Noreen Masud talks about the unnamed feelings and ambiguous modes of relationship occasioned by flat landscapes, and the act of looking at them, in twentieth century fiction, especially the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein.
Noreen Masud is a Lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK, currently working on flat landscapes in twentieth century literature. Her first academic book, Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, is out with OUP in 2022, and her first trade book, A Flat Place, will be released by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and Melville House Press in the US in 2023.
Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu
Music used in promotional material: ‘In Your Hollow’ by Allysen Callery
Tag: formalism
Autofictionalization
Claus Elholm Andersen talks about autofictionalization, a mode of narration that characterizes autotfiction, where the narrative consciousness or voice is placed with the experiencing character and not the narrator. Of particular interest here are texts produced after the financial crisis of 2008 which exemplify this mode, most importantly Karl Ove Knausgård’s series My Struggle (2009-2011).
Claus Elholm Andersen is the Paul and Renate Madsen Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his research, he is interested in the novel and in questions of fiction and fictionality: What it is, how it works, and what it implies. He is currently finishing up a book project on Karl Ove Knausgård and autofiction, titled The Very Edge of Fiction: Karl Ove Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel, in which he argues that Knausgård consciously engages with, and undermines, a long critical history of equating novels with fiction. He recently co-edited a special issue of Scandinavian Studies, with Dean Krouk, on Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle and edited the first scholarly anthology on Knausgård, published in Scandinavia in 2017. His latest publications are an article on Danish novelist Helle Helle in Edda in 2019 and an article on Henrik Pontoppidan’s novel Lucky-Per in Scandinavian Studies.
Image: © 2021 Saronik Bosu
Music used in promotional material: ‘North’ by Sergey Cheremisinov
Sextuality
Stephen Guy-Bray talks about sexuality, a concept that brings together the the use of sexual metaphors in the description of textual production and the erotics that inhere in reading praxes. Among other things, this concept is a critique of the use of popular heteronormative metaphors of reproduction to describe the creation of literature.
Stephen Guy-Bray is professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in Renaissance poetry, queer theory, and poetics. He has just finished a monograph on line endings in Renaissance poetry.
Image: © 2021 Saronik Bosu
Music used in promotional material: ‘The Gold Lining’ by Broke For Free
