Projects
Beyond Petroleum. Reimagining Energy in Contemporary Film and Literature KU Leuven
Like climate change, the shift to alternative energy sources is not just a technological challenge but a cultural issue too, necessitating a rethinking of dominant values, narratives and cultural ideas. One important development is the emergence of the ‘energy humanities’, a subfield that examines how cultural artefacts like movies and literary texts reflect on particular sources and uses of energy. Upon closer inspection, however, the field ...
Is the Future Ours? Exploring Literature and Politics in Contemporary Mexican Fiction Through the Bildungsroman KU Leuven
This project aims to make an important contribution to the study of contemporary Latin American literature by challenging the idea that it has turned away from politics. The generations of writers born in the 1960s and 1970s have been described as apolitical because of their focus on individuals who are often passive or self-centered, and because of their rejection of former, more politicized literary models. In contrast, I will show how ...
Narrative, Metaphor and Metamorphosis: The Ecological Potential of Contemporary Children's Literature Ghent University
Situated at the intersection of the study of children’s literature, ecocriticism and cognitive literary criticism, this project revisits the question of the transformational potential of children’s literature in light of the imaginative challenges raised by the Anthropocene, a newly identified epoch in which the geological make-up of the earth has been transformed by human impact. Starting from the assumption that, in order for substantial ...
Beyond Petroleum. Reimagining Energy in Contemporary Film and Literature Ghent University
Like climate change, the shift to alternative energy sources is not just a technological challenge but a cultural issue too, necessitating a rethinking of dominant values, narratives and cultural ideas. One important development is the emergence of the ‘energy humanities’, a subfield that examines how cultural artefacts like movies and literary texts reflect on particular sources and uses of energy. Upon closer inspection, however, the field ...
Imperial Extractivist Infrastructures: Petrocultural Violence and Resistance in Contemporary Indigenous Literature, Art, and Film KU Leuven
This proposed project, entitled "Imperial Extractivist Infrastructures", will offer the first in-depth study of literary and artistic Indigenous (American, Canadian, and Australian) responses to settler-colonial extractivism from three carefully chosen sites; namely the coal and uranium mines in the Navajo Nation (USA), the Athabasca tar sands (Canada), and the Adani Carmichael coal mining site in Queensland (Australia). The impact of fossil ...
Multilingualism, translation and minor languages in contemporary world literature KU Leuven
Since its emergence in the 18th century, monolingualism has had a strong impact on literature and culture. Despite its avowed global perspective, world literature still leans towards monolingualism. Not only does it focus on writers who write in major languages, while peripheral regions and minor languages are off the map, but it also favours monolingual works. Multilingual texts are often considered untranslatable or incomprehensible, which ...
Creative Writing and the Uses of Theory: Forms and Institutions of Contemporary US Literature KU Leuven
American literary production has become increasingly enmeshed with the institutions of higher education. At the heart of this phenomenon lies a proliferation of creative writing courses: between 1994 and 2014 the number of Writing MFAs in the US more than tripled. Many writers have formed defining ties with universities, first graduating from and later teaching at such programmes. For the literary historian Mark McGurl, this development ...
The presence of U+201CletteredU+201D memory and the literary history of the present in the U+201Ccabinets des lettrésU+201D of contemporary French literature Ghent University
Academic approaches of the narrative prose of contemporary French authors such as Quignard, Macé, Michon, Bergounioux and Puech usually stress the erudition of these writers, highlighting their continued interaction with the (French) literary tradition and the critical-theoretical canon. Via textual as well as contextual analysis, this research aims to determine to what extent the writers themselves consent and/or conform to this particular ...
Transnational collaboration in contemporary refugee literature: authorship, textual effects, comparisons KU Leuven
This project studies the conceptual, textual and political implications of collaborative writing in a transnational context, i.e. involving authors with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It focuses on the increasingly prominent genre of refugee literature, in which a considerable number of recent publications are co-written by refugees and other authors, often (Western) professional writers or journalists who are not necessarily ...