This talk poses the question of what happens to our modes of reading, when encountering trends in contemporary Danish literature in which gender and race are not primarily regarded as social constructions that need deconstruction, but accentuated and explored as specific material conditions that form the ways in which our lives are able to unfold? In posing this question, this project is aligned with a still emerging movement within literary criticism counting scholars such as Eve Sedgwick, Adam Frank, and Rita Felski whose work in different ways strive to surpass – although not neglect – the critical, discourse-analytical, and cognitive ways of reading that have in many years influenced the studies of literature, not least in its feminist and postcolonial variations. By merging ideas of affect theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi with the new materialist thoughts of among others Elisabeth Grosz and Mayra Rivera, the primary aim is to establish a methodological alternative that regards the literary text as a privileged site for getting in touch with the affective experiences of the conditions and activities of specific corporal morphologies. By not asking how a text constructs the body, this reading encounters the text as a means to access what it feels like to live within situated material enfleshments with its implicated unpredictable and recalcitrant becomings. My hope is to contribute to the development of such a practice of reading with a series of concepts that can help cultivate a sensibility towards the intricate relationship between corporal morphologies, affects, and literature.

Contact: Tobias Skiveren, School of Communication and Culture, Scandinavian Studies