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

Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Accessible yet comprehensive, this first systematic account of crime fiction across the globe offers a deep and thoroughly nuanced understanding of the genre's transnational history. Offering a lucid account of the major theoretical issues and comparative perspectives that constitute world crime fiction, this book introduces readers to the international crime fiction publishing industry, the translation and circulation of crime fiction, international crime fiction collections, the role of women in world crime fiction, and regional forms of crime fiction. It also illuminates the past and present of crime fiction in various supranational regions across the world, including East and South Asia, the Arab World, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Scandinavia, as well as three spheres defined by a shared language, namely the Francophone, Lusophone, and Hispanic worlds. Thoroughly-researched and broad in scope, this book is as valuable for general readers as for undergraduate and postgraduate students of popular fiction and world literature

‘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

THE MENTOR PROJECT MODEL: A Model For Experimental Development of Contract Software

This paper is a reflective paper on practical. experiences. It presents a project model that is in current use and has been successfully used in several large projects. The Mentor project model supports experimental development of contract software. The application area is interactive information systems, i.e. systems closely integrated with user work practice. The Mentor project model is a spiral model with iteration of the activities: (re- )design, estimation and negotiation, development and evaluation of prototypes. End-users are actively involved in design and evaluation. Repeated estimation and negotiation activities based on a calculation model for estimating system extent ensure that growth in extent is made visible and is subject to explicit decisions balancing use quality of the system with cost and schedule. The project model defines how to share the cost of experimentation between customer and supplier. The model contributes to the ongoing discussions of system development methodologies by focusing on contract software and by giving elaborate suggestions for how to prototype large information systems with many users