Timely Fictions: An Almanach, 2025

Today, in Berlin, or Paris, or Durham, North Carolina where I write, what happens if we consider fiction, invented around 1400 as the accumulating sum of all that writers, artists and their publics make with it in time? In this presentation, I’ll investigate this notion of fiction with you, one that encompasses its ongoing composition during different periods, in situations far from their first one.  To do so, I take fiction as a form of experimentation with ideas.  My test case: the political visions of Christine de Pizan with Édith Thomas, the poetry of François Villon with Langston Hughes and Bertolt Brecht, the drama of André de la Vigne with Samuel Beckett. 

To advance this notion of fiction, I’ll enlist the almanach. This capacious form emerging at the interface between Middle Eastern and European cultures, is transformed progressively into a compendium of scientific knowledge and artful techniques.  Premodern, and revolutionary, what model does it offer for synchronizing temporal ages, and synthesizing their assortment of ideas for their current-day public at work?

By thinking with the almanach, I’ll advocate for another historical understanding of fiction that accounts for its collective process and the time-released potency of what its creators imagine.  

Please register by June 10, 2025.

In cooperation with International Month.