A morning with
Josefine Klougart
Danish Author | Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professor Fall 2017
Jakob Sandvad | Director of the publishing house and reading association Gladiator
Prof. Dr. Oliver Lubrich | Universität Bern / Comparative Literature (Moderation)
In this workshop, Josefine Klougart invites doctoral students as well as other interested participants to think about other, more organic, or poetic strategies for structuring literary or academic texts. The linear narrative with one or two main figures’ development in the center is still predominant at least in literature, but also in many other narrative forms. This influences our possibilities for thinking new.
In the mid 18th century, Alexander Baumgarten introduced the idea of sensitive cognition, thus abandoning the rationalist notion that the lower part of the human cognitive faculty was only an instrument to provide the higher part with material. Baumgarten proposed that aesthetic – or sensitive – experiences held the possibility of true cognition.
In this workshop, we will ask the following questions: what constitutes the thinking and the experience we have when reading poetry and literature? What is the status and the possibility of this more complex vegetative and whirling way of perception in a modern society?
By way of reading literary texts from Josefine Klougart and of writing experiments, we will try to explore what happens with our mind when we have such experiences. We will talk about whether or not academia overlooks sensitive experience as a portal to true cognition, or, at least, whether it fails to communicate and incorporate such experience in its praxis. We will discuss how we can open academia, our self, our students and our society to a more organic, sensitive, poetic way of thinking.
Course reading:
Klougart, Josefine 2017: Of Darkness. Dallas, Texas: Deep Vellum Publishing. Whatever you can read.
Jørgensen, Dorthe 2015: Experience, Metaphysics, and Immanent Transcendence. In: Jørgensen, Dorthe et al. (eds.): Truth and Experience: Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pages 11–16 only.
Josefine Klougart is one of the most promising and productive young writers of Scandinavia and regarded as one of the most important literary voices of her generation. Born 1985 in Denmark, Klougart now lives in Copenhagen. She studied literature and history of art in Aarhus and attended the Danish Writer’s School in Copenhagen, from which she gratuated in 2010. In the same year, she published her debut novel Stigninger og fald(Rise and Fall) which has been awarded with the Danish Royal Prize for Culture and nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Since then, Josefine Klougart has written four further novels: In 2011, Hallerne (The Halls) was published, and one year later Én af os sover (One of Us is Sleeping) which was – among other nominations – also shortlisted for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Om mørke (On Darkness) in 2013 and New Forest in 2016 followed. Klougart’s books have been translated into English, French, Italian, and Turkish, and published in eight different countries. With essays and interviews for print and radio, for example about the norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, Klougart reached an international audience in Scandinavia, France, Croatia, Turkey and in the U.S.. She is currently working on a project together with the icelandic-danish artist Olafur Eliasson. From September to December 2017, Josefine Klougart spends the fall term in Switzerland as Friedrich Dürrenmatt Guest Professor at the University of Bern.
Registration
Until November 15, 2017 to toggweiler@wbkolleg.unibe.ch as well as / or on KSL: https://www.ksl.unibe.ch/ (Login via UniBe account, title search)
ECTS: 1.5 (for all GSAH-members to be credited in the compulsonary-elective section)
