Projects
Woman must dress her self: Thinking through the design poetics of female fashion designers using feminist theory (1960-2010) Ghent University
This project explores the interplay between second, third, and fourth-wave feminist theory and five female fashion designers working actively between 1960 to 2010. We focus on theorists and designers born in the 1930s and 1940s in order to examine the historical connections, interactions, development, and evolution of these two groups. Through the application of feminist theories to female fashion designers and their designs, we aim to show ...
Rerouting the 'ridderroman'. Adaptation Strategies in the Poetics of the 14th-Century Middle Dutch Ridderroman Ghent University
The 14th-century is seen as a highlight for secular literature in large areas of Western Europe. In contrast, 14th-century Middle Dutch secular literature has been largely underexposed. Its main exponent, the verse romance or ridderroman, has consistently been depreciated by 19th- and 20th-century literary historians as derivative, a mixture of older romance motifs amplified into sometimes grotesque proportions: 'epic in decay'. Yet, this ...
Ethos construction and the poetics of bilingual writing in the oeuvre of Nancy Huston between 1984-2002. KU Leuven
This project aims to explore the poetic repercussions of a bilingual, self-translating writing practice on the imaginary of ‘self’ and ‘body’ that is developed in Nancy Huston’s fictional oeuvre over a time period of two decades. As such, this research navigates between different research traditions: (i) that of a rapidly growing field of ‘self-translation studies’, (ii) that of a well-established rhetoric and pragmatic tradition of ...
Waking Prithviraj: the subversive poetics of the past in North Indian historical literature Ghent University
Complementing and challenging a dominant historiographical and socio-political mode of textual analysis, this project offers a first and much-needed literary/aesthetic reappraisal of an important Sanskrit historical epic poem, Jayanaka’s long-neglected Pṛthvīrājavijaya “Prithviraj’s Victory” (1192-3). This epic stands at the beginning of a long and ongoing tradition of heroic and unheroic retellings about the (in)famous North Indian king ...
Paperback Writer. A Comparative Study of Normative Poetics in American and French Handbooks for Writing Narrative Prose in the 21st Century. KU Leuven
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 ...
The Poetics of Precarity: Representations of the Worker in German Literature in the Aftermath of the “Great Depression” (1873-1914) KU Leuven
The financial and economic collapse in 2007/2008 has increased the interest for the literary reflection on economic crises and their social consequences. This project takes this contemporary sensibility and the ways in which it is reflected in contemporary political theory as a vantage point to look back at the German social novels in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1873. By focusing on the literary representation of the worker in ...
The poetics of Greek romantic prose fiction (1830-1850) and the adventure novel of ordealµ Ghent University
The project aims to
- describe how Greek romantic novels written before 1850 relate to the adventure novel of ordeal, and expose intertextual relationships with ancient or Byzantine models;
- make text analyses to illustrate the generic pattern and the ideological functioning of the modern Greek adventure novel;
- determine how this fits in with both Greek and European Romanticism.