The Errant Labor of the Humanities: Festschrift Presented to Stipe Grgas

Authors

Sven Cvek (ed)
Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3330-9421
Borislav Knežević (ed)
Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Jelena Šesnić (ed)
Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4276-3490

Synopsis

In preparing this Festschrift, we had in mind a specific inflection of the concept of errancy, one that comes from the rich and layered work of the American scholar and philosopher William V. Spanos, who conceived it as a way of rendering the logos and telos of the American project subject to thorough rethinking and redefinition, both in history and at present. By calling attention to the complementarity of the work of the two scholars, Grgas and Spanos, who both hone their critical skills on the theme of the logic of the American project, we do not so much intend to claim a direct influence but rather wish to highlight the confluence, commingling, and inspiration that working in the humanities may engender. This commonality is featured in the work of Spanos and in the work of Grgas as a dedicated and passionate engagement with the practices and possibilities inscribed in the discipline, which also requires the scholar to move beyond the given and inhabit what Spanos calls a meta-level of thinking. Grgas’s work, located at the intersection of several disciplines within the humanities and social sciences (which is reflected in the principal themes of this Festschrift), reveals precisely such a commitment that has in the course of his long, fruitful and versatile career charted out a scholarly position always in the process of becoming, and never quite stabilized and domesticated.

Grgas’s academic career has been as diverse as the humanistic disciplinary habitus allows: a provocative and popular lecturer, a researcher of tireless intellectual curiosity, a scholar testing the boundaries of disciplines, an enthusiastic and motivating mentor, a thoughtful and sensitive translator, or, as one of the contribution shows, an unobtrusive poet, Grgas has always displayed a remarkable intellectual energy in every aspect of his engagement with the varied and nowadays often embattled debates in the humanities.

However, Grgas’s work as an Americanist, cultural theorist, translator, writer, mentor, and teacher doesn’t merely reflect the exciting, if uncontainable, shifts marking the discipline in the last couple of decades; rather, his intellectual labor has been committed to offering a new way of comprehending this change, its scope, direction, and consequences, so as to create an intense web of connections and interrelations where different disciplines talk to one another, without hastening to provide answers so much as to provoke the right kind of questions. The questioning and questing nature of Grgas’s work has marked his writing from the start, but it has intensified in his later writing as the humanities find themselves facing a whole new set of questions for the new millennium. His sustained effort to bring a new awareness of economic issues to discussions of culture and literature in the recent period has been both timely and critically engaged in its reflection on why this issue is particularly significant at this point in history.

The layout of the Festschrift may be said to loosely reflect and acknowledge Grgas’s scholarly interests that have charted out his career in the field of the humanities.

(from the Editors’ Preface)

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Author Biographies

Sven Cvek, Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

Sven Cvek works as an Assistant Professor in the American Studies program of the English Department at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. He is a collaborator on the project “A Cultural History of Capitalism: Britain, America, Croatia.” Since 2014, he has also been coordinating the research project “Continuity of Social Conflict in Croatia 1988–1991” in cooperation with the Center for Peace Studies (CMS) and the Organization for Workers’ Initiative and Democratization (BRID). He has published a book, Towering Figures: Reading the 9/11 Archive (Rodopi, 2011), and co-edited Naša priča: 15 godina ATTACK!a [Our story: 15 years of ATTACK!] (2014). His broadest interest is in studying the place of culture in the process of historical and social change.

Borislav Knežević, Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

Borislav Knežević is Professor in the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. He has published two books - Figures of Finance Capitalism: Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens (Routledge, 2003) and Reading Joyce after the Postcolonial Turn (FF-press, 2012) - as well as a number of articles in the areas of Victorian literature, postcolonial criticism, and film studies.

Jelena Šesnić, Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

Jelena Šesnić is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia. Her books include From Shadow to Presence: Representations of Ethnicity in Contemporary American Literature (Rodopi, 2007); Mračne žene: Prikazi ženstva u američkoj književnosti (1820-1860) [Dark women: Representations of womanhood in American literature (1820–1860)] (Leykam international, 2010); and, as editor, Siting America, Sighting Modernity: Essays in Honor of Sonja Bašić (FF-press, 2010). She is a co-founder and currently secretary of the Croatian Association for American Studies, a co-organizer of the annual Zagreb American Studies Workshop, and vice-president of the Association for American Studies in South-Eastern Europe.

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Published

travnja 28, 2020

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Publication date (01)

2020

Publication date of print counterpart (19)

2017

Details about the available publication format: Tiskano izdanje

Tiskano izdanje

ISBN-13 (15)

978-953-175-596-2

Date of first publication (11)

2017