Search

When literature engages in portraying the contemporary rule of finance and its impact on our lives, it also entails a transformation of the forms through which literature represents our lives. Over the last decades, as debt has become an ever more important motive in contemporary literature, we have thus also seen the contours of a new debt chronotope: a particular organization of narrative time and space that can gauge and expound on the working of debt-driven financial capitalism. This essay’s argument hinges partly on an analysis of the spatiotemporal logic of contemporary financial capitalism and partly on the historical transformation of representations of debt from nineteenth-century realism to European literature of the present.

On the basis of Ernst Robert Curtius’ topology, Mikhail Bachtine’s theory of the chronotope, and Erich Auerbach’s analysis of “la cour et la ville”, this article envisions literary topology as the study of symbolic places in literary history.

Kritik i dag

The propensity for speculation within modernity is well established. It ranges from the artifices of the “as if” – the thrills of imagining that everything that is might also be different, codified by Robert Musil as an inherent “sense of the possible” – to the daring betting on the “what if,” invoking better futures with an utopian spark or grim prospects to hedge oneself against. The twin inclinations to imagine the different and to project the future are the hinges of the modern imagination. In the early eighteenth century, three powerful media of speculation came into being almost at the same time: the calculus of probability, paper money, and literary fiction. In different ways, they enabled agencies of correlating what is and what is not – whether in terms of risk assessment, circulation of capital, or social self fashioning. By the beginning of the 21st century, these media of speculation seem to have reached a point of excess. With big data, probabilistic speculation is about to accustom us to read “what if”-questions in an altogether indicative mode, just as big finance has succeeded in reversing the hierarchy between value assets and the media of liquid capital. This then raises the question of what happens to the third medium of speculation in our late modernity, that of fiction? This article attempts to diagnose the fate of fiction in an age of hypertrophied speculation, how practices of fiction-making migrate, how the functions of fiction transform, and eventually how our present notion of fiction is due for a conceptual makeover.

Concepts are first and foremost intellectual tools of academic discourse: They fulfil heuristic, cognitive and descriptive functions and thus enable discussion and exchange on the basis of a common...

Frederik Tygstrup: “Proust and the Literary Lacination of the Self”This essay investigates the mode of social and sensual experience developed by Marcel Proust in his novel In Search of Lost Time. The main hypothesis is that in Proust, the traditional understanding of experience as a relation between an experiencing subject and an experienced object is replaced by a more complex process of interaction and blending between the two, resulting in a concomitant fragmentation of the object and lacination of the subject. The first part of the essay is a theoretical inquiry into the notion of experience, based on a re-reading of Gilles Deleuze’s influential interpretation of Proust in Proust and Signs from 1964, with special attention to the affective nature of experience. On this basis, the second part undertakes a close reading of a few passages taken from the early part of the novel to demonstrate how experience is actually conceived in Proust and, of no less importance, how this conception is underpinned by specific and characteristic features of Proust’s prose style.

Positioner og perspektiver

L'article propose que l'œuvre de Balzac, Flaubert et Proust se reunit sous l'etiquette du ‘realisme’ dans un sens quasi-phenomenologique: leur preoccupation de situer la presence de l'etre humain dans un contexte historique. Le point de focalisation est les strategies litteraires dont se servent le trois auteurs pour construire symboliquement le corps. La perspective de cette investigation est de suggerer des aspects generaux de l'histoire des inventions litteraires du corps qui continue jusqu'au culture somatique actuelle.

Mellem system og sansning

In his memoirs, A Tale of Love and Darkness, published in 2004, Amos Oz tells the story of his grandmother’s death. Arriving in Israel on a warm summer’s day in 1933 from one of Eastern Europe’s grey winter villages, she saw the hot marketplace in front of her, with its bloody carcasses, colourful fruit, sweating men and noisy vendors and passed her verdict: ‘The Levant is full of microbes.’ She immediately embarked on a comprehensive hygiene regime, which she zealously came to maintain over the next 50 years — a regime which included cleaning, scalding, airing and disinfecting everything, including her own body, on a daily basis. The cleaning frenzy comes to an end only when she collapses at 80-something with heart failure during one of the three hot baths, which were part of her daily routine. So what did the grandmother die of? The fact is that she died of heart failure. But the truth is that it was her monstrous hygienic programme that killed her. And, on a philosophical tone, Oz adds: ‘Facts tend to hide the truth from our eyes.’1

Refleksioner over fortælling og erfaring

Salman Rushdie is a writer of an expanding world. The settings of his novels — whether in India, England, Pakistan, USA, Kashmir, or South America — are all deeply implicated in the predicaments of intensified global exchange. Most of Rushdie’s characters are migrants who follow the tides of their contemporary social processes and find themselves caught up in between different social and cultural settings, between the roots and the ramifications of different historical genealogies. The histories of their lives take place in spaces undergoing processes of radical change, just as their lives are changing the spaces in which they unfold.

Isak Winkel Holm og Frederik Tygstrup afsoger i “Livets rum, erindringens form” erindringens former og funktioner i litteraturen og kulturen med W. G. Sebalds forfatterskab, saerligt prosavaerket Austerlitz, som det centrale omdrejningspunkt. De viser, hvordan denne roman formidler et arkaeologisk og et eksistentielt projekt, idet den lader sin eponyme hovedperson eftersoge historiske vidnesbyrd om holocaust, samtidig med at han soger efter en made at leve med disse vidnesbyrd pa. I forlaengelse heraf er det deres pointe, at Sebald udvikler en saeregen skriveform til fremstilling af historien, som straeber mod pa en gang at erindre og glemme.

Frederik Tygstrup: Det litterære rum

Frederik Tygstrup: Den genfundne tids topografi