To fail,fall or flee can instigate a rupture from the ordinary, which may subsequently usher a new position from where to relate to the world otherwise. It is a gap which allows the imaginative, the hallucinatory, the mad, the illicit, and the uncanny to seep in.
The seminar examines failing, falling and fleeing, literally and metaphorically, as possible starting-points for literary endeavours. Nazim Hikmet and Jean Genet had written major literary works in prison; Al-Maarri’s literary treatises are the result of self-imprisonment; Agota Kristof’s and Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s writings flourished in exile, and so did Assia Djebar’s; Silvia Plath wrote in times of psychological duress; and, similarly, Robert Walser’s writings preceded his sectioning in a psychiatric hospital then an institution.