The Paranoid Chronotope, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Conspiracies
Where: Kaplan Hall 193
In this talk, Professor Frida Beckman will take you on a trip through the contemporary paranoid imaginary. This means a swift but hopefully not too mindboggling tour from the 1950s to the present with flashbacks to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, detours to Jordan B. Peterson, and temporary stops along the way at usual suspects such as Michel Foucault, George Soros, and Donald Trump. Usual suspects are also Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo and together with newer culprits such as Dave Eggers, Patrick Flanery, and Ben Lerner they will, hopefully, give us some clues to solving the plot to undermine the American liberal subject, not to mention democracy.
Frida Beckman is Professor of Literature specializing in American literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, Sweden. Recent work includes the monographs The Paranoid Chronotope: Power, Truth, Identity (2022) and Culture Control Critique: Allegories of the Present (2016), the critical biography Gilles Deleuze (2017), and the edited collection Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline (2018).