Reparative Worldmaking: Affects, Precarity & Queer Potentialities of the 'Good Life' in Contemporary Narratives (working title)

Living in precarity – as we all do once we acknowledge precarity as the "dominant structure and experience of the present moment"¹ – means that even knowing how to live one’s life well, knowing what to aim or hope for, is no longer as simple as it was once supposed to be. Ideals on how to live a life according to what is valuable (i.e. valued) are becoming less real and tangible by the minute. Before, some would have ostensibly been able to not only chase a fantasy of the 'good life,' but to realise it to some extent: have a stable job, durable intimacy, upwards progression, a family—envision a (valuable) life that can be anticipated and worked towards in the structures that are already given. In precarity, this stability, the very scaffolding on which to hang aspirations and normative fantasies, is becoming unreliable at best, and entirely lacking at worst. The structures are gone, and so, necessarily, is the comfort of the fantasies that rely on them. In precarity, as Berlant points out, fantasies of the 'good life' become even more "fantasmatic."¹ And now that those structures are gone, now that those fantasies can no longer show a good life, what is a good life?
This project is interested in practices of queer worldmaking where they engage with fraying fantasies of the good life in precarity. In the contemporary affective atmosphere of precarity, emerging narratives explore ways of being in precarity when fantasies of the 'good life' no longer offer believable blueprints for attachment, thereby engaging in what this project calls 'reparative worldmaking' practices. This project considers precarity and the reparative as linked, and recognises in a reparative thematic, aesthetic, and discursive reading of worldmaking practices in contemporary narratives an important contribution to discussions of the historical present in literary studies, queer theory, and affect theory.

¹ Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.

• Teaching

  Summer Term 2022	Millennial Literature  [099124] M.A. seminar, in-person and asynchronous e-teaching Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies II  [098998] B.A. course, in-person and hybrid e-teaching
  Winter term 2021-22	Academic Skills III  [096715] B.A. course, in-person and hybrid e-teaching Academic Skills V  [096717] B.A. course, in-person and hybrid e-teaching
  Summer term 2021	The Singularity of Literature in a Digital Age: Form, Diversity, Politics  [095060] M.A. seminar, asynchronous and synchronous e-teaching   Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies II  [094970] B.A. course, asynchronous and synchronous e-teaching
  Summer term 2020	Queer Life Writing  [0906559] B.A. seminar, asynchronous and synchronous e-teaching Theory and Literature IV: Contemporary Queer YA   [090695] B.A. & M.A. course, asynchronous and synchronous e-teaching   Theory and Literature V: Contemporary Queer YA   [090654] B.A. & M.A. course, asynchronous and synchronous e-teaching

   

   

   

   

  
   

• Contact

  Anja Groene
  she/her | they/them
  PhD candidate & lecturer
  Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität (WWU) Münster

  Robert-Koch-Straße 29, Rm. 205
  D - 48149 Münster

  
  Email: anja.groene@uni-muenster.de

  Office hours: please register for an appointment via email