What are you working on at the moment?
I am working on a number of parallel projects: I am writing a book on literary multilingualism in Yugoslav post-imperial borderlands, a chapter on (self-)translation and (vicarious) witnessing in Yugoslav Holocaust fiction, and together with colleagues from Zagreb and Austin, I am preparing a co-edited volume on the work of Dubravka Ugrešić, an important and dear author who passed away last year.
How does your work feature literature, cognition and emotions?
My past and current work on memory and trauma in (post-)Yugoslav literature is directly related to LCE’s three keywords. My current book project on literary multilingualism touches upon the relationship between literary creativity, language use, and affect but is not primarily grounded in cognitive theory.
Within LCE, I am together with Stefka Georgieva Eriksen leading the manuscript group. We have just held our third workshop, on Sound and Music in Manuscript Cultures, which brought together medievalists, literary scholars and musicologists. The workshop helped us map some common interests, led to fruitful discussions, and possibly opened up some avenues for further collaboration.
It seems that, thanks to LCE’s methods group, I will continue to work on manuscripts and 4E-cognition for a while. Most recently, Olga Anokhina (Paris), Mickaelle Cedergren (Stockholm) and I have been awarded a grant by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Franco-nordic programme) for a small-scale collaborative project on manuscripts, cognition, and translation in the work of women authors and translators, titled “Écrire et traduire au féminin.” In my planned chapter on Dubravka Ugrešić, I aim to discuss literary creativity through a cognitive and formalist lens – topics about which I learned much in discussions about Karin Kukkonen’s forthcoming book.
What activity or aspect of LCE would you recommend to other researchers?
What I like about the LCE activities is that they generally provide a safe and welcoming environment (i.e. also for colleagues less versed in cognitive theory) to discuss a whole variety of themes in a truly interdisciplinary setting. It can be very refreshing as a literary scholar to receive feedback on your work from a psychologist (to give but one example)! I would recommend researchers who might be new to the field not to hesitate but to join in whenever their curiosity is triggered by the topic of one of LCE’s reading groups, literary salons, or workshops.
What are you currently reading for pleasure?
I have just finished Rachel Cusk’s Second Place and got so hooked that I’m now reading her Outline and will probably continue with the other two books of the trilogy. Cusk is a master in letting her readers experience how our sense of self is, in a deeply embodied way, always already enmeshed in a complex web of relationality with others – in destructive as well as in liberating ways. Her novels seem to suggest that, in the final account, narrative and the arts more generally are the only way to get a glimpse of this struggle with ourselves and for our self.