“The Risk Doctrine: Modernism, Fernando Pessoa and Big Business

“The Risk Doctrine: Modernism, Fernando Pessoa and Big Business

Isabel Gil (Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon)
May 17, 4:00 PM / University Center Mission Room

Isabel Capeloa Gil is Professor of Cultural Theory at the Catholic University of Portugal. Her main research areas include intermedia studies, gender studies as well as representations of war and conflict. She is currently the Dean of the School of Human Sciences at the Catholic University of Portugal (Lisbon). In her paper, Gil will study the ways in which risk and uncertainty narratives have been dislocated from the discourse of economics into the realm of culture and literature, thus framing the production of knowledge in modernity and its reflexive self-awareness. Reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Anarchist Banker  with Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, Gil will analyze the contentious relations between the risk and uncertainty narratives in literary discourse.

Sponsored by  Speculative Futures: Critical Issues in America & The College of Letters and Science; The Series in Contemporary Literature; The Department of French & Italian; The Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic, and the IHC.