The Novel Echoes research group warmly invites you to a research paper talk by Prof. Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo): “Riddles, Dreams and Banquets: Reimagining Literary History through Games.”
Thursday 26th February at 2:30pm
Camelot (room 3.30, Blandijnberg 2, Campus Boekentoren)
Talk abstract: Early-modern writers developed an account of literary history from antiquity to the early-modern period by reimagining ancient sources in game settings. In particular, Prof. Kukkonen will discuss Madeleine de Scudéry’s use of Plutarch’s Banquet of the Seven Sages, Hesiod’s Theogeny and other early-modern translations and versions of ancient texts. Drawing on the ancients, she suggests, allowed Scudéry to write a history for the modern genre of the novel.
Prof. Kukkonen is a specialist of literature and cognitive studies, whose long-standing interest in the history of the novel has led her to bring Early-Modern poetics, narratives and literary games into dialogue with today’s cognitive approaches to literature. Her current project JEUX – Literary Games, Poetics and the Early-Modern Novel is funded by an ERC-Consolidator Grant and investigates how literary games facilitated novelists’ narrative innovations.