We are glad to invite you to a Kircher Online Lecture Series on "Facets of Nostalgia: Idealizing, Reflective, or Critical". The lecture will be in English by professor doctor Prof. Sylwia Janina Wojciechowska. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature Studies, Institute of Modern Languages at Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow, Poland. She holds an MA in Classical Philology, NCU Torun, hence her interest in ancient themes and motifs in modern literature. She also graduated from Stuttgart University, Germany, with an English and Italian Philology MA. You can find information on Prof. Wojciechowska's publications here: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7390-6952

The fascination with nostalgia has marked British culture and literature from the 1970s onwards. The currency of nostalgia notwithstanding, the phenomenon proves a paradox. A random search on Google indicates the immense popularity of a concept whose categorization and terminological boundaries remain blurred. The lack of a clear-cut definition allows for a wide-ranging examination in which nostalgia studies may be approached from several angles, one of which involves comparative literary studies. This presentation opens with a short introduction to the history of nostalgia. The paper first elaborates on the aetiology of nostos (the return) and algos (the pain) in nostalgia studies.

Further, with due attention paid to the semantic implications, the interplay of nostalgia, pastoral, and elegy is investigated. I argue that the salient features of nostos promote the intertwining of nostalgia and pastoral in its simplifying, i.e., idyllic, and conflicting, i.e., critical and ironic, literary manifestations. Regarding the latter, Svetlana Boym's concept of reflective nostalgia, as opposed to the restorative variant, helps explore the nature of such a critique in several literary deployments of nostalgia to modernist prose fictions.

When: June 2, 2022, 10 am – 11 am CEST

Participants can join the lecture using this Webex platform's link