Thursday, May 26 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room
Phillip E. Wegner is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, where he teaches twentieth-century literature, narrative theory, critical theory, and cultural studies. He is the author of Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (California, 2002), and is completing work on a new book, “Living Between Two Deaths: Periodizing U.S. Culture, 1989-2001.” He writes, “If T2 stages the end of a Cold War and its deterministic logics, and gives expression to the dizzying sense of freedom the United States felt in this moment to impose its will unhindered on the entire globe, then T3 can be said to repeat this gesture, in order to show the constraints and burdens that come with such an unparalleled position. It would be September 11 that would help ‘us’ assume a new global role, thereby marking both the final closure of the world historical situation of the Cold War and the opening of a new period in global history, that of the terrible infinity of the new Empire’s ‘war on terror.’”
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