Project by Helena Van Praet (Assistante UCLouvain)
Thinking-Feeling: A Comparative Study of the Conceptual Poetry of Rozalie Hirs and Anne Carson
This project aims to fill a gap in Dutch-language research: the subject of conceptual poetry as a manifestation of an embodied cognition, i.e. as a notional exploration of things and objects in the world through a specific form of literature. More specifically, it seeks to establish how this kind of poetry explores issues relating to the tangibility of ideas, the access to knowledge, and an alternative, affective understanding of concepts. To this end, the project conducts a comparative analysis of the work of the Dutch poet-composer Rozalie Hirs (1965) and the Canadian poet and classics scholar Anne Carson (1950). As a working hypothesis, the study postulates that Carson and Hirs explore two interconnected modalities in their work, namely the cerebral and affective, and that, in doing so, they slowly deconstruct certain discourses and encourage readers to think differently.
Project by Adrien Chiroux (PHD, FSR-UCLouvain)
Poetics of the Reflections of the Self: At the Crossroads of Autobiographical Novel and Autofiction. Status, Devices, and Effects of the Works of André Baillon, Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, and Fernando Pessoa
This comparative PhD project aims to establish and theorise a new type of fictional self-writings: the “reflections of the self”. These differ from autobiography, the autobiographical novel, autofiction, or fiction. To this end, the project relies on a corpus of prose works written by authors from the first half of the 20th century, coming from different linguistic and cultural areas: the Belgian André Baillon, the German Hermann Hesse, the English Virginia Woolf, and the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa. The aim of the thesis is to explain how this type of work, which combines fiction and autobiographical elements, is written. The analysis will thus explore both the common features of these works (in order to establish a poetics of the “reflections of the self”), as well as their singularities (in order to point out the characteristics of each of these reflections ). The final aim of the inventory and theorization of the processes and effects of these works is to clarify the debated “autobiography-fiction” continuum.
Project by Camille Dasseleer (Assistante UCLouvain)
In her PhD projet, Camille Dasseleer studies intermediality in the work of contemporary poets from Latin America and Spain. She considers the interaction between the poetic text and non-literary artistic manifestations as a particular means of expression of the artist's social commitment.