In the eye of Apollo: world literature from Goethe to Google

“National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” Thus the Olympian poet Goethe spoke to his young disciple Johann Peter Eckermann in Weimar in 1827. In Copenhagen, 1899, the great European critic Georg Brandes revived the term as a response to the surge of nationalism in European literature and culture; and in 1952, the emigrant critic, Erich Auerbach, turned to Goethe’s enduring concept as a framework for the emerging future of philology and humanism after WWII. Recent years have witnessed yet another revival of interest in world literature fuelled by a growing concern with a globalized marketplace, migration and new modes of communication. Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann, from which the concept was popularized, inaugurated a dialogue, based on a new cultural awareness of a global modernity, in which we still take part today. This seminar will introduce to the shifting meanings and applications of the concept of world literature, especially as it relates to changing conceptions of international and national cultures and literatures, in order to suggest productive perspectives on the conditions of literature in a transnational space of globalized cultures and media

‘No absolute privacy’: Henry James and the Ethics of Reading Authors’ Letters

Authors’ private letters play a significant role in Henry James’s fiction, literary criticism and in his literary and authorial legacy. They are privileged discursive objects activating fundamental issues of privacy and publicity, canonicity and the material condition of literature. The letter is a contested discursive object in James’s work, since it is at one and the same time a potent figure for authenticity and interiority, and consequently poses a threat to the author’s desire to control his own literary corpus and his privacy. In this article, James’s personal and private investment in designing his literary testament (his private letters and his definitive collected edition) is discussed in the context of his ethical and aesthetic concerns with reading the publications of authors’ private correspondences

Nordic noir in the UK: The allure of accessible difference

This article takes a closer look at the recent success of Nordic noir in the United Kingdom considering especially the ways in which this particular aesthetic or popular cultural form has come to function as a medium for intercultural communication wherein the perceived Nordicness of the genre plays a central role in negotiating social and cultural desires and challenges pertaining mostly to the receiving culture. Nordic noir, I argue, is not merely a fleeting fashion but a publishing and media phenomenon that tells us something about particular patterns of cultural consumption in the first decades of the twenty-first century United Kingdom

Høje tanker og tryksværte i romantikken: antologi reviderer vores syn på 1800-tallets digtning og bogmarked i Skandinavian og Storbritannien

A review of "Mellem ånd og tryksværte: Studier i trykkekulturen og den romantiske litteratur", Robert W. Rix (ed.), Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2015, 201 pp

Criminal logistics: Globalization, containerization and tragedy in Scandinavian crime fiction

This article investigates how globalized crime fiction is entangled in the infrastructural system of containerization and the production of our global age. My main examples are two widely circulated Danish contributions, namely Peter Høeg’s hybrid crime novel, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), and the TV-crime series, The Killing III (2012). Generally considered as contained by the regional moniker of “Nordic noir” these crime narratives can be seen to explore global “criminal logistics” (e.g. transportation networks, containerization, colonial administration, drugs and human trafficking, global capitalism) and their impact on the smaller local scales of states, families and victimized children. Conversely, with reference to David Simon’s The Wire (2002-8), the article considers how this “scale bending” between the local and the global is reproduced in the “down-sizing” of Ancient Greek myths and tragedies into the briefest but also most visible of citations on the hull of the ships at the centre of these transnational Danish crime narratives

Nordiske krimidronninger, 1990-2015

I 1990'erne og 00'erne indtog de såkaldte nordiske krimidronninger og femikrimier bestsellerlisterne. I den feministisk inspirerede krimi vendes kønsrollerne ofte på hovedet eller bliver fremstillet som ambivalente. Temaer som mænds vold mod kvinder, voldtægt, misbrug af børn, prostitution og trafficking er gennemgående. De mest kendte krimidronninger er bl.a. Susanne Staun, Gretelise Holm, Anne Holt og Liza Marklund

A Computational Pipeline for the Development of Comparative Anchor Tagged Sequence (CATS) Markers

Key points: Molecular markers that allow the transfer of map information from one species to another are vital in comparative genetics. To identify potential anchor marker sequences more efficiently, we have established a bioinformatic pipeline that combines multi-species EST- and genome- sequence data. Taking advantage of information from a few related species, comparative EST sequence analysis identifies evolutionary conserved sequences in less well-characterised species in the same family. Alignment of evolutionary conserved EST sequences with corresponding genomic sequences defines sets of PCR primer sites flanking introns. Markers identified by this procedure will be readily transferable to other species since they are selected on the basis of their common evolutionary origin. We exemplify our procedure on legumes and grasses, where model plant studies and the genome- and EST-sequence data available have a potential impact on breeding crop species