Projects
The author as reader. The poetics of Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature Ghent University
The project aims for an analysis of the poetical system that grounds Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, the classes on world literature which the author taught between 1941 and 1959 at the universities of Wellesley and Cornell. The central focus of the analysis lies with the interaction between the components author, reader and the autonomy of the literary text.
Non finito: Michelangelo, Rilke, and the Poetics of the Fragment Ghent University
The project reevaluates the relation between modern theories of literary, psychoanalytical, and philosophical fragmentation and Michelangelo Buonarroti’s late artistic style, non finito. The research explores the influence of Michelangelo’s poetry on Rainer Maris Rilke’s oeuvre and the latter’s translation of Michelangelo’s poems, as well as the development of later variations of non finito in Modernism.
The second module of the project ...
The imagination of the novel: towards a recalibration of the poetics of the novel in Italy (1945-1980) Ghent University
A study of the role of "imagination" and "knowledge" in poetics of the novel in a number of authors who do not easily fit in the dominant vision on the development of the Italian novel between 1945 and 1980. The final objective is to contribute to a recalibration of the history of the Italian novel in this period.
Artists' Lives in Dutch and Flemish biographical fiction (1918-2008): narratology, poetics, dynamics. KU Leuven
Space, Myth and Form: Modernist Poetics as Method to Learn About a Contemporary Condition of Crisis Hasselt University
Saharan Visions of Jesus. Poetics of Muslim-to-Christian religious conversions KU Leuven
My project aims to study the connections between Muslim-to-Christian religious conversions, the Saharan pastoral minorities (Tuareg, Berabish, Chaanba, Kunta) in Mali and in Niger and the post-conflict situation in Sahel through the unusual prism of oral poetry. The various Christian churches use television, radio, the mobile phone and the internet to spread their messages and thus increase their congregations. As a result, an impressive ...
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 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 his ...
Postmemory and Postmodern: Traumatic History and the Poetics of Absence in Recent Jewish American Novels Ghent University
This project investigates the ways in which postmodern historiographic metafiction, by its embrace of a poetics of absence, is employed for postmemorial purposes by Jewish American third generation authors after the Shoah, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Michael Chabon. Their Holocaust novels paradoxically escape the lure of traditional historiographyU+2019s desire for emplotment, teleology, and closure of trauma.