Kuisma Korhonen, Professor
Professor
Literature, The Faculty of Humanities
University of Oulu
e-mail: kjkorhon@mappi.helsinki.fi
Research interests
Kuisma Korhonen is a professor of literature at the University of Oulu, and a docent of comparative literature at the University of Helsinki. During the scholarly year 2008-2009 he is on leave from Oulu and works as a research fellow at the Institute of Art Research, University of Helsinki. He is also the leader of the research project Encounters in Art and Philosophy, funded by the Finnish Academy.
His latest publications include Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2006), ed. Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History / Literature Debate (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), and articles “Textual Communities” (Culture Machine 8, 2006), “Narrrating the Trauma: George Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance” in Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib, eds. Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2008), “Towards a Post-Levinasian Approach to Narrativity: Facing Baudelaire’s ‘Eyes of the Poor’” (Partial Answers, Vol. 6, Number 2, June 2008). He has also been the guest editor for the e-journal History and Theory: Protocols (February 2008), and a co-editor for Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics (New York: Lexington Books, 2009).
In the project Textual Communities, the aim is to provide theoretical ground for the analysis of textual communality in literature. It will combine philosophical analysis of community to literary theory and close reading of literary texts. It will address the relationship between aesthetic, ethics, and politics, advancing our understanding on how literature is able to describe and create communality, especially in themes of trauma and remembering.
In textual practice, the main interest lies in the analysis of rhetorical, figurative and narrative techniques that both support and challenge our received notions of history and communality. Special attention is paid to narratological work on the techniques of narrative empathy and politics of identification.