About the lecture
Games have served as creative catalysts throughout history. In the early-modern period, writers deployed literary games to explore and experiment what it meant to write a novel, considered a “new” genre at the time. They developed their own game rules for the new genre, turning gameplay into a storytelling practice that laid the foundations of the modern novel. Early novels built on gameplaying practices or were themselves conceived as a “game of the novel”. The practice of gameplay offers a particular access point to this phenomenon in literary history, because these games can still be played today – which Kukkonen and the researchers involved in the JEUX project did.
This lecture traces a hidden chapter in the history of the novel by observing a series of early-modern salonnières and novelists at play and outlining how creativity in the early-modern period (and perhaps also today) finds a shape in gameplay.
About the speaker
Karin Kukkonen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo (Norway). She is the author of several monographs, most recently Creativity and Contingency in Literary Writing (Bloomsbury, 2026). Her current research investigates literary games from the early-modern period and their impact on the development of the novel (JEUX, ERC Consolidator, 2024-2028).
Interested in attending?
Please register, preferably the day before the lecture: https://nettskjema.no/a/eveninglecture