Regional Tea Party lecture: Why is literature needed by social sciences… and the left?

As part of the Regional Tea Party lecture series, on June 6 at 17h, writer and university professor Igor Štiks will speak about the themes that pervade his novel “W”, in which a life of ideas collides with a life of action, ideology with passion, humanity with violence. Where is the individual to be placed between freedom and equality and is there a border between the intimate personal and the public social struggle? Should the individual sacrifice his personal self to the idea (and betray himself), or subjugate the idea to the personal (and thereby perhaps betray the idea)? And what is treason anyway?

Štiks’s novel follows the failed revolution and the fall of the left from the mythical events of 1968 to the present day, with a special focus on the downfall of the Western left and the downfall of the socialist systems, especially the Yugoslav one. What’s left? How to move on? Theory without imagination is empty, and imagination without theory is blind. We will talk about and discuss why imagination is key to social change and what social science and theory can learn from literature.

Igor Štiks (Sarajevo, 1977) is a writer and university professor. He published the award-winning novels “A Castle in Romagna” (2000) and “Elijah’s Chair” (2006), which have been to date translated into fifteen languages, as well as “The Cuts” (2017) and “W” (2019). The play “Elijah’s Chair”, directed by Boris Liješević, won the BITEF Grand Prix in 2011. The same director later directed his plays “Flour in the Veins” and “Zrenjanin”. In 2015, Bloomsbury published Štiks’ study “Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States: One Hundred Years of Citizenship”. He is the co-editor of the volumes “Citizenship after Yugoslavia” (2012), “Citizenship Rights” (2013) and “Welcome to the Desert of Post-socialism” (2015). With Srećko Horvat, he published the essay “The Right to Rebellion” (Fraktura, 2010), while recently two books came out, “Activist Aesthetics” (2021) and “The New Balkan Left: Struggles, Successes, Failures” (with Krunoslav Stojaković, 2021). Together with Vladimir Arsenijević, he is editing the book series “Common Reading Room”. Štiks also authored a book of poems ” History of the Flood” (2008). For his literary and public work, he was honored with the French distinction Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.

The Regional Tea Party lecture series “The Left” is organized in cooperation with the Academic Network for Cooperation in Southeast Europe. Moderator of the conversation and the discussion Irena Ristić.