YURI SLEZKINE - The Overthrow of Literary Canons and the Decline of Western Civilization

In conversation with Ivan Krastev
SONNTAG, 2.10. 2022 / 14h00
AKADEMIE DER BILDENDEN KÜNSTE WIEN, AULA

In recent decades, the West has been voluntarily dismantling literary canons, opening up space for new narratives from previously unrecognized quarters of society to enter center stage. But could the dismantling of the Western literary canons have something to do with the decline of Western civilization? In conversation with IWM Permanent Fellow IVAN KRASTEV, the Russian-American historian YURI SLEZKINE looked at the texts and political myths of the Western literary canons as an important source for understanding the rise, radical fragmentation, and eventual decline of Western civilization.

Yuri Slezkine is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley; Senior Research Fellow at St. Edmund College, Oxford, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent books are The Jewish Century (Princeton UP, 2004) and The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton UP, 2017).

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Part of the Vienna Humanities Festival 2022.
The Vienna Humanities Festival 2022 was a project by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Time to Talk. In cooperation with: Der Standard, Erste Stiftung, Open Society Foundations, Stadt Wien, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, European Forum Alpbach, Technische Universität Wien und Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.

Learn more about the Vienna Humanities Festival here: https://www.humanitiesfestival.at