Utopian worlds in contemporary literature
St Petersburg University and its Representative Office in Barcelona invite you to the online lecture ‘Utopian worlds in contemporary literature’. It will be delivered by Nina Shcherbak, Candidate of Philology. During the lecture, you will learn what examples of utopian narrative can be found in contemporary literature.
20th- and 21st-century utopias are sometimes works about vampires and monsters, narratives about epidemics or animal invasions, as seen clearly in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous thriller The Birds (1963), based on the no less popular short story of the same name by Daphne Du Maurier.
A famous example of a utopian narrative is also Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s legendary The Little Prince, a novella written during World War II. Vivid moments from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s own life − flights over the desert and an unusual meeting with Third Reich officers at a café on the Rhine − are historical realities that coexist together with the beautiful tale of a boy travelling the planets and his famous phrases ’You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed’ or ‘Draw me a sheep!’
Nina Shcherbak is Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.
The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia.
The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.