CAPONEU: Political Theory and the Politics of Fiction
CAPONEU is an exciting pan-European study of the power and influence of the political novel in Europe.
Funded by UKRI and the EU, CAPONEU – Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe aims to assess the political novel as a vital element of European political, social and cultural heritage. It sets out to examine how people in different national and cultural contexts engage with contemporary political issues, considering how the political novel enables them to have their share in shaping European societies and politics.
The University of Brighton’s CAPPE is at the heart of European political fiction studies
CAPPE brings its political-theoretical expertise to the ambitious inter-continental CAPONEU project, aiming to understand the political novel from diverse authorial, cultural, socio-political and linguistic backgrounds.
Co-ordinated by University of Zagreb, CAPONEU Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe brings together a partnership of eight institutions, five of which have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon research and innovation programme: University of Zagreb; Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren, Berlin; Adam Mieckiewicz University, Poznan; University of Nicosia; and Slobodna domena. The other three partners are funded by UKRI Innovate UK: University of Brighton, University of Cambridge and Autonomy. The partnership also draws on expertise from across publishing, academia and other influential organisations. All details of the CAPONEU partnership can be seen on the project website
CAPONEU’s interdisciplinary research team seeks not only to unpack the rich literary heritage of the twentieth century but also to make the political novel experiences relevant to our present.
It allows us to understand how perceptions formed by different beliefs, values, traditions, economy, history, culture, age and gender are reflected in the political novel as a specific literary genre, and how and why this genre re-emerges as a social factor today.
How do we understand the European political novel today?
CAPPE and its CAPONEU partners are working through the prism of an extraordinary aesthetic and social phenomenon that we call the political novel in Europe. The European political novel is currently gaining prominence not only in strictly delimited literary circles but in European societies at large. Given this new relevance of political writing, CAPONEU’s goal is to assess the political novel as an important element of European political, social and cultural heritage and as a tool for community building, political education and European advocacy.
The research teams are not only analysing the representation of beliefs and traditions in the political novel, but also the role of the political novel itself in shaping and changing perspectives on the individual, the state, the economy, and especially on Europe’s historical and cultural past.
Aware that the European project has been destabilised in recent decades by crises, the question now is how the European heritage of the political novel can become active in strengthening the resilience of European societies to crises. Given the simultaneous resurgence of various forms of populism and/or authoritarianism, a subsequent recession, and, most recently, war with unpredictable consequences, answering this question will be crucial for the future of Europe.
CAPPE investigates fictions of the political and the politics of fiction.
The CAPONEU project will aim to examine, through the lens of the European political novel, how people in different national and cultural contexts engage with and influence contemporary political issues.
The Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton have responsibility for CAPONEU Work Package 3: Fictions of the Political: Politics of Fiction.
A substantial part of the research that makes up the vision and ambition of the CAPONEU project draws on CAPPE’s long-standing political-theoretical expertise. Our research focus on the category of the political in contemporary thought interrogates the distinction between rhetoric and reason, especially how fictions narrate our ideas of the political.
This new funded partnership allows experts from the University of Brighton to builds on recent work on political ontology that views the political as the dominant way in which a symbolic imaginary is established. Here the focus will be on Europe, its margins and EU member states as they grapple with their national imaginaries.
Among these are:
- black pessimist critiques of the very possibility of a political ontology;
- the rhetorical turn in political studies;
- queer and decolonial critiques of the dominant framing of the political.
This line of research addresses the challenge that literary and cultural theorists and historians use the fashionable terms ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ without having registered the related political-theoretical debate that is at least 50 years old.
CAPPE members aim to sharpen and declutter the conceptual framework, among the activities they are undertaking with CAPONEU are:
- organising and hosting the second CAPONEU annual conference Rethinking the Political:Narrative, Protest and Fiction in the 21st Century.
- facilitating the political-theoretical ‘training’ of literary and cultural scholars through four annual research workshops, including “Thinking the Political” (May 2023) and “Exploring the politics of Fiction” in June 2024
- three collaborative workshops evolving from collaborations with bookshops, book festivals and philosopher/novelist author discussions.
- four research-to-impact workshops
- a co-produced political novel from the University of Brighton.
Do twenty-first century politics demand a new approach to understanding the political novel in Europe?
The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a fundamental rethinking of politics and of the political.
Rather than begin with universal theories of the polis in the abstract, contemporary theorists focus on how dominant notions of the political depended upon racist and gender based violence, the destruction of the planet and of those lives that do not conform the proper bounds of the polis.
For many decolonial and black pessimist theorists any common ontology of the political fails to recognise the coloniality of Being (Wynter 2015) constitutive of life in the polis, and the human.
Likewise, for queer critics of identity politics, bodies and selves are ‘fragmented, unfinished, broken beyond-repair forms’ (Halberstam 2018) that resist any common ontology.
Despite their radically different starting points these accounts all view politics as a contested and contingent space that concerns both the drawing of borders, and the contestation of the borders drawn. They point to the moments of rhetorical and sometimes violent excess that betray the contingency, and the inequalities, of political orders.
Join us in our study of politics and the European Political Novel
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- We are always keen to support promising candidates for a PhD in political thinking, the political novel and other aspects of CAPPE’s work. Please see the University of Brighton’s pages on PhD in politics and applied philosophy.
- If you are thinking about applying for a degree in politics and would like to know more about the special world of politics and applied philosophy at the University of Brighton, please follow our BA and Masters course links.
