Projects

This project analyzes handbooks for creative prose-writing from the 21st century (2000-2015) in an English (primarily American) and French corpus. The project focuses primarily on storytelling as a craft, a learning activity based on strategic insight and the adequate use of a toolbox, as opposed to the idea of literature as art, based on the mystery of original and free creation. How do such handbooks ‘define’, ‘construct’ and legitimate a ...

In his 1956 essay La posizione, published in the literary journal «Officina», Pier Paolo Pasolini raised the necessity of “adjusting […] the periscope to the horizon, the immense horizon of phenomena” as an instrument of literary criticism capable of overcoming what he perceived to be the “posizionalismo” or perspectivistic stance of communism towards literature and the arts. When put in a broader perspective, though, the concept ...

The research project undertakes a systematic analysis of the interference between complex figurative and stylistic processes, on the one hand, and layered narrative settings, on the other, in a historically differentiated corpus of eventful narrative texts (Grimmelshausen, Forster, Kleist, Meyer, Keller, Raabe). Special attention is being paid to the cotextual embeddedness of the figurative processes and to the ways in which they elicit the ...

The project explores the ways in which the notion ‘culture’ is mobilised in youth courts. This institutional context is underpinned by "it's for your own good" ideals, entailing a constant balancing between protecting and punishing young people. Professionals also need to take into account youth's overall background. Previous research has shown that 'mundane' understandings of ‘culture' influence these assessments and at times negatively ...

The project explores the ways in which the notion ‘culture’ is mobilised in youth courts. This
institutional context is underpinned by "it's for your own good" ideals, entailing a constant
balancing between protecting and punishing young people. Professionals also need to take into
account youth's overall background. Previous research has shown that 'mundane' understandings
of ‘culture' influence these assessments and at times ...

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 ...

This project aims to study the role of victims as active participants in the establishment of historical records, using for the first time in the field of international criminal justice the approach of narrative victimology, which has been developed in domestic criminal justice. This research seeks to demonstrate that the narrative victimology emphasis on victims’ ownership of their narrative offers a novel and important framework to study ...

The goal of this project is to analyse how, in today’s highly digitized and networked (post-)covid mediascape, key stakeholders in arts and science are revisiting their traditional ways of mediating their content and are adopting virtual platforms and novel audiovisual media formats. Drawing on linguistic ethnography, I set out to 1. Document novel ways of mediating arts and science and examine shifting underlying conceptualizations of the ...

Between 1945 and 1975, magical powers, curses and transcendent visions played a decisive role in Flemish literature about Congo, shaping the narrative and evoking different worldviews. Impossible phenomena in science fiction or fantastic literature have similar functions, but, unlike these genres, the supernatural elements in the Flemish literature about Congo have a religious undertone. This is explained by the strong missionary presence of ...

Medieval romance is arguably the most influential secular literary genre of the European Middle Ages. Its history has not been written yet. In order to enhance our understanding of this history (both conceptually and cross-culturally), this project offers the first reconstruction and interpretation of the persistence of (ancient) novelistic and (late antique and medieval)hagiographical traditions in French, Anglo-Norman and English medieval ...