Sten Pultz Moslund

My postdoctoral fellowship takes up the “topological turn” in the humanities in relation to language, literature and cultural identity. It looks into the ways in which identity may be seen as a product of a deep-seated interaction of natural, physical and linguistic phenomena with our sensual perceptions. The overall thesis is that literature provides an insight into such production of individual and cultural identity: as a site of language and sensual energy, literature, or literary landscaping, at one and the same time reflects and performs the complex processes in which identity is shaped through human interaction with place. The project is concerned with how language and literature can presence the experience of place through their powers to trigger sense energies within the reader (as opposed to a meaning-based representation of something absent to the reader). Although primarily concerned with how language varieties and their sense-production may be closely tied to the experience of specific places and landscapes, the project looks at how transcultural dynamics constantly change languages and places and affect our perception of places and literary engagements with places. I attempt to develop a literary reading practice (so far I have dubbed it "langscaping") which tunes in on the dynamic relations between language, sense-production and local places as well as the constant change caused by transcultural dynamics. In order to do so I make use of a cross-disciplinary range of theory, combining elements from cultural studies, linguistics, aesthetics and studies of human perception (with Edward Casey, Deleuze and your idea of presence as constituting a theoretical core). I will apply the reading practice I develop on (mainly postcolonial) novels of several varieties of english. The project is financed by the Danish Council for Independent Research – Humanities (FKK) and the Institute for Literature, Culture and Media at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU).