s talk is below.
Best wishes,
The CCI Colloquium Committee
Sjoerd Levelt
William Coker
…
Georgi Gospodinov’s There, Where We Are Not:
Beyond, Between, Elsewhere, and Nowhere
Assistant Professor Mihaela P. Harper, CCI
20 April 2017. 12.40-14.00. Bilkent Library Art Gallery
After his last novel, The Physics of Sorrow, prompted Jean-Luc Nancy to urge everyone to read it “without delay,” a much-anticipated volume of poetry by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov appeared in print in April 2016. He writes “In Place of a Preface” that this is a book “Not about the cities, but about the absence /…/ Not geography, but beyond / a geography of the beyond. / Of this here of the bodies and there of language.” Gathered over the course of a decade, Gospodinov’s poetic peregrinations traverse boundaries— geographical (between the local and the global), temporal (between past and present), philosophical (between events and non-events), and linguistic (between the trivial and the profound). The poems sustain his endeavors to glimpse “elsewhere” in its many senses and the human being with all of its doubts, sorrows, and afternoon lonelinesses.