Flights and Spoors: an Evening Dedicated to Olga Tokarczuk

November 7, 2019 | 4:30PM
Franke Institute for the Humanities | 4:30PM
Agnieszka Holland

According to the motivation for her Nobel Prize, Polish author Olga Tokarczuk's "narrative imagination [...] with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." She has explored meetings, movement, and otherness/es in a string of novels and short story collections since the late 1980's, in books such as Flights and Primeval and Other Times. In 2014, she published her momentous 900-page novel The Jacob Books, which uses the Jewish mystic Jacob Frank as a conceit to write a Polish history of heterogeneity. Besides the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature, she was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

Agnieszka Holland is one of the central figures of Polish cinema. She came to prominence as part of the dissenting cinema of moral concern in the late 1970's. Her subtle, often socially critical filmmaking has investigated topics ranging from single motherhood in the Polish People's Republic to terrorism in Tsarist Russia, and, repeatedly, the Holocaust. Spoor (2017) is an ecocritical crime thriller based on Olga Tokarczuk's novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Roundtable participants: Bożena Shallcross (University of Chicago), George Gasyna (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne), and Sasha Lindskog (University of Chicago).

11.07.19 The Franke Institute for the Humanities
4:30pm Roundtable
5:30pm Spoor Screening

View the Trailer